Yesterday, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management learned that hundreds of staffers will either have to quit their job or move to Grand Junction, Colorado. While the move to Grand Junction may be convenient for Secretary Bernhardt, who PolitioPRO notes is from nearby Rifle, it’s a major problem for, say, any of BLM’s employees who have a spouse employed in the DC area and/or don’t want to uproot their entire life.
Especially since it's for something that will likely hurt the agency. As Kate Kelly of the Center for American Progress told the Washington Post, the move will “make the agency and its leadership invisible” to decision-makers in DC, while “the constant shuffling, shrinking and disassembling of BLM’s workforce will have long-term implications for the health of the agency.” (If this all sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve seen this tactic before- a few months ago the USDA announced it would force a bunch of their researchers to move from DC to other areas of the country.)
So why would the Trump administration do something that would hurt a federal agency charged with protecting public lands for the public use?
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Trump administration has loaded the DOI up with corporate cronies. On Monday William Perry Pendley started work as BLM’s deputy director of policy and programs. Until last December, Pendley was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a group funded by Exxon and other fossil fuel interests that heroically defends mining and timber interests from the threat of public protections.
In 1988, MSLF held the first “Wise Use” conference, with “wise use” being a euphemism for the front group movement to let industry exploit public lands for private profit. MSLF’s founding president was James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior under Reagan, who opened up lands to coal mining and oil drilling and otherwise slashed environmental protections up until he resigned after making racist comments. (Because the 1980s were apparently a different time, when racism had consequences for Republicans.)
And it’s not like the DOI needs any more industry activists in its ranks, as Pacific Standard revealed yesterday that the conflict of interest violations committed by Douglas Domenech, an assistant secretary at the agency and Megan McCain’s father-in-law, are even more substantial than they had first appeared. Like Pendley, Domenech worked for an industry front group before joining DOI. And despite formally being barred from using his public-paid-position as a government employee to help his former employer, FOIA’d documents show he did just that.
Which is why it’s hardly a surprise that the Center for Western Priorities recently found that the DOI has “completed or taken action on at least 53 policy changes requested or supported by energy companies and associations as of June 2019.”
From gutting regulations on methane to opening up fragile ecosystems to offshore oil drilling and weakening drilling safety rules developed after BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, the department has made at least 20 explicitly pro-oil-and-gas moves. Then there are another 21 changes to wildlife policy that have weakened enforcement of species protections and otherwise made it easier for industry to kill wildlife in the pursuit of profit. And of course there are the dozen other miscellaneous changes, like shrinking national monuments to allow for drilling, letting mines of the hook for cleanup, and setting (arbitrary) page limits and timeframes for environmental reviews.
We can see then, from intention to execution, from hirings to relocation-or-firings, that Trump’s Department of the Interior is, like the EPA, captured by the forces it’s supposed to be fighting.
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