Former lobbyist to be nominated as secretary of Interior Department
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will nominate David Bernhardt, a veteran lobbyist who has helped orchestrate the administration’s push to expand oil and gas drilling as the Interior Department’s No. 2 official, to serve as the next secretary.
If confirmed, Mr. Bernhardt, a 49-year-old Colorado native known for his unrelenting work habits, would be well-positioned to roll back even more of the Obama-era conservation policies he has worked to unravel since joining Interior 1½ years ago. He has helmed the department as acting secretary since Jan. 2, when Ryan Zinke resigned amid multiple ethics probes.
While Mr. Zinke reveled in public displays of his affinity for the outdoors — riding horseback while on the job and touting his enthusiasm for hunting — Mr. Bernhardt is the ultimate insider. A former Capitol Hill staffer who served as Interior’s top lawyer under George W. Bush, Mr. Bernhardt has made it his mission to master legal and policy arcana in order to advance conservative policy goals.
“It’s a humbling privilege to be nominated to lead a Department whose mission I love, to accomplish the balanced, common sense vision of our President,” Mr. Bernhardt said in a statement Monday.
A former partner at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, he walked into the No. 2 job at Interior with so many potential conflicts of interest he has to carry a small card listing them all. He initially had to recuse himself from “particular matters” directly affecting 26 former clients in order to conform with the Trump administration’s ethics pledge.
While Mr. Bernhardt has deliberately adopted a lowprofile while steering the 70,000-person department, he has used his expertise to promote the president’s agenda at every turn. He is working to streamline environmental reviews to expedite energy projects and has promoted overhauling the Endangered Species Act to provide more certainty to developers.
In an interview last year with The Washington Post, Mr. Bernhardt said he immerses himself in the details of every significant policy decision because he knows they can have enormous ramifications for Americans across the country.
During the 35-day shutdown, when trash began posing a health risk at national parks, he instructed superintendents to tap fees those sites had collected to address their most visible problems.
Industry representatives praised the selection. Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, said in an email that like Mr. Trump’s recent nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, Mr. Bernhardt is better prepared to enact policy changes than his predecessor.
Mr. Bernhardt’s industryfriendly policies, coupled with his work as a lobbyist, have earned him the enmity of environmental groups and many Democrats.
“The ethical questions surrounding David Bernhardt and his commitment to pandering to oil, coal, and gas executives make former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke look like a tree-hugging environmentalist in comparison,” said Vicky Wyatt of Greenpeace USA. “And Ryan Zinke was a disaster.”