Scott G. Winterton/The Deseret News via AP
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on horseback in the Bears Ears National Monument near Blanding, Utah, May 9, 2017
This story is part of the Prospect’s series on how the next president can make progress without new legislation. Read all of our Day One Agenda articles here.
When President Trump took control of the U.S. Interior Department, he immediately stuffed the place with industry lobbyists and right-wing ideologues. Douglas Domenech, a fossil fuel advocate and conservative think tank operative, was tasked with leading the transition team and would later become an assistant secretary. Daniel Jorjani, an adviser to the billionaire Koch brothers, became the agency’s top lawyer. David Bernhardt, an oil, gas, and mining lobbyist, was selected as Interior’s number two and eventually ascended to the top job.
Together, these men and their fellow political appointees hacked away at our country’s environmental laws and regulations: stifling climate science, sabotaging government-transparency mandates, subverting key statutes like the Endangered Species Act and the Antiquities Act, and supercharging oil and gas lease sales on federal land across the country. They turned the Interior Department—a sprawling federal agency that manages some 500 million acres of federal property, controls vast reserves of fossil fuels, administers tribal trust lands, conducts scientific research, and more—into the plaything of Big Ag, Big Oil, and other commercial interests.
“Morale is the lowest I have ever seen it in my career,” says one civil servant who has spent years at DOI and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “We are drowning.”
A first major challenge Biden will confront is the Interior Department’s onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing programs.
Now, Joe Biden gets a chance to renew this ailing giant of an agency. Conservationists, climate activists, and others are waiting to see what he plans to do with it. Will he select Congresswoman Deb Haaland (D-NM) as interior secretary, making her the first Native person to lead this bureaucratic behemoth? Will he give the nod to retiring Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), whose father Stewart ran DOI under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson? Or will he pick Michael Connor, a former deputy interior secretary and enrolled member of the Taos Pueblo who now works as a partner at WilmerHale, the law and lobbying firm notorious among environmentalists for its advocacy on behalf of a controversial foreign mining conglomerate? We’ll soon find out.
The larger question is this: If Democrats fail to recapture the Senate, what will the Biden administration aim to accomplish at Interior, which will play an absolutely essential role in any serious effort to combat the climate and extinction crises? Will Biden simply clear the rubble that Trump leaves behind? Or will his administration exceed the middling legacy of the Obama era, when DOI was the locus of serious conservation victories as well as bitter disappointments?
A first major challenge Biden will confront is the Interior Department’s onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing programs, which together with public-land coal mining contribute roughly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. During the campaign, Biden’s platform explicitly proposed “banning new oil and gas permitting on the public lands and waters.” He has the power to do just that, though the effort will be politically and legally delicate.
Western states like New Mexico and Wyoming rely on federal oil and gas revenues to support their budgets. Biden may also face internal bureaucratic stumbling blocks. Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the federal onshore leasing program under the auspices of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management runs the offshore program. The internal cultures of these bureaus have historically been dedicated to fossil fuel extraction, and they have both been on a leasing spree during the last decade.
“I think the immediate problem is that there are at least 25 or 26 million acres currently under lease and it will be difficult to flip a switch on that,” says Nada Culver, vice president at the Audubon Society and a public-land expert who has been floated as a candidate to lead BLM. Still, she adds, Biden has many “arrows in his quiver” if he wants to curtail and even stop the federal oil and gas programs moving forward.
Culver points, for instance, to a legal analysis published in 2019 by former Interior Department solicitor John Leshy that describes the agency’s “ample legal authority to limit or call a halt to fossil fuel leasing on America’s public lands.” According to Leshy, President Biden’s DOI could announce a temporary halt to new onshore oil and gas lease sales while his administration conducts an environmental review of the leasing program per the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. The administration could also follow in the footsteps of Herbert Hoover, who in 1929 instituted a general moratorium on leasing on public lands to combat an oil glut, a move that was later upheld by the Supreme Court. And Biden could use the Federal Land Policy and Management Act to develop a slew of new land management plans that formally prohibit oil and gas leasing on vast tracts of federal land around the West.
The Endangered Species Act is an immensely powerful law that provides the executive branch with all kinds of tools to fight extinction.
“The bottom line is the incoming Biden administration will have pretty unrestricted authority to do whatever they want to in terms of stopping or interrupting the leasing process” on federal land, says Leshy, who served at DOI under Presidents Clinton and Carter. “The applicable statutes, the Mineral Leasing Act, gives the Interior Secretary broad power to lease or not lease. If they do it right and carefully, the odds of a court setting aside what they do are pretty slim.”
If Biden really takes the climate crisis seriously, he can use such powers on day one to govern far more aggressively than his predecessors.
Another pressing issue Biden must address, advocates say, is the revival of the Antiquities Act of 1906, a foundational conservation law that allows the president to create national monuments and protect public land in perpetuity. In one of his early moves in office, Trump laid siege to the law’s integrity, drastically shrinking two prominent monuments in southern Utah. Prodded by conservative pressure groups, he slashed the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by some two million acres. The move was a gut punch to a coalition of tribal nations in the Southwest that spent years advocating for the protection of Bears Ears, with its abundance of cliff dwellings, ancient petroglyphs, and other Indigenous ancestral sites.
Five tribes and conservationist allies are currently asking a federal court to reverse Trump’s attack on Bears Ears. County commissioners in San Juan County, Utah, where Bears Ears is located, recently came out in support of the monument’s immediate restoration. And advocates like Utah Diné Bikéyah, an Indigenous-led grassroots organization in the region, are asking Biden to not merely restore Bears Ears to the 1.3 million acres originally designated by President Obama, but to expand it to 1.9 million acres, all while ensuring that tribal nations have a central voice in its management moving forward.
“We are advocating for Biden to restore Bears Ears on his first day in office or as soon as possible,” says Woody Lee, a member of the Navajo Nation and the executive director of Utah Diné Bikéyah, which has also sued to overturn Trump’s Bears Ears rollback.
Biden has already promised to use his authority under the law to restore the monument, but there is much more to do. Conservationists also want to see the new administration restore Grand Staircase-Escalante, and tear down the border wall that Trump punched through Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. And his administration could further shore up the Antiquities Act by working to identify and designate new national monuments around the country, including ocean monuments to protect imperiled marine mammals. Biden has the power do all this with executive action on day one.
Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP
The hoodoos of Devil’s Garden in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
DOI is also home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) the key federal agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and combating a growing global extinction crisis that threatens as many as one million species in the coming decades. Some wildlife advocates want Biden to immediately declare the extinction crisis a national emergency. They want him to use his powers under the National Emergencies Act to direct FWS to immediately protect the hundreds of candidate species that are currently waiting to be listed under the ESA.
“We depend on the world around us to survive, so if the biodiversity extinction crisis isn’t a national emergency, what is?” says Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is advocating for the emergency declaration. “And it is not just symbolic—this unlocks additional powers for every agency to use to combat the crisis.”
Even without emergency authority, the Endangered Species Act is an immensely powerful law that provides the executive branch with all kinds of tools to fight extinction. But it has hardly ever been deployed to maximum effect. The Fish and Wildlife Service, for instance, almost never uses the ESA to prohibit bad development projects, even though it has such authority under Section 7 of the statute. And the sad state of wildlife conservation has only worsened in recent years as Trump’s Interior Department ratified new regulations that seriously weaken the ESA, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and other important laws.
Beyond reversing Trump’s anti-wildlife regulations, advocates say, Biden could rescind and rewrite Reagan-era regulations that make it unnecessarily difficult to use Section 7 to block destructive development projects that are funded, permitted, or carried out by the federal government. He could also rescind a Bush-era solicitor’s opinion that hobbles FWS’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas–emitting projects. Obama never bothered to address either of these policies.
Advocates are also calling on Biden to fully integrate climate science into federal endangered-species programs. They are calling on him to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade in the United States. They want him to liberally designate new “critical habitats,” a powerful form of protection under the ESA that is underutilized. And they are asking him to direct all federal agencies to develop proactive conservation measures to benefit listed species, as they are supposed to do per Section 7(a)(1) of the ESA. These are just a handful of the administrative tools that Biden has at his disposal if he wants to preserve the globe’s vanishing gene pool.
Finally, the President-elect, Haaland, and Udall have all publicly vowed to protect 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030, in an effort to combat extinction and climate disruption. “Globally, the loss of nature—accelerated by climate change—is putting up to one million species on the path to extinction,” said Rep. Haaland in a statement earlier this year announcing her support for the so-called Thirty by Thirty plan. “Conserving our lands and waters is essential to protecting humans and wildlife and stabilizing our climate.”
The Interior Department already controls one-fifth of the U.S. landmass, giving it enormous sway as it strives to preserve the last remnants of wild nature in North America.
This summer, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act. Though flawed, the law permanently and fully financed the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a pot of money that uses offshore oil and gas revenues to provide federal, state, and local agencies with $900 million a year to purchase new public land and pursue conservation projects. The Biden administration could use some of these funds and seek additional appropriations from Congress to go on a land-buying bonanza, purchasing ecologically sensitive parcels around the country and creating a string of new national monuments, wildlife refuges, conservation areas, and more.
DOI already controls one-fifth of the U.S. landmass, from the Everglades to the Brooks Range, giving it enormous sway as it strives to preserve the last remnants of wild nature in North America. The faster Biden starts building public support for land acquisitions and new protections, the faster he fortifies threatened landscapes like the Grand Canyon, the Boundary Waters, and the borderlands, the better his actions will withstand attacks from hostile administrations in the future. The threat of pandemics like COVID-19—with their roots in wildlife degradation, habitat destruction, and unrestrained development—offers this administration a powerful rationale for pursuing ambitious conservation programs like Thirty by Thirty.
The Interior Department is beset by maladies, from depleted staff and low morale to internal bureaucratic cultures that prioritize political expediency over scientific integrity. DOI’s FOIA program is a mess. Its ethics program, which presided over several high-profile scandals during Trump’s term, is worse. The National Park Service is slowly turning into a subsidiary of corporate interests like Vail Resorts and other hospitality purveyors. The Bureau of Land Management is still reeling from Trump’s decision to move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado, thereby purging many of the agency’s high-ranking civil servants. The U.S. Geological Survey is adrift after four years of petty and manipulative leadership. The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages a huge portfolio of federal dams, remains a menace to environmental quality around the West. All the while, public-land advocates continue to clamor for the creation of a new Civilian Conservation Corps to fix crumbling infrastructure, heal damaged ecosystems, and create jobs on the federal domain.
These are thorny problems and real opportunities. DOI is ripe for deep and abiding reform. Will Biden’s new Interior team be up for the task?
