Hoffman, P

paul hoffman  dep asst F&W fmr cd state dir for dc in wyo

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Paul Hoffman, then DOI’s deputy assistant secretary
for fish, wildlife, and parks, was the nominal author
of the revised policies. Hoffman was a political
appointee, hand-picked by then-Secretary of the
Interior, Gale Norton,321 and he prepared the proposed
revisions without consulting the very agency that
stood to be bound by the changes: NPS.322

The
myriad of changes that elicited furor from inside the
Park Service as well as from the general public can
perhaps best be summed up by the change of a single
sentence.323 Hoffman struck out the longstanding
core declaration, grounded in the NPS Organic Act,
that “when there is a conflict between conserving
resources and values and providing for enjoyment of
them, conservation is to be predominant.”324 Instead,
Hoffman declared, the guiding principle of the new
management policies would be that the NPS “must
balance the sometimes competing obligations of
conservation and enjoyment in managing the
parks.”325

Along the same lines, another important change in the
Hoffman rewrite’s language would have effectively

eviscerated the Organic Act’s directive that the parks
be left unimpaired for future generations. The 2001
management policies gave wide latitude to park
officials to exercise their judgment in order to prevent
“impairment” to the parks, defining the term as “an
impact to any park resource or value [that] may
constitute an impairment.”326 Hoffman’s draft would
have raised the bar significantly, changing the
definition of impairment to an impact that could be
proved to “permanently and irreversibly adversely
[affect] a resource or value.”327

One final change bears particular mention. The 2001
management policies specifically recognized that “[i]n
addition to their natural values, natural sounds, such
as waves breaking on the shore, the roar of a river,
and the call of a loon, form a valued part of the
visitor experience.”328 Hoffman’s draft proposed to
enshrine the opportunity for visitors to have a very
different kind of experience, replacing that language
with the following:
There are many forms of mechanized
equipment, and mechanized modes of travel,
and improved technology has increased the
frequency of their use. In some areas and
under certain conditions, the use of
mechanized equipment and mechanized
modes of travel may be determined to be an
appropriate use.329

Critics characterize these changes not as the reflection
of Hoffman’s personal agenda or “an attempt to start
a dialogue” (the Park Service’s official position after
the draft was leaked).330 Instead, they charge,
Hoffman is “the appointee who . . . carried out his
superior’s wishes—the embodiment of what the Bush
Administration feels about national parks, and how it
wants them changed.”331 The Administration’s goals
for the parks were personified in the President’s
choice for the post of Interior Secretary, Gale Norton.
Norton’s “absolutist views on property rights and her
hostility to environmental protections” were said to
have “place[d] her far outside the mainstream of even
conservative legal scholarship on these issues.”332

Certainly Hoffman’s ties to the Administration are at
the highest levels – before coming to DOI, he served
for twelve years as Executive Director of the Cody,

Wyoming Chamber of Commerce—and before that as
a congressional aide to Dick Cheney in the 1980s.333
Moreover, Hoffman’s attempt at permanently
protecting the right to use off-road vehicles (ORVs)
instead of the Park Service’s ability to conserve the
parks themselves is a reflection of the close ties
between the Administration and the ORV industry.
Secretary Norton is said to have frequently availed
herself of the counsel of William Horn, a lawyer and
lobbyist who previously served as Assistant Secretary
of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks during the
last three years of the Reagan Administration.334
Horn currently represents, among others, the
International Snowmobile Manufacturers
Association.335 While the NPS itself did not have a
voice in the preparation of Hoffman’s draft policies,
the International Snowmobile Manufacturers
Association did—William Horn has said that he
“weighed in with opinions” on the draft “when he
could.”336

In November 2005, Horn testified before the Senate
Subcommittee on National Parks in support of a
revised version of Hoffman’s proposed management
policies, which the Park Service issued following the
public outrage at the original version.337 His
testimony, which included prominent mention of his
past experience at DOI, omitted reference to his
current representation of the International
Snowmobile Manufacturers Association.338 Horn
argued that the 2001 management policies were
“overtly hostile to traditional visitor use” and that
“Congress has never intended that parks be managed
as “biospheres under glass” or managed in an
“exclusionary” manner.339

Horn’s characterization of the 2001 management
policies, however, ignored the fact that despite being
unable to engage in some uses prohibited inside the
parks, 300 million annual visitors still give the parks a
95 percent approval rating.340 Rather than concern for
the enjoyment of visitors, the true motivation behind
the push to open the parks to more ORV use seems to
have been to increase the market for the ORV
industry. As noted by the former superintendent of
Yellowstone National Park, Mike Finley, whenever
Hoffman “talked about ‘use,’ it

In the end, the revised management policies for the
NPS failed. Following Gale Norton’s departure from
DOI, Secretary Dirk Kempthorne – after less than a
month on the job – abandoned the draft revision and
restored “the longtime standard that national parks
must emphasize preservation over any other
activity.”342 Outcry from the media, the public (more
than 50,000 comments on the revised draft were filed
– “one of the most significant outpourings of public
concern about a park issue in the 90-year history of
the system”),343 and from within the park service may
have played a pivotal role in the Administration’s
reversal.

The public is left to wonder, however, what other less
visible, perhaps more incremental, but nonetheless
destructive institutional changes are being pushed at
DOI. The Administration has made clear its resolve
to continue pushing its agenda through executive
branch initiatives as he is confronted with a
Democratic majority in the 110th Congress.
According to White House spokesman Tony Snow,
the President has
been calling all his Cabinet secretaries and
telling them, ‘You tell me administratively
everything you can do between now and the
end of the presidency. I want to see your todo
list and how you expect to do it.’ We’re
going to try to be as ambitious and bold as we
can possibly be.”344
While two of the publicly-known faces of the failed
attempt to write conservation out of the national
park management policies have since departed DOI,
Paul Hoffman remains, though now exercising less
direct control over the park system.345 Both Congress
and the public need remain vigilant to ensure that the
special interests who have the Administration’s ear do
not achieve their goals at the expense of our shared
park legacy.

Concluding Summary
The Bush Administration fully appreciates the
public’s desires for our national parks. The
President’s campaign promise to eliminate the
maintenance backlog, and the recently unveiled,..
Yet the Administration’s record on national parks –
characterized by its failure to fix the maintenance
backlog, cuts in operations funding and attempted
political meddling in park management – stands in
contrast to the public’s wishes.
Secretary Kempthorne’s rejection of Paul Hoffman’s
proposed management policy rewrite is a welcome
affirmation of the public’s desires for our shared
parks, as is the increase in public funding proposed in
the President’s proposed budget for FY2008.
However, the economic forces arguing in favor of
increased ‘use’ of the parks for the enjoyment of
today’s visitors will remain strong in the coming years.
If safeguards are not put in place, private donations in
furtherance of the Centennial Initiative’s matching
funds program could further strengthen the influence
of these private industries on our public parks
policies.
In the long-term, Congress and the public need
remain vigilant to ensure that those charged with
managing our national parks adhere to the statutory
mandate that today’s enjoyment of the parks be the
kind that leaves them “unimpaired for the enjoyment
of future generations.” In the short-term, the
Administration and Congress should work together to
pass – and surpass – the federal funding levels
stipulated in the President’s FY2008 budget proposal.
Moreover, if Congress chooses to pass the “matching
funds” provision of the Administration’s centennial
initiative, it must ensure that appropriate safeguards
are in place to prevent the privatization....
sept 2007
Squandering Public Resources
by Alyson Flournoy, Margaret Clune Giblin and Matt Shudtz

Centennial Initiative demonstrate this understanding.