Trump’s Latest Government Overhaul Aims to Cut Advisory Panels by One-Third
From: CNN “President Donald Trump on Friday announced plans to slash the formal system for advising regulators on nearly every area of federal policy. The President signed an executive order directing each agency to “terminate at least one-third of its current” advisory ...
House Dems Push Trump to Fill High-Level Interior Vacancies
From: The Hill “Fifty-nine percent of key [Interior] positions have yet to be filled; fewer than half of those vacant even have a nominee awaiting Senate approval,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote in a letter to President Trump ...
Federal Managers who Try to Protect Public Lands Face Threats and Violence. Here’s What Makes That Much Worse.
From: The Washington Post “Recently, the federal Bureau of Land Management fired a longtime employee, allegedly for blowing the whistle on the Trump administration’s refusal to enforce grazing policies on federal lands. The former employee, Craig Hoover, reported that agency ...
Number of Criminal Environmental Cases Referred to DOJ by Interior at Nearly 25-Year Low
From: The Hill “The number of criminal environmental enforcement cases brought by the Interior Department has decreased by nearly 40 percent since 2016, according to internal data shared with The Hill. Criminal environmental cases that often deal with unlicensed big-game hunting, ...
Ethics Group Goes After Interior for Sidestepping Senate When Filling Posts
From: The Hill “An environmental group filed a complaint against the Department of the Interior on Tuesday, saying the agency shuffled controversial employees into roles without Senate confirmation. A May 23 order from Interior Secretary David Bernhardt slotted people into various ...
Trump’s EPA Is Letting “Forever Chemicals” Into Our Food, Experts Say
From: Truth Out “A growing chorus of environmental groups and public health experts are slamming the Trump administration for its milquetoast response to the widespread problem of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a family of toxic “forever chemicals” that are linked to ...
Public Lands Critic to Oversee Fish, Wildlife and Parks
From: Environment News Service “Putting Karen Budd-Falen in this position is like putting Genghis Khan in charge of a day care center,” said PEER Senior Counsel Peter Jenkins, pointing out that she was previously slotted into an Interior deputy solicitor job that required no Senate ...
Trump’s Insidious War on Climate and Science
From: Times Free Press “George Luber is a national award winner for his work on climate change and health questions. He also is an internationally recognized epidemiologist, and until last year he headed the climate and health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...
Whistleblower: BLM Ignores IIlegal Grazing After Bundy Fiasco
From: E&E News “Hoover alleges that BLM’s decision to fire him was “improper retaliation” for an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint he filed last year and for “disclosing illegal grazing and other activities by one of its permittees, who was ...
Interior Department border deployments are mired in secrecy
From: High Country News “On May 15, it was reported by The Hill that 47 Interior Department officers were currently assigned to the border — more than twice the previous number. This leaves public-lands advocates worried about the effects of their absence on the lands these ...
No Word From Feds on Tampa Sewage Spat
From: Tampa Bay Times “Jerry Phillips, the attorney who prepared the complaint for the environmental group, said the group hasn’t given up, but it hasn’t heard a peep from the federal government. That’s not unusual since President Donald Trump took office, Phillips said. ...
A Steal of a Deal: How Ranchers Take Advantage of Public Lands
From: The Revelator “BLM’s own records reveal that much of the sagebrush West is in severely degraded condition due to excessive commercial livestock grazing,” Kirsten Stade, advocacy director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a press release when the ...
Letter to the Editor: A Response to Chris Stewart’s and Mike Lee’s Letter on Wild Horses
From: St. George News “As a Utah constituent located in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, I will not – nor will I ever – consider Chris Stewart the “wild horse guy.” I would, however, consider him so deep in the pocket of the USDA, he wouldn’t even be able to tell the ...
Forest Service Chief: Agency Auditing Alaska Region Timber Program
From: KFSK “The chief of the U.S. Forest Service has responded to the Petersburg borough that the federal agency is conducting an audit of the timber program on national forest land in the Alaska Region. Vicki Christiansen’s May 8th letter to borough mayor Mark Jensen apologizes ...
The Administration Tried to Muzzle this Scientist on Climate Change. But He Won’t Go Away
From: Washington Post “Last week, Luber was in Washington to accept one of six Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards. The prizes were established in 1979 by Christie Hefner and named for her father, who founded Playboy magazine. (I was a member of the 2019 judging panel.) Luber, who ...
Yellowstone Connectivity Upgrades Inevitable: Sholly
From: Yellowstone Insider “In an ideal world, visitors would turn off their cellphones during their Yellowstone National Park visits, preferring to commune with nature and patiently await an Old Faithful eruption or two. And, indeed, many visitors do indeed adopt this approach to a ...
Ethics Experts Explain How to Protect Taxpayers From Pruitt-Like Scandals
From: Think Progress “Among its more than a dozen recommendations, the OIG says the EPA should recover these funds from the “responsible official or officials.” Ten of the 14 recommendations in the report remain unresolved, however, and in its response, the EPA asserted that ...
Wallace Could Fill Extended Interior Vacancy
From: Jackson Hole News & Guide “If confirmed, in fact, Wallace would oversee two agencies that have lacked Senate-confirmed leadership dating to when Trump took office. Dan Smith, a deputy director who’s “exercising the authority of director,” now leads the National Park ...
Parents, Schools Await Results of Federal Health Study into Synthetic Turf with Tire Crumbs
From: The Oregonian “This delay was entirely predictable based on the history of this issue particularly and of the current administration’s languid stance on health and safety,” he said. “The approach the regulatory agencies are sticking with is a Trump-era classic: Do nothing ...
Toothless Law Lets White House Keep Jobs Vacant
From: E&E News “More than halfway through President Trump’s first term, the Interior Department remains rife with key vacancies despite a federal law that suggests the agency should be hobbled by the lack of leadership. Instead, Interior hasn’t so much as slowed down ...
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