Everything Is Happening On Public Lands Everywhere All At Once
Republicans are trying to break national parks, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, all while selling off (or maybe giving away?) public lands to real estate developers.
Here’s a picture a friend on Capitol Hill texted me of William Perry Pendley, a small time villain, walking out of Congressperson Jeff Hurd’s (R-Colorado) office this week. Could they be scheming on plans to re-relocate BLM offices to Grand Junction? While that’s going on, the Interior Secretary is ordering the National Park Service to maintain all operations even as reductions in force loom, the USDA is gutting the forest service even while declaring a logging emergency and, believe it or not, Democrats may actually be doing something to fight all this! Also, freedom cities are back in the news for reasons that defy logic. Happy Friday!
Elon Musk Discovers National Parks
Imagine waking up from a Calvin Klein bender to discover the majesty of our nation’s national park system. You’re sitting there, utterly depleted of dopamine, unsure of where the border between reality and hallucination might lie, and you come across an image of the Grand Canyon for the first time.
And while a normal response might be something like, “Holy shit, that’s one big hole!” If you’re the world’s richest nazi, your reaction apparently goes in a different direction. Because it seems like that happened to Elon Musk, and his reaction was something like, “I’d better invent a conspiracy theory before that hole forces me to pay taxes!”
“We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more, casually,” Musk told Fox News. “For example, [a] simple survey that was literally a 10-question survey [that] you could do with SurveyMonkey, costs about $10,000, the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that…A billion dollars for a simple online survey: 'Do you like the National Park?’”
The whole thing was just a drug-induced fantasy Musk seems to have invented in the moment, of course. But that didn’t stop Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, from repeating the claim in a cabinet meeting.
“One of those contracts was to do surveys of individuals. $830 million for surveys,” Burgum claimed. “The surveys came back, and a survey was an 8-and-a-half-by-11 sheet of paper with 10 questions that anyone's child in junior high could've put together, or AI could have done for free.”
No such survey or expenditure exists. The IRS estimates that Musk’s actions inside the executive branch since January 20th have cost the United States Treasury $500 billion, so far.
What Tragic Mustaches Have To Do With Oil And Gas Permitting On Public Lands
William Perry Pendley is one of those people who, once you learn about him, makes you really wish you didn’t know he exists. Sorry.
During the Reagan administration, in his role as deputy interior secretary, Pendley devised a plan (which never came to fruition) to sell off 35 million acres of public land. Pendley would then go on to pursue two careers, holding down a day job as an oil and gas lobbyist while moonlighting as an author. But he didn’t use his spare time to write inspiring poetry or motivational children’s books. Instead, he devoted it to mocking Indigenous religious beliefs, denying the existence of systemic racism, lying about immigrants, fighting against LGBT equality, and denying climate change.
Way back during the halcyon days of the first Trump administration, when it was believed that gross humans who were desperately unqualified could never pass Senate confirmation to hold important positions within the federal government, interior secretary David Bernhardt didn’t think ol’ William could hack it in a confirmation hearing, so instead illegally appointed him to run the Bureau of Land Management in a shady maneuver that saw him managing the agency across a variety of unofficial roles.
One of the things Bernhardt and Pendley conspired on was relocating the BLM headquarters from Washington DC, to a couple rooms inside the Exxon office in Grand Junction, Colorado. Something the Biden administration corrected immediately.
Now, a friend on Capitol Hill spotted Pendley emerging from Jeff Hurd’s office earlier this week, and snapped this, “creeper photo,” of him standing in the halls of Congress. Hurd represents Colorado’s 3rd District, in which Grand Junction sits. Could the two of them be plotting to again move the agency to Exxon’s break room, where the needs of that company and other oil and gas businesses would become the overriding priority? Could Pendley be angling for another shady role within that agency? One thing’s for certain: Whatever happens, it’ll all end up being a lot more racist you’d think was possible!
Small Town Real Estate Huckster Declares Himself Park Service Director
It seems like this second Trump administration is again going to try and get away without a Director for the National Park Service. One of the big scandals of the first administration occurred when Bernhardt ordered that parks remain open during the protracted government shutdown that spanned late 2018 and early 2019. Allowing visitors free run of national parks without staff to babysit them resulted in over $10 billion in damage.
I’ve previously argued that attempts to cut costs by reducing staffing at national parks, while keeping the parks open, will actually add massively to the nation’s deficit. The administration is targeting a 30 percent reduction in payroll for NPS alone, as part of the mass “reductions in force” expected to come down any day now. But it seems like Doug Burgum isn’t listening. Yesterday, he authored an order to NPS directing that all parks, trails, attractions, and everything else remain open just like normal, no matter what.
“To ensure visitor access and satisfaction, any closures or reductions to operating hours, seasons, or any visitor services (including trails and campgrounds), in whole or in part, must be reviewed by the NPS Director and the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks prior to any reduction action by the individual park units,” the order states.
Since the NPS Director role is currently being handled by the park service’s comptroller, and there is no Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, that means Dougie himself will be approving trail closures across all 85 million acres managed by NPS. And if anyone has up-to-the-minute information on, say, grizzly bear activity in Glacier National Park, it’s a real estate developer from Arthur, North Dakota (population 328).
Who Needs A Forest Service Anyways?
DOI manages NPS, BLM, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, among other agencies. The Forest Service is managed by USDA. Earlier this week, that agency warned staff to ready themselves for large-scale reductions in force.
Government Executive explains, “According to a source briefed on the matter, the U.S. Forest Service is planning to consolidate its 10 regional offices into as few as three. USFS' research team, which focuses on priorities such as new tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water and employs around 1,500 people, is expected to face cuts. The agency’s five Research Stations are slated to be pared back. The nation’s 154 National Forests are expected to be consolidated and the plan is to move the Wildland Fire division into another part of the government. USFS’ Washington headquarters is slated to be ‘hollowed out,’ the source said.”
I’ve got an idea: In order to cut taxes on billionaires, let’s just consolidate all our various forests into one “National Forest Of America!” An overwhelming sense of patriotism will then inspire wildfires to not start in the first place.
If There Are No Trees There Won’t Be Wildfires
But wait, a far-right political agitator with zero experience in land management has a better idea!
“National Forests are in crisis due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors whose impacts have been compounded by too little active management,” writes Brooke Rollins, in an order she issued yesterday. "In total, this [Emergency Situation Determination] designates 112,646,000 acres of NFS lands as an IIJA emergency situation, which is 59 percent of all NFS lands.”
Rollins plans to expedite approvals for all logging projects on those 112 million acres. Logging cannot be shown to decrease the risk of fires.
“This order is a trumped-up fake emergency whose real purpose is to enrich Big Timber by feeding our national forests into the woodchipper,” says Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center of Biological Diversity. “Unleashing the bulldozers and chainsaws on these beautiful public lands will result in clearcuts, polluted streams and extinct species. It’s well known that heavily logged forests are the most flammable.”
Affordable Housing, One $183,000 Acre At A Time
Writing on The Land Desk, Jonathan P. Thompson takes a deep dive into American Enterprise Institute Plans to develop all that public land the Trump administration plans to either sell or give away under the guise of “affordable housing.”
“In a nutshell, the plan — which is broken up into the Home Sweet Home and Freedom Cities phases — looks like this:
The Bureau of Land Management would sell off 850 square miles, or about 544,000 acres, of developable public land in or near existing metro areas. About 250 of those square miles would fall under the Home Sweet Home phase, with the remaining 600 square miles devoted to 20 Freedom Cities around the West. They say this would generate $100 billion for the U.S. Treasury, which would mean the land would sell for an average of about $183,000 per acre.
Under the Home Sweet Home phase, a total of 1.5 million new homes would be built on that newly privatized land within existing metro areas on the current urban fringe.
Another 1.5 million homes would be built in Freedom Cities, which would lie outside — but not far from — existing metro areas’ peripheries."
Democrats Might Do Something, Maybe!
In response to all the above, Democrats plan to coordinate their outfits, hold up tiny signs, and wear diapers while giving very long speeches. I kid, it sounds like they may actually be doing something for once.
“Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) plan to offer an amendment (cosponsored by Sens. Kelly, Padilla, Bennet, Rosen, Cortez Masto, Luján, Wyden, Merkley, Murray) to the nascent reconciliation package that would bar attempts by the Trump administration to sell public lands to private interests,” reads a press release from the Sierra Club. “It comes after news reports earlier this week indicated Trump officials and Congressional Republicans were considering selling off large areas of public lands in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires through the complex budget reconciliation process.”
Can Dems muster the votes necessary in order to add an amendment? It depends. I’ll analyze that and more below.
Update: In early voting on the reconciliation package, Heinrich and Hickenlooper’s amendment failed. I’m reaching out to both Senators to ask if they plan to reintroduce it, or something similar, later in the in process.
How Much Damage Will This Cause And What Can We Do About It?
It takes a simple majority vote to add an amendment to a bill passing through either chamber. Currently, Democrats hold 213 of 435 seats in the House and 47 of 100 seats in the Senate. Their ability to make up that deficit depends on factors including: Trump’s popularity, the vulnerability of any given member of Congress in the mid-terms versus the relevance of public lands to their voters, and the timing of the vote.
I can see this amendment passing, if all three of these factors can be aligned in the right ways:
Trump’s popularity: even rats like Ben Shapiro are currently fleeing the SS Trump, amid reports that the administration asked AI to create its tariff plan, and the crashing stock market. If that keeps up as a vote on budget reconciliation approaches, odds increase that Republicans will start to fear for their own electoral future.
The mid-terms: one of those vulnerable republican congressmen is Montana’s Ryan Zinke. The former interior secretary, who was forced out of the first Trump administration for penny grifting, isn’t a terribly popular figure here, but has yet to face concerted opposition from an electable Democrat. My buddy Ryan Busse is talking about trying to unseat him in 2026. And if Busse can raise a good amount of money, I think Zinke will be sweating. Busse will be pushing him on support for public lands, and Zinke loves an opportunity to make a performative vote he can hold up to distract from a record that’s overall pretty terrible. That same dynamic will play out in other western states too.
The continuing resolution gets Congress through to the end of September. And while that’ll still be over a year until the mid-terms, it is well past Trump’s first 100 days, and the administration is going to start feeling like a lame duck. The later Dems can push the vote on this amendment, the better the opportunity they’ll be creating for Republicans to separate themselves from this President’s already abysmal perception.
Away from budget reconciliation, I also see some signs of hope in the rest of these machinations.
In his order for parks to continue operations at normal levels, Burgum is acknowledging the unique position national parks hold in the public’s imagination. He knows that, should those close their gates, or limit access to attractions like trails, the result will be seriously negative PR for the administration. But Burgum can try as much as he’d like to control the narrative, and stories around negative impacts will still get out. Look at how much traction stories around the February 14 firings have gotten. That was only 1,000 employees. Should thousands more be lost to the upcoming RIF, much more negative press will result. It also looks like park rangers are digging in for a long term opposition, and are learning how to effectively mobilize for press coverage, social media campaigns, and protests. Should really significant damage to parks occur, that could prove this administration’s downfall.
And as I explained at length last week, while the administration may be very good at making evil plans, it is very bad at following through on evil plans. Legally-suspect declarations of crisis and emergency, retaliatory actions against private corporations that piss off the President, and yes, a moronic trade war all combine to create a really unpredictable environment for investment. And without regulatory certainty, the large capital expenditures and multi-decade investments that it takes to build new drilling sites, or plan logging projects, or open up new mines, cannot be embarked upon. Declaring a logging crisis will be as bad for the timber industry as it will be for trees.
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