This blog post is adapted from the How We Fight Back email series sent to our subscribers. Read more from the series by clicking the links below, and check back for future posts.
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This week is National Park Week — and the next installment in our email series leading up to the midterm elections, How We Fight Back. Our first email, “A Constitutional, Legal, and Moral Crisis,” discusses seven themes driving our work in the time leading up to the midterm elections.
In this email, we discuss what our work looks like as the Department of the Interior — an agency whose purpose is to manage public lands, water, and wildlife for all Americans.
At Interior, Secretary Burgum is skirting laws and oversight, bending the agency’s mission to serve oil and gas, mining, and ranching interests, and working to please the president at all costs. Our goal is to publicize wrongdoing, challenge illegal actions where we can, and build an oversight agenda for the next Congress.
We can’t tell you everything we’re doing, but here are a few examples of how we’re fighting back and helping frame the important stories of our day.
- Questioning the Financing Behind Freedom 250
We sued Interior after it failed to release records on Freedom 250 — a private Trump-aligned entity organizing America’s 250th anniversary that has reportedly diverted $100 million in taxpayer funds. Our Senior Counsel Aaron Lloyd noted, “Under Secretary Burgum’s leadership, the Department of the Interior continues to intentionally hide how it is spending taxpayer dollars.”
I testified before Congress on the need to investigate public financing of Freedom 250, put guardrails on the current pay-to-play system in Washington, and fight corruption.
- Reflecting Pool and Vanity Projects
Meanwhile, I told journalist Scott MacFarlane that Secretary Burgum was using the National Park Service (NPS) as a piggy bank for Trump’s vanity projects. And in commenting to The New York Times on inflated no-bid contracts to fix fountains in front of the White House, I said that the capital’s renovations have “become a secretive project where the friends and business associates of the president are being rewarded with no public scrutiny.” I called the broader pattern reflected in the Reflecting Pool fiasco “a poster child for corruption and why competitive bidding and transparency in federal contracting matter.”
- Challenging Billion-Dollar Offshore Wind Buyouts
Our Senior Counsel Tony Irish, a veteran Interior attorney, has been unpacking how Interior used the federal Judgment Fund — money meant for real legal settlements — to pay energy companies nearly $4 billion to abandon lawfully awarded offshore wind leases, without the hearings the law requires. Several states are now suing to stop these payouts from moving forward.
- Defending Science
Tremendously important science programs at Interior are under attack. Before you can fight a flood or drought, someone has to measure water levels and flows. When DOGE terminated leases on 25 United States Geological Survey (USGS) Water Science Centers without consulting scientists or planning for the lost capacity, our Science Policy Director Kyla Bennett called it “chaotic and haphazard.” We were part of an effort that helped win back some of the centers and funding.
- Standing Up for Public Employees
We documented mass firings on the ground — including a new hire at Denali National Park who was fired three days into the job. Publicizing cases like this gave reporters real stories, not abstractions, and helped build a public record behind lawsuits that led to the reinstatement of roughly 25,000 wrongly fired probationary employees government-wide. Our work supporting public employees is some of the most consequential work we do.
- Documenting Chaos and Mismanagement
We are documenting how Interior is a poster child for maladministration. Here is just one example: Interior reassigned over 5,000 employees from NPS, USGS, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and other agencies into the Secretary’s office, often with no clear supervision, job descriptions, or chain of command. A PEER Freedom of Information Act request forced Interior to admit it can’t produce a single record showing the move saved any money. As we suspected, these actions look less like reform and more like a strategy to make people quit rather than fire them outright.
- Standing Up for Wilderness
We have joined other conservation groups in building opposition to Interior’s efforts to launch damaging revisions to wilderness-quality lands across the Bureau of Land Management, NPS, and FWS.
Let’s celebrate our national parks and public lands!
Previously, we described what is happening at NPS as a stress test for democracy. The same can be said for its parent agency, the Department of the Interior.
Let’s continue to fight back against the grift and self-dealing that are undermining our public lands and system of government. Together, we are making a difference. Every voice matters. We would love to hear from you about how you think we should be fighting back — feel free to contact us.
Coming together to challenge Interior’s mismanagement of public lands and its mistreatment of public employees is a great way to commemorate National Park Week.
Tim Whitehouse is the Executive Director at PEER.