Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
President Joe Biden greets Interior Secretary Deb Haaland prior to delivering remarks on restoring protections for national monuments, October 8, 2021, on the North Lawn of the White House.
The nomination of Deb Haaland as the Biden administration’s secretary of the interior, the product of tireless campaigning by progressive groups in Washington, was historic and widely celebrated. As the first Native person to ever head up the department, Haaland represented one of the biggest triumphs for progressives in the Biden Cabinet.
Her track record on environmental issues, too, looked like a paradigm shift for a department that, even under Democratic administrations, has habitually acted as a clearinghouse for oil and gas leasing, with little attention paid to conservation or indigenous rights. As Data for Progress put it, Haaland “will prove a critical demonstration of the incoming Administration’s commitment to Indian Country, environmentalists, progressives and, indeed, Democratic values of diversity and representation.”
But nearly a year since Haaland’s confirmation, the few occasions the Interior Department has made news have come from its outstanding commitment to the status quo. Its highest-profile action so far has been November’s auction of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest in the Gulf’s history, justified by spurious logic. The department claimed it was compelled, hands tied, to hold the sale due to an earlier court ruling that reversed the pause on new drilling permits on public lands in the Gulf. In August, a memo filed by the Department of Justice contradicted that assertion, finding that the government was not, in fact, forced to issue new permits.
A January court decision has thwarted that auction, at least temporarily, holding that the Interior Department must conduct a new and adequate environmental analysis that accounts for the greenhouse gas impacts of the development of those leases before going forward. The administration could still appeal.
All in all, the Biden Interior Department has approved 34 percent more oil and gas drilling permits than the Trump administration managed in its first year, good for 3,557 concessions in just 12 months. Even more alarmingly, almost 2,000 of those permits were approved on land administered by the Bureau of Land Management’s New Mexico office, in Secretary Haaland’s home state. The disappointments haven’t even been limited to fossil fuel extraction: The department has also decided to continue a Trump-era decision to remove the gray wolf from protected status, allowing them to be hunted and imperiling their fragile return from endangered status, to the surprise and frustration of congressional Democrats. The administration did restore three national monuments that were curtailed under Trump, but there hasn’t been much else to cheer.
This track record is hard to square with Haaland’s personal history as vice chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands. But it makes more sense when looking at Biden’s White House advisers who are holdovers from previous Interior Departments with ties to oil and gas.
“We support Auntie Deb Haaland, but she can only do what the Biden administration tells her or allows her to do,” said Joye Braun, national pipelines organizer at the Indigenous Environmental Network. “She still has to follow Biden’s policies, and right now they’re not strong policies when it comes to protecting the Earth or indigenous rights.”
Indeed, despite some choices that signaled a paradigm shift in the administration’s attitudes toward oil and gas, the Biden White House remains chock-full of holdovers from previous Democratic administrations, ones, like Obama’s and Clinton’s, that prioritized playing nice with fossil fuel industries. So far, those advisers have won out over the early pledges from the president to reconsider the relationship to leasing and to take climate change seriously.
Despite the termination of the Keystone XL pipeline by the Biden administration last year, major, controversial new projects continue apace.
Among those top-level aides is David Hayes, special assistant to the president for climate policy. A BigLaw alum from the firm Latham & Watkins, Hayes first served under Bill Clinton’s interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, and then eventually as the Senate-confirmed deputy secretary of the interior under Clinton. After spending the Bush years at Latham, he returned under the Obama administration, where he was the deputy secretary of the DOI, a core member of the Ken Salazar–led agency that helped usher in a massive expansion of the oil and gas sector under Obama, as well as presiding over the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Elsewhere, Biden nominated Tommy Beaudreau to be his deputy secretary of the interior last April; he was confirmed to the position in June. Beaudreau is also an Obama-era holdover; in 2011, he became the founding director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, charged with the establishment of a more intensive regulatory environment for deepwater drilling. But Beaudreau quickly proved to be another oil and gas ally. The Center for Biological Diversity described him as a “rubber stamp” for drillers even in the period after Deepwater Horizon.
“The abandonment of that climate ambition from the DOI is an abandonment from the highest level of the White House,” said Taylor McKinnon, senior campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Unfortunately it’s consistent with what the institutional Democrats have done for decades.”
The result has been a White House and an Interior Department full of loyalists to the old order, which has hemmed in the new leadership and kept out anything but business as usual. Alums of Salazar’s Interior, which expanded Gulf and Arctic drilling drastically even after Deepwater Horizon, dot the masthead. Despite making a number of historic appointments of Native people to high-ranking positions, the Biden administration has effectively overridden them via those holdovers, and hidden behind the positive press of those figureheads.
“The Biden administration has had a lot of smoke screens. I don’t know if it was their intention in making those appointments, but it has certainly been a consequence of that,” said Braun. “But it’s not just Haaland. There are appointees in other departments as well—the first indigenous person to head the National Park Service, the first indigenous person to run the Army Corps of Engineers. It’s still the same as ever.”
Indeed, despite the termination of the Keystone XL pipeline by the Biden administration last year, major, controversial new projects continue apace. Despite Jaime Pinkham, a citizen of the Nez Perce tribe, heading up the Army Corps, projects like Line 3 and Line 5 have continued over the fierce objections of Native protesters.
All that has led to Bidenworld going back on a number of its environmental commitments, at the same time that its signature climate legislation has been stranded in Congress. If the administration is ultimately unable to pass a climate-only Build Back Better spin-off, its unwillingness to empower climate-concerned appointees in the Cabinet will prove disastrous. Alternatively, they could also allow the secretary of the interior to make decisions about issues under her jurisdiction.
An empowered Interior Department, aligned with the White House, could make massive strides on climate change. Some estimates have held that a nationwide ban on federal fossil fuel leasing would reduce carbon emissions by 280 million tons per year, which would immediately become the single most impactful federal climate action in years.
