As Zinke swaggers through parks, Interior staff rolls back regulations
As oil and gas industry racks up wins, conservationists find secretary’s efforts to cultivate rugged image growing old
WASHINGTON — Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL and lifelong Montana outdoorsman who now heads the Interior Department, loves to compare himself to Theodore Roosevelt, the father of American conservation.
“I’m a Teddy Roosevelt guy!” the interior secretary said in an April announcement that he would commence a review of the boundaries of the nation’s national monuments. “No one loves public lands more than I do.”
But as the secretary hopscotches across millions of acres of Western parks, monuments and wilderness with his Stetson-sporting swagger, a crew of political appointees in Washington has begun rolling back the conservation efforts put in effect over the eight years of President Barack Obama’s administration. Many of those appointees spent the Obama years working for the oil and gas industry — and they come to the Interior Department with an insider’s knowledge of how its levers work and a wish list of policies from their former employers.
Their work has been swift. Zinke’s staff on Tuesday filed a legal proposal to rescind the nation’s first safety regulation on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. They are exploring a proposal to loosen safety rules on underwater drilling equipment put in place after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They have rolled back an Obama-era order to block coal mining on public lands and delayed carrying out a regulation controlling emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells.
The agency is also conducting a review of federal protections of the sage grouse, a bird whose habitat extends over 11 states and is generally protected from oil and gas drilling.
“No one loves the sage grouse more than I do,” said Zinke, in response to a question this month about his agency’s early steps to review federal protections of the animal’s habitat. “But sometimes one size fits all doesn’t fit anybody.”
In the meantime, the secretary has assiduously cultivated his rugged image. Zinke spent about 40 days, a third of his time, on the road during his first four months as secretary, mostly in the West. In Washington, he
has eschewed a coat and tie for fishing shirts and boots. He arrived for his first day at work as secretary on horseback. Inside the secretary’s spacious office, giant stuffed animal heads have been returned to the wood-paneled walls. One of his first planned departmentwide initiatives was a bring your dog to work day.
To conservationists, the act is getting old.
“Zinke has been a disappointment,” said Whit Fosburgh, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which supported his nomination. “His first meetings were with the sportsmen’s community, and we were encouraged that he would be great — or at least someone we could work with. Since that time, it’s been nothing but rolling back conservation.”
The oil and gas lobby says it is delighted.
“All these guys have been in Interior before and they know a hell of a lot,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist and adviser to the Trump transition. “They’re getting the band back together, and they’re going back to the Bush administration.”
While Zinke explores the boundaries of national monuments, the man widely expected to oversee major policy decisions back in Washington is David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist and Trump transition official who served in senior positions in the Interior Department under George W. Bush.
Bernhardt, who was confirmed by the Senate on Monday as the deputy interior secretary, has generated criticism from environmental and government watchdog groups that his new role will create a conflict of interest, as he oversees new proposals that could directly benefit his former clients.
As a partner in the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Bernhardt lobbied for the oil companies Cobalt International Energy and Samson Resources. His legal clients have included the Independent Petroleum Association of America and Halliburton Energy Services, the oil and gas extraction firm once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney.
During his confirmation hearing in May, Bernhardt told senators that he would assiduously avoid potential conflicts of interest.
“If I get a whiff of something coming my way that involves a client or a former client for my firm, I’m going to make that item run straight to the ethics office,” he said. “And when it gets there, they’ll make whatever decision they’re going to make. And that will be it for me.”
But among the first decisions awaiting Bernhardt is a proposal backed by several of his former clients. Oil companies have pushed for years to recombine two Interior Department offices, one that collects revenue from the oil and gas companies that drill on federal lands and waters, and another that oversees and enforces safety and environmental regulations of that drilling.
Those offices were split on the recommendation of a commission that investigated the causes of the 2010 rupture of the Macondo well in the Gulf. Separating the jobs of oil revenue collection and safety oversight would break up an internal culture that prioritized the promotion of drilling over safety, the commission said.
“Reversing this decision does not sound like a positive response to the Macondo disaster,” said William Reilly, a Republican co-chairman of that commission and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush. “I have yet to see a convincing rationale for moving back to pre-BP rules.”
Another Interior Department veteran, James Cason, who served in the agency under the Reagan and both Bush administrations, has been appointed associate deputy secretary, a role that does not require Senate confirmation, and has pushed controversial personnel moves.
Cason was the key architect of what some Interior Department employees now call the Thursday night massacre.
Between 7 and 8 p.m. June 15, at least two dozen senior career officials at the Interior Department received emails informing them that they would be reassigned to new positions. While it is not unusual for new administrations to make personnel moves, some of the transferred employees said the moves appeared intended to undermine the department’s work on environmental priorities.
Joel Clement, a climate change expert who focused on the effect of global warming in Alaska, received an email reassigning him to a position in an office overseeing fees and royalties from fossil fuel drilling.
“I’m the climate change guy, and they moved me to the accounting office that collects fossil fuel royalties,” said Clement, who went public with his complaints in a Washington Post opinion article last week. “They couldn’t have found a job less suited for me, or that sent a clearer signal that they were trying to get me to quit.”
On Monday, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, sent a letter to the Interior Department’s deputy inspector general, calling for an investigation into the personnel moves.
Cason has also been asked to lead a panel aimed at identifying existing regulations to eliminate. He will have help in reviewing regulations from Daniel Jorjani, a longtime adviser to the free-market activist billionaire Charles G. Koch who is now the department’s principal deputy solicitor. He served as a legal counselor for the department during the George W. Bush presidency and in recent years became one of the top paid employees in the conservative donors’ network of organizations.
Another Bush administration veteran, Douglas W. Domenech, has been tapped to lead the department’s insular affairs unit, which administers policy for the United States’ overseas territories. Domenech, who served as Virginia’s secretary of natural resources under its last Republican governor, was most recently the director of the Fueling Freedom Project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group that aims to “explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.”
The appointments and the policies have drawn cheers from the oil industry. “You’re hearing a desire to promote oil and natural gas opportunities on all lands, and on federal lands,” said Erik Milito, the director of upstream issues for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for oil companies. “And doing so on federal lands is a great way to bring in more revenue.”