pendley bak

SEE PJT 2025

pension?

boundary waters?

not exactly zombie b/c no scandal resignation? more like herpes virus that goes latent till eruption?

what has he been up to?

pendejo

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~ NOM EXTREMIST

Meet Extremist William Perry Pendley

Conflicts

Pendley touts a 17-page recusal list, detailing over 50 conflicts of interest and some 57 entities that he should be ethically dismissed from working on. In total, there are few, if any, decisions or policies in front of the BLM that Pendley wouldn’t be recused from working on.

Strikingly excluded from his recusal list was the Northwest Mining Association, despite Pendley’s connection to their previous lawsuit against the agency he now heads.

Pendley is also still the attorney for three Utah counties defending the Trump administration’s illegal move to shrink the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — one of which the BLM recently announced it would begin leasing land to oil and gas interests.

The Acting Director is also slated to receive a lifelong payment from his former employer, the Mountain States Legal Foundation — a litigation group that regularly opposes public lands and has sued Interior at least 40 times.

Remember when Interior tried to offer oil and gas leases in the sacred Badger-Two Medicine Wilderness Area in Montana? Well, Pendley actually represented Solenex, the group that holds the now-canceled leases.

What else?

Pendley has cited wild horses as an existential threat, representing legal clients in three cases, with only one previous client listed on his recusal list.
Pendley’s recusal list includes at least eight entities or individuals representing oil, gas, and industry interests.
His recusal list also boasts at least four individuals that have been involved in litigation against the federal government over lands rights and access issues.

The worst part? William Pendley puts the responsibility of managing his ridiculous recusals list on the shoulders of his staff. It’s unclear what exactly he can accomplish with so many conflicts of interest, without being totally and clearly unethical.

Pendley is more conflicted than his conflict-ridden boss Interior Secretary Bernhardt and cannot be trusted to manage America’s public lands.

Learn more about William Perry Pendley's conflicts

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William Perry Pendley: Carrying Concealed At The Post Office Is ...

Aug 21, 2026William Perry Pendley: Carrying Concealed At The Post Office Is Constitutional: A Decade Late Guest columnist Perry Pendley writes, "Therefore, Congress' attempt to bar the constitutionally protected carrying of firearms from all federal buildings isֻ 'presumptively unconstitutional.'

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9 26 https://globalextremism.org/post/project-2025-comes-for-public-lands/

No Accident: Project 2025 Comes for Public Lands

September 23, 2026

William Perry Pendley wrote the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025. Doug Burgum now runs the Interior Department, and he is carrying it out. Endangered species, America’s public lands, and the sacred places on them are paying the price.

Key Takeaways

Project 2025 wanted wild horses disposed of. The government sold 3,700 of them last year, many for as little as $25, through a loophole that for some ends at a slaughter plant.

Project 2025 complained that Trump’s first-term monument cuts didn’t go far enough. He has now cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, both in Utah, by about 90 percent each.

Project 2025 wanted the Endangered Species Act kept out of the way of “economic development.” The wildlife agencies didn’t wait for Congress. They rewrote the rules, and 20 states and the District of Columbia sued on September 9. Five days later, Fish and Wildlife told its field offices that killing an endangered animal breaks no law unless the killing was the point.

Project 2025 called for “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border.” Homeland Security has waived cultural and environmental laws to build it, and crews are blasting Kuuchamaa, a Kumeyaay sacred mountain on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The mustangs had waited years in an Idaho feedlot, penned there since helicopters ran them down off the range. In March, the Bureau of Land Management finally shipped 68 of them out. The trailers went 1,800 miles east to Brandon Jones, an Ohio livestock trader who had paid the government $25 a head. Around midnight the next day, two double-decker cattle trucks came for the horses. Jones won’t say where they went.

Jones told The New York Times, which ran the investigation on its front page in August, that he has nothing to do with Fred Bauer. Bauer is one of the largest exporters of slaughter horses to Canada, where they are processed into meat for human consumption and sold abroad.

William Perry Pendley, who wrote Project 2025’s Interior chapter, once ran the bureau now selling those horses. A federal judge ruled in 2020 that he had served unlawfully as its acting director for 424 days. His chapter asked Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act and to rein in the Endangered Species Act. Congress has done neither. Interior, under Secretary Doug Burgum, has found other ways, and the horses show how.

Project 2025’s section on wild horses ends by telling Congress to pass a law letting the bureau “dispose humanely of these animals.” Congress never did, and it still bars the bureau from spending money to kill healthy wild horses. A 2017 survey of 556 registered voters, commissioned by wild horse advocates, found 80 percent of respondents, including 86 percent of Trump voters, opposed killing them.

Livestock inspection records show some of the government’s mustangs on trucks bound for Canadian slaughter plants.

The bureau posts wild horses on its online adoption site, and after three one-week listings with no takers, it labels a horse unadoptable and can sell it. Once sold, the horse loses its protections. The buyer promises in writing not to slaughter it or knowingly sell it to someone who will. The middleman signs nothing, and the horses go to Canada. The government can spend more than $3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market, then sell it for $25.

Slaughter plants pay up to $750 per horse.

Clare Staples runs Skydog Sanctuary, a rescue for wild horses and burros with ranches in California and Oregon. She wrote to Burgum the day the Times story ran, demanding the sales program be shut down. She had spent more than a year combing the bureau’s own sales records and standing at the kill pens. Her count runs 19 months, a longer stretch than the government’s one-year figure: 6,331 wild horses sold, against a historic average of about 1,200 a year. More than half were one to four years old, prime adoption age, and nearly three-quarters sold for $25 or less. Staples has tracked 333 wild horses and burros into kill pens this year alone. Selling protected animals for $25 to be butchered abroad, she said, is “a betrayal of the law and the American people.”

Sacred Lands

Trump signed the monument orders in the Oval Office on July 13, 2026, with Utah’s senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis, Gov. Spencer Cox, and state House Speaker Mike Schultz lined up behind him. The proclamations took effect September 11, and Bears Ears was reduced from 1.36 million acres to 121,000, a 91 percent cut. Grand Staircase-Escalante lost about the same share. Conservation groups sued on September 2.

The proclamation itself acknowledges the twin buttes known as the Bears Ears, “which are considered sacred by the Native American tribes that call this area their ancestral home.” The same document lists “critical minerals such as silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.”

The proclamation also ended the Bears Ears Commission (BEC), through which the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni had co-managed the monument with the federal government. In its place is an advisory committee whose named seats number 15: five for the tribes, four for San Juan County and its towns, and six for people recommended by Utah’s governor. The secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture now have no “obligation to engage, consult, or coordinate with the BEC or a comparable entity,” the proclamation states, though it still requires them to consult tribes under other laws.

Pendley has fought over sacred ground before. In 1996, Mountain States Legal Foundation, the Denver firm he then led, sued the Park Service over a voluntary June climbing ban at Devils Tower in Wyoming, a site many Northern Plains tribes hold sacred. A federal appeals court tossed the case in 1999, ruling that the climbers had no standing to sue.

In his Project 2025 chapter, Pendley wrote that Trump’s first-term review had been “insufficient” because only two Utah monuments were cut. The next administration, the chapter says, “must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906.” The law protects “cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands,” and it confines each monument to the “smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Whether that clause lets a president carve down a monument a predecessor created is the question the conservation groups have asked a federal court to answer.

The day the cuts took effect, mining companies filed 16 new claims on land stripped from Bears Ears.

What Counts as Harm

Since 1975, wrecking an animal’s habitat has counted as harming the animal. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service deleted that definition in a rule published July 14, 2026, and wrote nothing to replace it. The rescission took effect September 14. Logging the last of an owl’s nesting ground no longer harms the owl. Two more rules followed a week later. Newly listed threatened species lost their automatic protection. Critical habitat can now be trimmed when a company makes a credible case about the cost of preserving it.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia sued in federal court in California on September 9, five days before the harm rescission was due to take effect. The rules “are wrong on the merits, the morals and the law,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said. The complaint calls the harm rescission “a reversal of staggering proportions.” The rescission’s own preamble invites companies holding “take” permits to hand them back “in order to not have to continue spending resources to mitigate.”

Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, signed the memo on September 14 and sent it to every one of the agency’s field offices. The New York Times obtained a copy. It turns on one word. Until now, “take” has covered killing or injuring a listed animal whether or not anyone meant to. Now it covers only the killings someone intended. Wildlife advocates say that lets a logging company knowingly cut down a forest full of endangered bats, as long as it was after the timber.

Most endangered animals that die at human hands are killed by accident, in the course of somebody’s business, the Times reported. Because those deaths have counted as take, developers seek permission first. A builder who wants to put houses where an endangered salamander lives traditionally applies for an incidental take permit promising to protect a few of them, or pays to conserve some elsewhere, and the government forgives the rest. The memo appears to upend that arrangement. If an accidental death breaks no law, nobody needs the permit.

Andrew Mergen argued endangered species cases for the Justice Department and teaches law at Harvard now. Everyone has understood the act to mean one thing, he told the Times: “Don’t kill endangered species.” The memo drains it of that meaning. People are held responsible all the time for harm they never intended but should have seen coming, Mergen said.

Interior’s press office wouldn’t say why it adopted the new reading, or whether the memo is already in force, and sent an unsigned statement saying the act “continues to prohibit take of endangered wildlife.” Stateline reported on September 21 that the memo’s instructions to staff take effect immediately.

Pendley’s chapter asks Congress to keep the Endangered Species Act from being used to “seize private property, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states.” Interior got there with a rule and a memo. Pendley cheered the result. The new reading, he told Cowboy State Daily, “will shield innocent people from litigation by the country’s largest law firm, the Department of Justice.”

The Border

Kuuchamaa, a 3,885-foot peak that straddles the border near Tecate, is sacred to the Kumeyaay. In their creation story, a shaman became the mountain. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992, and the listing itself states that disturbing its natural state would be sacrilegious. Contractors have been blasting it anyway, and the explosions send rock tumbling down its Mexican side.

From a park in Tecate, Baja California, about half a mile away, Norma Meza Calles can hear the crews breaking boulders. Kumeyaay from both sides of the border have climbed the mountain for generations to sit on those boulders, Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay leader who works as a guide, told KPBS. “They’re destroying it,” she said in Spanish. “No one ever consented or supported the use of dynamite on the mountain,” Emily Burgueno, a Kumeyaay Nation member in California, told the Associated Press. The Department of Homeland Security waived cultural and environmental laws to speed the work.

Project 2025’s Homeland Security chapter directs the Pentagon to “assist in aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border.” Congress has since put more than $46 billion behind construction. The waiver power Homeland Security is using comes from a 1996 immigration law that Congress broadened in 2005, long before Project 2025 existed.

In Southern Arizona, the wall has reached O’odham country, which straddles the border. In April, a Homeland Security contractor damaged the Las Playas Intaglio, a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge that pointed toward the Gulf of California. The Tohono O’odham Nation sued Homeland Security in June to stop a 30-foot wall in three places along the stretch of border that crosses its reservation. Tribal leaders posted No Trespassing signs on August 7. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied the Nation’s request to halt construction a week later. On August 25, according to the Nation, contractors entered the reservation with about 20 masked, armed Border Patrol agents. Homeland Security says the work sits inside the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot federal strip along the border. The Nation appealed on August 26.

About 30 miles west of the reservation, a second fence is planned 150 feet from the existing wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Crews have already cleared ground a few miles east of Quitobaquito Springs, a desert oasis where O’odham families have held ceremonies for generations and where the endangered Quitobaquito pupfish and the Sonoyta mud turtle live. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham elder whose great-great-grandparents walked about 50 miles through the Sonoran Desert to the springs, called the wall “another slap in the face” to her ancestors. “This is not ours to own. It is ours to protect,” Verlon Jose, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, said at the springs.

Nobody Home

The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to weigh what a project will do to historic places, and to consult tribes, before they build. Pendley’s chapter asked Interior to revive a first-term order “clarifying” those reviews. Hiring rules under the Trump administration cap the agencies at one new employee for every four who leave, so most vacancies stay open.

Landscape Architecture Magazine combed Office of Personnel Management data and counted about 6,700 Park Service departures, close to three in 10 of the people who worked there in 2024.

The White House wanted deeper cuts. Its 2026 budget asked Congress to take nearly $4 billion from the land agencies. Appropriators balked and held Park Service funding roughly level, but a budget line can’t rehire a ranger who took the buyout. This year’s request targets the Historic Preservation Fund, which pays for state and tribal historic preservation offices. It would cut the fund by 95 percent.

What Hasn’t Happened Yet

Pendley’s complaint about Trump’s first term was that the cuts to protected lands stopped at the Utah line. The new list doesn’t. In April 2025, a senior Interior official told E&E News the department was weighing cuts to at least six monuments: Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon. Burgum said the monuments were under review but “not a top priority of the administration.” Two are done. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni covers 917,618 acres around Grand Canyon National Park, takes in Red Butte and land the 13 tribes of the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition fought to protect, and keeps new uranium mining out. It is still on the list.

The horses never needed a vote. The ban on killing them rides in the spending bill nearly every year, and the White House left it out of its 2027 budget request, as it did the year before. Congress put it back last time.

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EXMR

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An Elon Musk insider shares what he found in Washington — and it should terrify youOp-Eds

An Elon Musk insider shares what he found in Washington — and it should terrify you

William Perry Pendley

Tyler Hassen, who Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency embedded at the Department of the Interior, has written an extraordinary book: Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider — must reading if you care about America’s future.

Hassen’s findings made news in late March 2025 on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier. Musk referenced a billion-dollar contract for a customer service survey that, writes Hassen, “I could have done … in high school.” (He would not have had misspellings.) Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whom Hassen extols, killed it after Hassen’s briefing, but not before Interior spent $100 million!

A Princeton graduate who held executive management positions with postings in New York, London, and five countries over his 20-year career, Hassen is the founder and CEO of Stable Crest Holdings LLC in Houston. In Washington in 2025, dressed like a banker amid engineers in hoodies and staff in jeans and T-shirts, Hassen, armed with his laptop, confronted bureaucratic gobbledygook. Worse: “No briefing packet. No onboarding manual. No list of priorities. Just: Figure it out.” Fortunately, Hassen and his colleagues figured it out.

Hassen was there because the national debt gnawed at him. “It wasn’t politics — it was math. We’ve grown used to the illusion that the bill never comes due. But the number is now over $39 trillion and rising.” Musk was his leader, and President Donald Trump (whom Hassen lauds as the reason DOGE existed) and Burgum were his bosses, but his clients were taxpayers.

At Interior, he found “two worlds colliding — [career employees] preserving how things have always been done [and political appointees] trying to change them in real time.” That produced resilience but also resistance that made it “almost impossible to know who truly believed in what we were trying to do. [Hassen] didn’t have the luxury of discovering it slowly.” He pursued competence, clarity, and “people who answered directly, moved quickly, and didn’t hide behind jargon.” Fortuitously, he found them and applauds their value, vision, and vigor.

Immediately, he flew to California to referee a water crisis, a “baptism by fire into the media world,” where Hassen “went from an anonymous executive in Houston to a public figure in one of the most politicized water fights in America.” “[P]erception isn’t just reality; it’s a weapon.” If a “narrative sets, facts become secondary.”

In Washington, Hassen scrutinized government contracts for “waste,” which Musk described: “Money is most poorly spent when you’re spending someone else’s money on people you don’t know. That’s the federal government.” After Hassen cracked the code concealing the worst waste and issued precise “data calls” forcing answers from bureaucrats, he found billions in “waste hiding in plain sight.” Equally profligate were 25,719 previously unreviewed grants totaling a “staggering” $26.7 billion.

Hassen uncovered a department awash in waste: Federal Advisory Committee Act creations of which Interior had 79, squandering time and money; “nonprofits” whose sole funding source — Interior — supported fat-cat executives; and 160 leases for empty offices countrywide. DOGE’s focus on “external vendors exploiting government inefficiencies” yielded a blind spot, which Hassen exposed: “[A] sprawling ecosystem of hidden service shops and embedded consultants, moving billions of dollars in ways most people … never saw.”

Despite Hassen’s and DOGE colleagues’ efforts, contracts continued to be issued, grants kept getting made, and employees were still being hired. Initially horrified by the suggestion, he agreed to lead one of Interior’s most important posts: assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget. “PMB wasn’t a niche policy office,” Hassen found out. “It was the nerve center of Interior.” There, Hassen controlled contract issuance, grant making, and reductions in force, including freezing the onboarding of probationary employees.

Hassen ascertained the Interior had 50 human resources offices with 2,000 employees coast-to-coast, ensuring chaos: 300,000 separate job descriptions for 70,000 employees! IT was no better: 18 chief information officers supervised 2,000 staffers. Worse was procurement: over 1,000 officers managed five contracts apiece! An expensive consulting firm spent five years studying consolidation and proposed another five years to oversee it. Hassen’s team took five weeks.

Musk warned: “There aren’t even fifty of us in this room — but there are millions of government workers who want us to fail.” Unfortunately, millions of others declared war on DOGE. Hassen, many of whose DOGE colleagues vote for Democrats, wondered when believing the federal bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient became a partisan issue.

DOGE’s “incredibly gifted” people suffered “long hours, data discipline, and a willingness to absorb criticism without flinching” while declining opportunities with “tremendous salaries and equity,” to “work for the American people.” In return, they got death threats! Nevertheless, the “turmoil” over DOGE did not alter its mandate to “reduce waste, streamline bureaucracy, and increase accountability.” Hassen remains hopeful for DOGE 2.0.

TRUMP FOUGHT UNELECTED BUREAUCRATS. NOW THEY’RE BEING CODED INTO IMMORTALITY

Hassen characterizes Musk’s famous email to federal employees (“What did you do last week? Please write 5 accomplishments.”) as a mirror that, once held up “inside a bureaucracy, [reveals] who is willing to look — and who would prefer to turn it away.”

Hassen holds up a mirror to the people. Will they continue treating federal workers as untouchable, even sacred? If they do, public good becomes secondary, and reform becomes impossible. Having endured a similar experience at Interior during the first Trump administration, I hope Americans heed Hassen.

September 22, 2026 8:00 am

Think you own your land? A 100-year-old loophole says state agents can walk right inOp-Eds

Think you own your land? A 100-year-old loophole says state agents can walk right in

William Perry Pendley

August 22, 2

While Colorado burns, Washington says ‘contractors not acceptable’Op-Eds

While Colorado burns, Washington says ‘contractors not acceptable’

William Perry Pendley

After an unseasonably, but not unprecedented, warm winter, the West is bone dry, water supplies are dangerously low, and wildfire risk is fearfully high. Parts of Colorado and Utah are infernos that, despite Herculean efforts and the deaths of three young firefighters, are not contained.

Thank God, these fires are not as bad as those Colorado suffered in 2020. But nonetheless, early drought conditions have folks spooked and surveying evacuation routes. Significantly, nearly 90% of wildfires are human-caused, even without lunatics like the New Mexican arrested for lighting a blaze along my town’s main thoroughfare.

Westerners need every firefighting hand on deck. Unfortunately, according to a Texas expert, we have been battling wildfires with one hand behind our backs. Concludes Derrick P. Holdstock of Western Fire Resources, LLC, “Current federal dispatch and policy practices undermine the availability, financial stability, and long‑term viability of the private wildland fire contracting industry — an industry that supplies more than half of all engines on large wildfires during [the highest two stages of wildland fire activity managed by the National Interagency Fire Center].”

Thus, Holdstock reveals, hidden behind the flames, smoke, and haze of annual, massive, heroic firefighting efforts in the West, a controversy largely unknown: the difference between cooperators and contractors. Cooperators are government entities created, maintained, and sustained by taxpayer dollars to fight blazes while conducting hazardous fuel reduction in their home jurisdictions. Contractors are privately owned enterprises that expend hundreds of thousands of dollars obtaining costly equipment and assembling seasonal crews in hopes of orders to fight wildfires alongside federal, state, and local agencies across the United States.

Despite the fact that private-sector contractors are “more cost effective, fully compliant, and often closer,” federal dispatch policies prioritize taxpayer-funded cooperators over them. In fact, in 2025, many federal engine resource requests were marked “Contractors Not Acceptable,” which violates U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ Memorandum 1078‑011 by not “eliminat[ing] all barriers and unnecessary procedures.” Not surprisingly, those orders often went “Unable to Fill,” notwithstanding available contractor engines, thereby endangering public safety and undermining resource protection.

Contractors have not just been denied jobs, but they have been restricted in what they may do on the job. For example, restrictive chainsaw-use language in 2025 barred routine tasks, such as cutting fire lines and mitigating hazardous fuels, which contractors have performed for decades.

When I worked on the railroad, we called these “union rules,” which made no sense then and make less sense today. They reduce operational effectiveness and prevent contractors from performing fuel mitigation work while staging for initial attack. That early work yields fire lines closer to the blaze, placing less acreage at risk by not ceding too much terrain to the oncoming wildfire early on.

In 2025, half the nation’s contractors urged that federal officials adopt these reforms: Restore practical chainsaw‑use authority consistent with training and qualifications; end “Contractors Not Acceptable” tags and prioritize them if they provide equal or better value; order contractor engines for 12‑hour shifts, 7‑day‑on/3‑day‑off schedules, from May 15 to October 15, to ensure 100 days of predictable work “to improve retention and create a ready surge force for initial and extended attack;” increase transparency in firefighting contracting by making all engine orders public; and “establish an annual Wildland Fire Contract Strategy Conference to address dispatch equity, qualifications, training pathways, and regulatory burdens.”

Those recommendations are fully consistent with and all but mandated by President Donald Trump’s Executive Orders 14308 (“Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response”) and 14239 (“Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness”).

Thus far, most noteworthy, the U.S. Forest Service restored and strengthened contractors’ chainsaw use for 2026. Unfortunately, whether “Contractors Not Acceptable” tags have been removed is unknown — once public-facing websites are now locked behind government firewalls. Productive talks are underway on some issues. Regrettably, this year the Forest Service introduced yet another barrier by becoming “target-fixated” on troubleshooting a new but failed software system rather than using its still-functional legacy program to make new equipment available to wildfires.

Meanwhile, constitutional, statutory, and regulatory reform of the National Environmental Policy Act by all three branches will decrease delays in getting firefighting boots on the ground and increase the number of boot-clad firefighters we can put in the field, mitigating fire danger, reducing hazardous fuels, and fighting inevitable fires. For that, we will need both cooperators and contractors on the fire lines.

ONE OF SPAIN’S DEADLIEST WILDFIRES HAS KILLED AT LEAST 12 PEOPLE, WITH 23 OTHERS MISSING

As a matter of public policy, cooperators cannot “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness,” to quote from Trump’s Executive Order 14239, if they are shirking their duties at home by running taxpayer-funded for-profit businesses hundreds of miles away from their jurisdiction when private contractors can easily fulfill that role.

As a matter of personal interest, westerners today want their taxpayer-funded, neighbor-run, and community-aware firefighters nearby when a wildfire hits next door.

William Perry Pendley, a Marine, Wyoming attorney, and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.

July 14, 2026 10:00 am

The tragedy of the commons: Why we can’t have nice thingsOp-Eds

The tragedy of the commons: Why we can’t have nice things

William Perry Pendley

June 26, 2026 8:00 am

Supreme Court ends racial stereotype gerrymanderingOp-Eds

Supreme Court ends racial stereotype gerrymandering

William Perry Pendley

May 21, 2026 7:00 am

America held hostage, Moody R. Tidwell, III, and the end of the beginningOp-Eds

America held hostage, Moody R. Tidwell, III, and the end of the beginning

William Perry Pendley

April 28, 2026 8:00 am

Three reasons Jimmy Carter was the worst president everOp-Eds

Three reasons Jimmy Carter was the worst president ever

William Perry Pendley

March 12, 2026 6:00 am

Trump administration kills Montana Buffalo CommonsOp-Eds

Trump administration kills Montana Buffalo Commons

William Perry Pendley

February 25, 2026 6:00 am

Called to Serve: Donald Paul Hodel’s ride with ReaganOp-Eds

Called to Serve: Donald Paul Hodel’s ride with Reagan

William Perry Pendley

January 26, 2026 10:23 am

Trump Vows to Make Union Station Great AgainOpinion

Trump Vows to Make Union Station Great Again

William Perry Pendley

December 21, 2025 6:00 am

Vietnam veteran returns to active duty after honoring those with whom he servedOp-Eds

Vietnam veteran returns to active duty after honoring those with whom he served

William Perry Pendley

November 24, 2025 11:42 am

The West also celebrates the end of racial gerrymanderingBeltway Confidential

The West also celebrates the end of racial gerrymandering

William Perry Pendley

October 24, 2025

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no lnx

Meet the ex-Trump officials who helped draft Project 2025

:{By Robin Bravender | 07/11/2024 :

Former President Donald Trump says he has “no idea” who’s behind the Project 2025 policy blueprint. The authors include his senior energy and environmental appointees.

Then-President Donald Trump speaks at the Heritage Foundation's annual President's Club meeting.

Then-President Donald Trump speaks at the Heritage Foundation's annual President's Club meeting Oct. 17, 2017, in Washington. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Former President Donald Trump says he knows “nothing about” a conservative policy blueprint and has “no idea who is behind it.”

But the authors include Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries, top White House officials and senior aides — including former Trump appointees to EPA, the Interior Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025, a policy blueprint organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, come as Democrats are seizing on pieces of the framework to attack Trump on policy and as the Biden campaign aims to shift focus away from questions about his age and mental acuity following the presidential debate.

Email blasts from the Biden campaign in recent days have been titled, “Project 2025: Trump’s Extreme and Dangerous BFFs;” “Donald Trump Takes His Project 2025 Abortion-Banning Agenda to Florida;” and “Trump’s Project 2025: Gutting the National Weather Service (Bad!).”

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday slammed the project as she tied it to the former president. “Trump advisers have created a 900-page blueprint of their agenda for the second term. They call it Project 2025,” Harris said. “Let us be clear, this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future.”

Stephen Moore, an adviser to the Trump campaign who co-authored the Project 2025 framework, said the policy guide has been misunderstood.

“It’s not meant to be a blueprint for Donald Trump — it’s meant to be a blueprint for a conservative president,” Moore said.

“We wrote this as our dream scenario,” Moore said of the authors, a list that includes former Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro, who’s serving in federal prison after he was convicted of contempt of Congress.

“I assume some of the ideas Trump would reject and some he would adopt,” Moore said.

Three co-authors who laid out visions for overhauling energy and environmental agencies were high-ranking officials under Trump.

Mandy Gunasekara answers questions in Hinds County Circuit Court on March 22, 2023, in Jackson, Mississippi. | Rogelio V. Solis/AP

Gunasekara was chief of staff at Trump’s EPA before she penned the Project 2025 vision for downsizing that agency and overhauling President Joe Biden regulations.

EPA, she wrote, has “long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states.”

She encouraged a realignment of the agency “away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.”

Among other things, the blueprint recommends eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, developing a plan to relocate EPA’s regional offices “so that they are more accessible to the areas they serve,” and resetting science advisory boards.

Gunasekara urges EPA to identify existing regulations to be halted and reproposed, to stop and review grants slated for advocacy groups, and to reduce the number of full-time positions within the agency.

As for Trump’s comments distancing himself from the policy guide, Trump “is right,” Gunasekara said Wednesday.

“The project is the work of Heritage and many other conservative nonprofits,” she said. The policies “are designed for the next conservative administration to consider and provide strategic thought on how to achieve them. What is ultimately pursued is the prerogative of the president.”

William Perry Pendley

Former Trump Interior official Perry Pendley wrote in the Project 2025 blueprint that the next Republican president should slash the footprint of national monuments and move to bar future presidents from wielding executive power to protect federal lands.

He called the Biden Interior Department “at war with the department’s mission” when it comes to fossil fuel extraction and urges a conservative president to pursue the “restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons, much of which is yet to be discovered.”

Perry Pendley led the Bureau of Land Management under Trump, although he was never confirmed by the Senate and a judge ruled that he had unlawfully served in that job.

A new administration must “immediately roll back Biden’s orders,” reinstate “the Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda” and put a series of Trump-era secretarial orders back into place, he wrote in Project 2025.

“We’ll see what happens after the election and what the president chooses to do,” Perry Pendley said Wednesday.

“I think we got some commonsense recommendations in there, certainly consistent with what [Trump] did during his first term,” he said. “Given the comments that [Trump] has made with regard to energy independence and developing our energy resources, I think once the president takes a look at what I prepared for the Interior Department that he’ll embrace it, but we’ll see.”

Bernard McNamee

Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Bernard McNamee.

McNamee, a Trump pick for FERC, urged the next administration to repeal Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws and to boost domestic energy production.

“DOE, instead of focusing on core energy and security issues, has been spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize renewable energy developers and investors, thereby making Americans less energy secure and distorting energy markets,” McNamee wrote in the Project 2025 energy section he authored.

McNamee, who also served in the Energy Department during Trump’s presidency, wrote that the next administration should “eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports” and “stop using energy policy to advance politicized social agendas.”

The next president should also support the repeal of “massive spending bills,” such as Biden’s signature infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, and “support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs,” McNamee wrote.

McNamee did not respond to a request to comment for this story.

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Project 2025 Seeks To Repeal One of America’s Greatest Conservation Tools

The Antiquities Act, a popular bipartisan executive tool for protecting lands as national monuments, is at risk of being repealed by Project 2025.

Author

Sam Zeno

Tackling Climate Change and Environmental Injustice, Biden Administration, Conservation, +2 More

Part of a Series

Project 2025: Exposing the Far-Right Assault on America

President Biden is seen at a desk signing proclamations, surrounded by others.

President Biden restores protections of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Washington, D.C., on October 8, 2021. (Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

This article is part of a series from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook, published by the Heritage Foundation, would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.

Just weeks ago, on August 16, 2024, the Biden-Harris administration utilized the Antiquities Act to formally designate the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Illinois, where one of the most violent race riots in U.S. history occurred. Last year, President Joe Biden used the same tool to protect nearly 1 million acres of public lands sacred to Tribes in the Grand Canyon watershed, designated as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. Protecting critical histories and landscapes such as these is one of many essential uses of the Antiquities Act.

Signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the Antiquities Act was the first U.S. law passed for the purpose of protecting cultural and natural resources with historic or scientific value on public lands. The Antiquities Act grants the president the authority to designate national monuments. It has been used by 18 presidents across party lines to protect 164 places across the country, many of which later became national parks. Communities nationwide spend decades advocating for natural or cultural sites to be protected as national monuments. For example, the community around Castner Range National Monument in El Paso, Texas, worked since 1985 to get the landscape protected and finally saw it conserved by the Biden-Harris administration in March 2023. Communities continue to call for the Antiquities Act to be used to protect other valuable areas such as Chuckwalla in California and the Great Bend of the Gila in Arizona.

Despite the fact that some of the country’s most iconic, ecologically vulnerable, and culturally sensitive landscapes benefit from protections because of this tool, the future of the Antiquities Act is actively under threat. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 lays out a far-right policy road map for a future conservative president to hit the ground running with measures aimed directly at dismantling the Antiquities Act and the places it has protected.

Project 2025 is a threat to executive conservation action

A 2023 poll by the Center for Western Priorities found that more than two-thirds of voters in Western states support the president using executive authority to designate national monuments. But despite the historically bipartisan and overwhelmingly popular nature of the Antiquities Act, its future is at risk. Project 2025 calls for a new administration to “seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906” and to consider downsizing existing monuments. These efforts parallel the extreme policy agenda of the antiparks caucus, a group of lawmakers working to increase the reach of oil and gas, erase land and water protections, overturn critical conservation rulemakings, and more.

The Agenda of the 118th Congress’ Antiparks Caucus

A view of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, with downtown Los Angeles visible in the background.

Article

The Agenda of the 118th Congress’ Antiparks Caucus

Jun 10, 2024

Sam Zeno

The playbook harkens back to the Trump administration’s two widely unpopular and seemingly legally flawed rollbacks of protections, labeled “reviews,” of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. These rollbacks prompted numerous lawsuits—some of which were led by the Native American Rights Fund, Patagonia, and the Natural Resources Defense Council—arguing that the Antiquities Act does not grant the president power to reduce or remove national monuments. Ignoring these arguments, Project 2025 calls these rollbacks “insufficient” and proposes another monument “review.” This proposal suggests that more monuments in more states are under threat of being downsized or abolished, specifically calling out monuments designated by the Biden-Harris administration.

The threat that Project 2025 poses to existing and future national monuments should not be taken lightly. William Perry Pendley, former acting director of the Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—the agency that manages the most U.S. public lands—is the author of the section of Project 2025 about public lands. Perry Pendley has publicly denied climate change and has shared his beliefs that public lands should be sold off. In fact, he spent years of his longtime anti-conservation career, prior to his role at the BLM, advocating for public land sell-off as president of Mountain States Legal Foundation. This extreme position is immensely unpopular, has strong ties to antigovernment extremism, and has led to strong backlash in the West. Perry Pendley’s extremism extends to his views on national monuments and the Antiquities Act, going as far as suggesting that even Theodore Roosevelt “abused” his authority by signing the Antiquities Act into law.

Despite the historically bipartisan and overwhelmingly popular nature of the Antiquities Act, its future is at risk.

The Antiquities Act has provided 118 years of protections

In its 118 years of existence, the Antiquities Act has been used to protect 164 places and has served as a critical launching point for public land protections of all types. This tool allows for expedited conservation of especially vulnerable natural resources by allowing the president to act to conserve at-risk landscapes while popular conservation bills get held up in congressional gridlock. Often, protections are later cemented through legislative establishment as a national park or through administrative establishment as a national forest or wildlife refuge. There are now 32 national parks that were originally protected as national monuments.

FIGURE 1

The Antiquities Act is a critical executive tool to protect ecologically sensitive and culturally important landscapes

Areas originally protected as national monuments in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah

Note: In its 118 years of existence, this tool has been used to protect 164 landscapes, 61 of which are in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah.

Source: City of Phoenix, "Parks Boundaries" (last accessed September 2024); The Wildlands Conservancy, "Sand to Snow National Monument" (last accessed September 2024); U.S. Bureau of Land Management, "BLM Natl NLCS National Monuments National Conservation Areas Polygons" (last accessed September 2024); U.S. Forest Service, "National Forest Lands with Nationally Designated Management or Use Limitations (Feature Layer)" (last accessed September 2024); U.S. Geological Survey, "Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument boundary" (last accessed September 2024); U.S. National Park Service, "Administrative Boundaries of National Park System Units - National Geospatial Data Asset (NGDA) NPS National Parks Dataset" (last accessed July 1, 2024); U.S. National Park Service, "Cinder Cone Trail" (last accessed September 2024); U.S. National Park Service, "National Park Historic Boundaries" (last accessed September 2024); Additional data on more recently designated national monuments are on file with the authors.

Map: Center for American Progress

These national monuments-turned-national parks have become some of the most visited, most popular, and most iconic public lands in the country, to the extent that many are now household names. Sites including the Grand Canyon, Zion, Acadia, Grand Teton, Joshua Tree, and Olympic national parks—all originally protected as monuments—boasted some of the highest visitation counts of any national parks across the country in 2023. Other national parks, such as Death Valley, Denali, Glacier, and Arches, host some of the most unique visitor experiences, ranging from international dark-sky parks to the highest mountain in North America, just to name a few highlights. Katmai National Park, another site that began as a monument, may be most well-known for its annual Fat Bear Week, but it is also home to numerous volcanoes that are a testament to the variety of landscapes protected by the Antiquities Act.

The Biden-Harris administration has used the Antiquities Act 11 times to protect more than 1.6 million previously unprotected acres and restore protections for more than 2 million acres of land across the country. These protections include restoring Bears Ears National Monument, expanding San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, and designating Avi Kwa Ame National Monument—among others. These designations are significant in their conservation impact, and most of them also stand to document and preserve the stories of historically underrepresented communities. This is important, as only about 25 percent of existing national monuments are dedicated to recording and protecting diverse histories on U.S. public lands. For example, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument conserves lands that are sacred to many Tribal nations and Indigenous communities, and the Biden-Harris administration’s designation of this site opened the door to co-stewardship with Tribes there. National monument designations have been a crucial way for the administration to deliver on its commitments to equitable and inclusive conservation.

Additionally, a 2020 study by Resources for the Future found that new monument designations result in increased local jobs and business establishments. Outdoor recreation is a critical driver of the U.S. economy and the source of more than 4.5 million jobs across the country. Protected places such as national monuments support local communities and businesses as well as the national outdoor recreation industry.

Conclusion

In just over a century, the Antiquities Act has preserved some of the country’s most historically and culturally important and ecologically vital public lands for the enjoyment and awe of generations to come. But Project 2025 poses a clear threat to the future of this tool. If a far-right administration succeeds in repealing the Antiquities Act, as laid out in Project 2025, presidents from both parties will lose this long-standing, impactful conservation device. The Antiquities Act plays a unique role in actualizing community-led conservation in a way that actually encourages community engagement. Many communities are actively advocating for new national monument designations on nearby public lands, such as Frances Perkins Homestead in Maine, Bahsahwahbee in Nevada, and the Dolores Canyons in Colorado. Getting rid of a tool that has been so impactful over the past 118 years would have disastrous consequences for the state of conservation in the United States.

The author would like to thank Mariel Lutz, Sharon Ferguson, Jenny Rowland-Shea, Nicole Gentile, Bill Rapp, Beatrice Aronson, Shanée Simhoni, Mona Alsaidi, and the local and national conservation leaders who are building impactful and equitable conservation solutions every day.

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Project 2025 would devastate America’s public lands - Center for Western Priorities

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Project 2025 would devastate America’s public lands

Jul 16, 2024

Issue: Extremism

By Kate Groetzinger

The extreme agenda seeks to hand public lands over to corporations, end vital land protections, and harm wildlife

Project 2025 is a radical action plan for a future Republican presidential administration that seeks to significantly roll back federal regulations and allow big corporations to maximize extraction of publicly-owned resources. Project 2025 was launched by the Koch-funded think tank Heritage Foundation in 2022, and, according to the New York Times, is a $22 million operation to staff the next Republican administration at a scale “never attempted before in conservative politics.” It also includes a far-right policy platform that touches on almost every function of the government, including the management of federal public lands.

Project 2025 lays out a plan to gut the Interior department and remove environmental safeguards that ensure the health of our public lands. The chapter on the Interior department was written by former acting BLM head William Perry Pendley, who believes the federal government shouldn’t even own land. Pendley sought the help of extractive industries in writing this chapter and freely admits that the energy section was written “in its entirety” by oil industry leaders.

Given its authorship, it’s unsurprising that Project 2025 would overhaul management of national public lands. But the extent to which it favors industry over wildlife and the environment is largely unprecedented. It would give extractive industries nearly unfettered access to public lands; severely restrict the power of the Endangered Species Act; open up millions of acres of Alaska wilderness to drilling, mining, and logging; roll back protections for spectacular landscapes like Oregon’s Cascade Siskiyou National Monument; and remove protections for iconic Western species like gray wolves and grizzly bears.

gray wolf

A gray wolf in the Midwest, where the species is currently listed under the Endangered Species Act; USFWS/Flickr

The recommendations in Project 2025 stand in stark contrast to the wishes of Westerners, who, year after year, affirm their love of public lands and wildlife in polling conducted by Colorado College in the annual Conservation in the West poll. The majority of Westernersacross the political spectrum say they want elected officials to preserve nature and protect wildlife, not sell off public lands to the oil, gas and mining industries, as Project 2025 recommends.

Below is an overview of the most egregious aspects in Project 2025 that pertain to public lands.

Unfettered fossil fuel production

Project 2025 seeks to roll back environmental regulations as well as recent fiscal reforms to give the oil and gas industry free reign to extract fossil fuels from public lands at bargain basement rates, at the expense of the environment and taxpayers.

The plan calls for the reinstatement of a number of secretarial orders issued by former Interior secretaries Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt,, including S.O. 3349, which directs the department to implement “American Energy Independence” by removing almost all environmental and climate change mitigation policies that apply to oil and gas extraction, and S.O. 3354, which directs Interior to increase the pace at which it leases public land for drilling and permits new wells. The plan also recommends the Interior department to hold lease sales in all oil-producing states every quarter, to the maximum extent allowed under law. This would be a sharp reversal of current Interior department policy, which seeks to balance drilling with other uses of public land by leasing only lands that have high potential to produce oil and are not in environmentally sensitive or recreationally valuable areas. The plan also calls for rescinding the Bureau of Land Management’s recently-finalized Waste Prevention Rule, which aims to reduce methane waste from venting, flaring, and leaks during oil and gas production on federal and Tribal lands.

Additionally, the plan calls on a future president to abandon mining and drilling withdrawals of lands in the Thompson Divide in Colorado, the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota. It also recommends the future president reinstate leases and permits for energy and mineral production in these areas.

Finally, the plan seeks to revitalize the dying coal industry in the West by resuming the federal coal leasing program, which has been in legal limbo for the past decade. Project 2025 calls for immediately restarting coal leasing in Wyoming and Montana, reversing the Biden administration’s plan to ramp down coal production over the next two decades.

pumpjacks in field

Pump jacks on BLM land in Wyoming; BLM Wyoming/Flickr

End federal land protection

Project 2025 calls on a future Republican president to slash national monument designations, kill the Antiquities Act, and end the national goal of protecting 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030, a cornerstone of President Biden’s “America the Beautiful” initiative.

The plan calls for shrinking national monuments in Maine and Oregon (Katahdin Woods and Waters and Cascade-Siskiyou, respectively), and recommends a future presidential administration conduct a review of monuments, including those designated by President Biden. It calls on a future administration to make “downward adjustments” to the size of monuments and to seek the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which presidents have used to protect some of America’s most iconic landscapes, from the Grand Canyon to Acadia. It also calls for the end of the America the Beautiful goal of protecting 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030 and the reinstatement of a Bernhardt policy that requires the approval of state and local governments before federal acquisition of private property with money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

:{Project 2025 also advocates for the review of “all resource management plans finalized in the previous four years and, when necessary, select studied alternatives to restore the multi-use concept enshrined in FLPMA [the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976] and to eliminate management decisions that advance the 30 by 30 agenda.” This would reverse huge gains in balanced resource management made by the BLM. Many of the management plans (also known as RMPs) finalized since 2021 are updates to plans that were over two decades old. These new plans determine where mining and drilling can occur on huge swaths of public land.

They also include protections for fragile habitats and popular recreation areas. For example, new RMPs for 1.6 million acres of public land in the Colorado River Valley and Grand Junction field offices, closed more than one million acres to drilling and designated over 120,000 acres as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern. The creation of these plans involves thousands of hours of meetings with stakeholders and the public, and they represent compromises between the many user groups that interact with public land. Vacating all of the RMPs completed in the past four years would be a significant waste of resources — all for the sake of giving extractive industries unfettered access to public lands.}:

large mountain range

Mount Katahdin in Maine; U.S. Department of the Interior/Wikimedia Commons

BLM and OSMRE

Project 2025’s recommendations seek to hamstring the federal government’s ability to effectively manage public lands by firing career employees and moving federal offices out of D.C.

The plan advises a future Republican president to reinstate the “Schedule F” program first enacted by President Trump in 2020, which would strip protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encourage expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring.

In addition to reinstating Schedule F, Project 2025 recommends moving the Bureau of Land Management headquarters out of D.C. and back to Grand Junction, Colorado, where Zinke moved the agency’s headquarters in 2019. It was returned to D.C. by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2021. The 2019 move led to “confusion and inefficiency,” according to a 2021 Government Accountability report. Dismantling the D.C. office more than doubled the number of vacancies at the agency and drove out the agency’s most experienced employees, according to the report. Finally, the forced relocation of staff to the West was a solution in search of a problem. Roughly 95 percent of BLM employees are already located outside of D.C., with hundreds of staff in each Western state. Moving the BLM’s headquarters back to Colorado would throw the agency into turmoil once again, undercutting its ability to effectively manage public lands and natural resources.

Project 2025 also recommends relocating the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement headquarters to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This would likely have a similar effect on OSMRE that moving the BLM headquarters to Colorado had on that agency. The plan also recommends reducing the number of field coal-reclamation inspectors, giving a green light to polluters.

large grey stone building

The BLM is currently headquartered in the Interior department office building in Washington, D.C.; BLM

Alaska wilderness and wildlife

Project 2025 recommends opening up untouched Alaska wilderness for drilling, mining, and logging, exacerbating climate change and putting wildlife at risk.

First off, the plan calls on the president to reinstate a plan that would open up over a third of the 23 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to drilling, reversing a recent decision by the Bureau of Land Management that limits drilling to about half of the reserve in order to protect threatened and endangered species. The plan also calls for reinstating oil and gas leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were issued under then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and recently canceled by President Biden. The nine leases cover over 430,000 acres within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres, which are home to an abundance of wildlife including musk oxen, wolves, caribou, and polar bears. In addition to reinstating those nine leases, the plan calls for the establishment of a competitive leasing and development program within the refuge on Alaska’s Coastal Plain.

In addition to encouraging more drilling in Alaska, the plan encourages the president to immediately approve the Ambler Road Project, a 211-mile-long gravel highway through the Brooks Range in Alaska that would devastate the fragile arctic tundra. The road would disrupt and permanently harm water and wildlife, intersecting almost 3,000 streams and 11 rivers (many of which are salmon-bearing), and the migratory routes of three caribou herds.

Finally, the plan recommends opening up more than half of the Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development. The Tongass serves as a massive carbon sink for North America and provides key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout. It also boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees — some of which are 1,000 years old — absorb at least eight percent of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48′s forests combined.

caribou walking

Teshekpuk caribou in the Northeast National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska; Bob Wick, BLM

Limit environmental reviews

Project 2025 seeks to make federal environmental reviews ineffective and block conservation groups from suing over inadequate reviews.

All major actions on federal lands are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act, which involves an environmental review, a public comment period, and a protest period. These reviews ultimately inform whether the government permits major projects — like clear cuts and power line construction — to move forward. NEPA reviews also seek to reduce the negative environmental impacts of major projects and actions as much as possible.

Project 2025 would revert back to earlier NEPA rules, which disallow the consideration of climate impacts in environmental reviews. The plan also recommends placing time and page limits on NEPA documents and putting a price tag on the cost of the reviews. These recommendations are made under the guise of expediting environmental reviews and transparency, but they are actually meant to undercut the environmental review process in favor of industry. According to research from the University of Utah, speeding up the NEPA review process is a matter of adequately staffing agencies and empowering staff to work efficiently by implementing new systems for communication, not page and time limits. These will only weaken the quality of the review, resulting in environmental harm. Project 2025 also calls on a future administration to champion congressional changes to NEPA, including the elimination of judicial review of NEPA documents, which would effectively render the law meaningless.

Put endangered species at risk

Project 2025 seeks to remove Endangered Species Act protections from iconic Western species, like grizzly bears and gray wolves, and put sage grouse at risk of becoming endangered.

The plan recommends delisting the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems, delisting the gray wolf in the entire lower 48, and ceding jurisdiction over the greater sage-grouse to Western states. Giving up on federal protections for the sage-grouse would put the bird on a path to extinction and, with it, the health of the entire Western sagebrush sea ecosystem.

It also recommends ending the “experimental species” program conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which allows the establishment of a population of a species within its historical range in order to aid in the recovery of the species.

bear and cub in field

Grizzly bear and cub in Yellowstone National Park; xinem/Flickr

Forest “management”

Project 2025 recommends ramping up logging in national forests to “prevent” wildfire.

The management of national forests falls under the Department of Agriculture, not Interior, so this issue is covered in the Project 2025 chapter on USDA, which calls for increased logging and decreased prescribed burning in national forests. It states that the Forest Service “should focus on proactive management of the forests and grasslands that does not depend heavily on burning,” even though manual thinning is much more costly and less effective than prescribed burning. In effect, this is a call for more logging by private industry, not targeted treatment to prevent wildfire. The plan calls on a future administration to “embrace” and build on Executive Order 13855, which called for an increase in logging and a reduction in the rigor of environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.

aerial view of forest with patches of clear cut

Industrial forest land near Roseburg, Oregon; USFS

An industry wishlist

Oil and gas industry leaders literally wrote the Project 2025 chapter on public lands. As mentioned at the top of this blog, author William Perry Pendley freely admits that the section on energy policy was written by industry leaders, including Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma and Senior Vice President of Policy at the American Energy Alliance Dan Kish. A number of other industry leaders and allies contributed to the Interior department chapter, including representatives and attorneys from the ranching, fossil fuel, and farming sectors.

h Extractive industries represent their own interests — not those of the American people. Project 2025 is an example of what it would look like to sell off America’s natural resources and public lands to corporations with little-to-no regard for the environment, the climate, taxpayers, or wildlife.}:

Feature image: Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon is in the crosshairs of Project 2025; Bob Wick/BLM

---

ggl 3 25

[### DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

Project 2025

https://static.project2025.org › 2025_MandateFo...](https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-16.pdf)

PDF

AGENCY OVERVIEW. DOI's purview encompasses more than 500 million acres of federal lands, including national parks and national wildlife refuges; ...

[### Project 2025 would devastate America's public lands

Center for Western Priorities

https://westernpriorities.org › 2024/07 › project-2025-...](https://westernpriorities.org/2024/07/project-2025-would-devastate-americas-public-lands/)

Jul 16, 2024 — The extreme agenda seeks to hand public lands over to corporations, end vital land protections, and harm wildlife. Project 2025 is a radical ...

[### What Project 2025 Means for Public Lands and Waters

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers

https://www.backcountryhunters.org › what_project_202...](https://www.backcountryhunters.org/what_project_2025_means_for_public_lands_and_waters)

Jul 15, 2024 — Stories about “Project 2025” have been circulating in the news, but what many hunters and anglers may not realize are the vast implications ...

[### Project 2025 Seeks To Repeal One of America's Greatest ...

Center for American Progress

https://www.americanprogress.org › article › project-20...](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-seeks-to-repeal-one-of-americas-greatest-conservation-tools/)

Sep 12, 2024 — The Antiquities Act, a popular bipartisan executive tool for protecting lands as national monuments, is at risk of being repealed by Project 2025.

[### COMMENTARY | Project 2025: Are We Headed Toward An ...

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility - PEER

https://peer.org › commentary-project-2025-public-lands](https://peer.org/commentary-project-2025-public-lands/)

Oct 15, 2024 — This far-right agenda would concentrate federal power in the presidency, undermine democracy, and give politicians and corporations ...

[### Policy Agenda

Project 2025

https://www.project2025.org › policy](https://www.project2025.org/policy/)

This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country.

[### Conservation Groups Say Project 2025 Would Gut Wildlife ...

Sierra Club

https://www.sierraclub.org › sierra › conservation-groups...](https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/conservation-groups-say-project-2025-would-gut-wildlife-and-public-land-protections)

Aug 20, 2024 — The far-right plan to hollow out the federal government would be a disaster for the environment.

[### Project 2025 is coming for our public lands

Colorado Newsline

https://coloradonewsline.com › 2024/07/09 › project-2...](https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/07/09/project-2025-public-lands/)

Jul 9, 2024 — William Perry Pendley is an anti-public lands zealot and a dire threat to our great public lands hunting and angling heritage.

[### Project 2025 Leader Calls for Selling Off Public Lands

Accountable US

https://accountable.us › project-2025-leader-calls-for-se...](https://accountable.us/project-2025-leader-calls-for-selling-off-public-lands/)

Jun 26, 2024 — Controversial former Trump administration official and author of Project 2025's section on the Department of the Interior William Perry ...

[### William Perry Pendley

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › William_Perry_Pendley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Perry_Pendley)

William Perry Pendley is an American attorney, conservative activist, political commentator, and government official who served as the acting director of ...

---

ggl 3 254news

[Colorado Newsline

Project 2025 is coming for our public lands

William Perry Pendley is an anti-public lands zealot and a dire threat to our great public lands hunting and angling heritage.

Jul 9, 2024](https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/07/09/project-2025-public-lands/)

Accountable US

Project 2025 Leader Calls for Selling Off Public Lands

Controversial former Trump administration official and author of Project 2025's section on the Department of the Interior William Perry...

Jun 26, 2024](https://accountable.us/project-2025-leader-calls-for-selling-off-public-lands/)

[

E&E News by POLITICO

Meet the ex-Trump officials who helped draft Project 2025

Former President Donald Trump says he has “no idea” who's behind the Project 2025 policy blueprint. The authors include his senior energy...

Jul 11, 2024](https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-ex-trump-officials-who-helped-draft-project-2025/)

[

Los Angeles Times

Trump downsized national monuments. Biden restored them. Project 2025 calls for reductions again

Trump reduced national monuments before Biden restored them. The Project 2025 blueprint says public lands need to remain open to a wide...

Oct 11, 2024](https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-10-11/2024-election-trump-harris-environmental-divide)

[

JHNewsAndGuide.com

Grizzlies remain protected. Project 2025, Hageman call for changing that

Officials in Donald Trump's orbit have urged the incoming president to reform the Endangered Species Act — and act to overturn the U.S. Fish...

1 month ago](https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/environmental/grizzlies-remain-protected-project-2025-hageman-call-for-changing-that/article_234ca610-d2a7-11ef-a2dc-5b76a3bf8f92.html)

[

High Country News

Project 2025’s extreme vision for the West

The demolition of public lands, water and wildlife protections are part of conservatives' plan for a second Trump term.

Jul 19, 2024](https://www.hcn.org/articles/project-2025s-extreme-vision-for-the-west/)

[

The New York Times

The Many Links Between Project 2025 and Trump’s World

Former president Donald J. Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, the conservative policy initiative. But well over half...

Oct 22, 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/22/us/politics/project-2025-trump-heritage-foundation.html)

[

Duluth News Tribune

Local View: Project 2025 puts public lands, democracy in peril

From the column: "(It) calls for, for example, reversing decisions that provide protections for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness."

Aug 7, 2024](https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/local-view-project-2025-puts-public-lands-democracy-in-peril)

[

POLITICO Pro

E&E News: Trump’s BLM chief has a plan for housing: Sell off public lands

GREENWIRE | The conservative lawyer who once led the Bureau of Land Management during former President Donald Trump's final two years in...

Jun 27, 2024](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2024/06/27/trumps-blm-chief-has-a-plan-for-housing-sell-off-public-lands-00165194)

[

HuffPost

Trump’s Second-Term Blueprint Would Take A Wrecking Ball To Public Lands

William Perry Pendley, an anti-federal land zealot, wrote the playbook for a Republican-controlled Interior Department, with an assist from an oil buddy.

Apr 6, 2024](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/project-2025-trump-blueprint-public-lands_n_660f001fe4b083254eab6ba5)

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AHA yikes RR nostalgia gipper, but massive dereg now under cover of?

[https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/28/global_heat_climate_crisis_july_2023

...

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I mean, the short answer is, to limit all of these impacts, we need to reduce carbon emissions very rapidly. And while we have had an incredibly impressive renewable rollout over the last couple of years, all of the graphs are pointing way up. The next decade looks much more promising for renewable energy than most advocates even believed was possible just a few years ago. Nevertheless, they’ve barely dented, if they’ve dented at all, the emissions that we’re producing from fossil fuel generation. So we haven’t actually reduced the share of global power production that comes from fossil fuels from this remarkable renewable rollout. We’re just using those renewables to add to our power capacity.

And that’s really, you know, the change that we need to make. We need to be producing so much renewables now that we can actually draw down fossil fuels, and draw them down relatively rapidly, rather than simply using them to supplement our consumption patterns and power production. And unfortunately, we haven’t really seen a sign of that. At best, it looks like we’re going to be looking at sort of a plateau for emissions over the rest of this decade. And we know from all of the scientific warnings that that’s simply inadequate if we have any hope of meeting some of our more ambitious climate targets.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, David, I want to ask you about what would be the most effective legislation in the United States to deal with climate change. But, Dharna Noor, I wanted to first go to your piece. If you can explain what Project 2025 is and what you found in your investigation?

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, Project 2025 is, essentially, a group of dozens of right-wing organizations. We’re talking about think tanks, publications and the like. And it was convened by the Heritage Foundation, which is, I think, in the climate world, very well known for promoting climate denial for decades, and for even longer promoting this sort of anti-regulatory stance. So, these groups came together in an attempt, essentially, to advise whoever the next president is, if that person is a Republican, so any Republican who takes office in next year’s presidential election.

This is the second time that the Heritage Foundation has led the creation of a sort of transition plan aimed at a Republican president. In the early ’80s, we saw the Heritage Foundation create one of these plans, that actually went on to have a huge influence on the Reagan administration and was framed as a sort of way of taking on the out-of-control regulatory state.

And in this particular iteration, there’s a lot of focus in their new transition plan on unmaking environmental regulations. I’m happy to talk more about this, but there’s a number of previous Trump appointees who have written, essentially, proposals to undo the many powers of the federal administration, from the EPA to the Department of the Interior, all in an attempt to sort of lessen the federal authority to regulate fossil fuels and, essentially, to boost those polluting industries.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. Polls show now that Biden and Trump, even though he was indicted again yesterday, are neck and neck in the polls for president. You talk about the Department of the Interior part of the plan, in this 2025 plan, being written byWilliam Perry Pendley.You note he controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations. Talk more specifically, and name names.

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, as you mentioned, William Perry Pendley very controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump, controversially because he was actually never confirmed by the Senate. This was the case for a number of Trump appointees. And he also was known, before he had a role in the Trump administration, for writing this book called Sagebrush Rebel, that was really in praise of Ronald Reagan, of Ronald Reagan’s anti-regulatory sort of agenda. It’s, I think, unsurprising to see his name in a sort of proposal that’s aimed at, you know, ending the ability for federal regulations to have any real impact on the environment.

Previous reporting from E&E News, from Scott Waldman there, found that Mandy Gunasekara had written another chapter focused on remaking theEPA, really focused on shrinking its authority both by laying off staff, by cutting budgets, with an especially big focus on sort of cutting environmental programs, like environmental justice programming and public outreach programming.

Another name that was in the proposal was Bernard McNamee, who wrote a chapter on the Department of Energy, again sort of in an attempt to say we should shrink the authority of the Department of Energy. He previously served as an adviser to Ted Cruz. And before that, he led this far-right organization called the Texas Public Policy Institute — or,Texas Public Policy Foundation, rather, that really aims to undo environmental regulation and fight renewable energy at the state level.

And so, we’re really seeing, I think, a who’s who of the far right in this attempt to, you know, not only sort of be in the next president’s ear if they’re a Republican, but also, you know, sort of recommend personnel and say, “Hey, here’s who you should staff up with.”

AMY GOODMAN: What role does billionaire Charles Koch play in this project, Dharna?

DHARNA NOOR: So, the Heritage Foundation, who, again, are the far-right foundation that sort of convened this group, Project 2025, has historically had ties, financial ties, to the Koch brothers, who are, of course, billionaires who made their fortune in fossil fuels and related industries. The Heritage Foundation is also a member of the State Policy Network, which is a sort of coalition of these extreme right-wing groups that have targeted regulation, especially climate-focused regulation, in states for many years. And I think, you know, I would just say, I guess, it’s no surprise that an organization with ties to people who have made such a great fortune in the industries that must be regulated in order to take on the climate crisis, you know, have historically been tied to a group that is trying to push that agenda to the presidential level.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask David Wallace-Wells to respond to what Dharna is describing right now, and also talk about what needs exactly to be done. I mean, we’re speaking today, the day after the Supreme Court has just OK’d, cleared the way for construction of the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline to resume, lifting a halt on a section of the project that had been issued by a lower court earlier this month after a challenge by environmental groups.

...

ref

GUK

https://yyytheguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/27/project-2025-dismantle-us-climate-policy-next-republican-president

‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president

Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative Dharna Noor

Thu 27 Jul 2023

An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.

Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

[A burned-out car against a background of charred trees and hills

Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show

Chair Grijalva, Rep. Porter Seek Documents on Another Incident of Potential Bribery under the Trump Administration

Washington, D.C. – House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Katie Porter (D-Calif.) today sent a letter to U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Deb Haaland requesting documents regarding a second incident of potential bribery between senior officials in the Trump administration and real estate developer Mike Ingram. Previously, the lawmakers sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleging potential bribery regarding a Trump administration decision about Ingram’s proposed real estate development, the Villages at Vigneto in Benson, Arizona.

The full letter to DOI is available here.

In their letter, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter describe evidence that Ingram, a businessman with unique access to high-ranking Trump administration officials, may have unduly influenced former President Trump’s decision to pardon convicted public lands arsonists Dwight and Steven Hammond in exchange for a sizeable donation to a pro-Trump Super PAC.

The letter lays out the following timeline of events:

May 25, 2018 – Ingram’s executive assistant sends an email to Ben Cassidy, DOI’s Senior Deputy Director for External and Intergovernmental Affairs, with two articles arguing for pardons for the Hammonds, including anop-ed by Trump-era Bureau of Land Management Director William Perry Pendley.
July 1, 2018 – A proponent for pardoning the Hammonds tweets that President Trump is “seriously considering a pardon.
July 2, 2018 – Ingram makes a $10,000 out-of-cycle donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.
July 10, 2018 – President Trump pardons the Hammonds.

Ingram’s only other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election cycle was the donation that triggered the Committee’s investigation into—and subsequent criminal referral about—the Villages at Vigneto development. As the letter points out, “The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.”

Background on the Villages at Vigneto Criminal Referral

On May 11, 2022, after a years-long investigation, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to DOJ outlining evidence of potential bribery between Trump administration officials, including then-DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, and Ingram regarding the Villages at Vigneto (Vigneto) real estate development.

The Committee’s investigation began in April 2019 when the Arizona Daily Star reported that Steve Spangle, a now-retired Field Supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Arizona office, claimed he was directed by a “high level politico” to reverse the agency’s decision about Vigneto in late 2017. Later reporting revealed that then–DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt was the “politico.”

The investigation found that—shortly after holding asecret breakfast meeting with Dep. Secretary Bernhardt—Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with him, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee. All of the donations occurred on or near Oct. 6, 2017, the same day that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.

Weeks later, on Oct. 26, 2017, Spangle officially reversed FWS’ decision on Vigneto, marking the final greenlight for the development.

Concurrent with standard practice, DOJ has not yet commented on whether they have pursued the investigation.

Press Contact

Media Contact: Lindsay Gressard

202-225-6065 | cell: 202-740-4715

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https://westernvaluesproject.org/sec-bernhardt-and-interiors-latest-effort-to-skirt-congressional-oversight/

September 12, 2019 by Yetta Stein

Sec. Bernhardt and Interior’s Latest Effort to Skirt Congressional Oversight

Chief of Staff Todd Willens Finds Excuse To Potentially Illegally Cancel Congressional Oversight Trips

Interior Department chief of staff Todd Willens has reportedly canceled Interior’s sponsorship of congressional oversight trips, NBC News reported, amounting to a potentially illegal move. The decision comes after an alleged confrontation between an Interior staff member and an aide to the House Appropriations Committee.

“We’ve seen this Administration go to great lengths to avoid oversight and scrutiny, but this represents a new low,” said Jayson O’Neill, Deputy Director for Western Values Project. “Either Bernhardt and his underlings aren’t competent enough to manage congressional field visits or they’re just trying to stonewall necessary congressional oversight functions. Now more than ever Congress needs to vigorously perform oversight to ensure our public servants are protecting our public lands.”

The decision to halt all of Interior’s sponsorship of House oversight trips is potentially illegal, according to a law that says some funds Congress appropriates to federal agencies must be made available to scrutinize just exactly how appropriated money is being used.

This isn’t the first attempt by Secretary Bernhardt’s Interior to undermine Congressional oversight and outside scrutiny:

Prior to his abrupt departure to work for a foreign oil corporation, then-Assistant Land and Minerals Management Secretary Joe Balash sent a letter to both McCollum and Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) threatening to withhold “departmental resources” for their oversight efforts regarding DOI’s plan to relocate the BLM.
DOI’s Inspector General recently launched an investigation into the practice of political appointees at Interior to interfering with the release of documents in response to FOIA requests.

Just yesterday, William Pendley, Acting BLM Director and anti-public lands zealot, failed to give a clear rationale concerning Bernhardt’s plan to relocate the BLM in front of the House Natural Resources Committee. Instead, he spent much of the hearing defending his call to sell all public lands and his disparaging remarks towards Native Americans.

Willens is a long-time D.C. operative who has, throughout his career, continually utilized the lobbyist revolving door. Willens has his own history with congressional staff trips: he was among a group of congressional staffers who visited the Mariana Islands on a trip paid by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

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https://www.desmog.com/2019/10/22/empowerment-alliance-dark-money-natural-gas-industry/

no lnx many. vids

The Empowerment Alliance’ and Other New Dark Money Groups Sound a Lot Like the Natural Gas Industry

By Dana Drugmandon Oct 22, 2019

Amid the crescendo of calls for climate action and rising rage directed at the fossil fuel industry, petroleum producers and their allies are engaging in an aggressive promotional push focused on natural gas. The same month that the American Petroleum Institute (API) started running ads emphasizing gas’s role in reducing carbon emissions, a new dark money group has launched under the patriotic guise of promoting “America’s energy independence” by promoting, you guessed it, natural gas.

That group, called The Empowerment Alliance (TEA), is a registered 501(c)4 that does not disclose its donors (and is not required to under law). TEA launched on September 30 with a news release filled with natural gas industry talking points and attacks on the Green New Deal. The organization describes natural gas as “essential to our shared prosperity” in terms of jobs, national security, energy costs, and even air quality, while the Green New Deal is labeled as “radical and unachievable” and a “risky tax scheme.”

This anonymously funded organization, from its leaders to its messaging, is part of a broader chorus of misleading talking points that goes beyond the “natural gas and oil” industry (as the API ads say) to conservative media pundits and top strategists and officials within the Trump administration and the GOP.

Key Players and Plans

The Empowerment Alliance is known to be run by two top figures and lobbyists for the Republican Party.

James Nathanson, the executive director, is a longtime Republican operative and apparent dark money extraordinaire. Nathanson’s business consulting firm in Dayton, Ohio, James S. Nathanson & Associates, has funded various conservative candidates and Republican Party groups and SuperPACs. But while these donations are transparent, Nathanson has also headed a group called Freedom Vote, Inc. — another 501(c)(4) dark money organization. Freedom Vote (FV) has been accused of failing to report more than $1.1 million spent on political attack ads during the 2016 U.S. Senate race in Ohio.

Watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed official complaints against Freedom Vote to the IRS and Federal Election Commission (FEC), and even filed a lawsuit in June seeking to compel the FEC to take enforcement action against the organization. Nathanson was also a central subject to a 2004 complaint to the FEC for violating campaign finance law in Ohio election campaigns.

Terry Holt, partner at the PR firm HDMK, is TEA’s communications director and spokesman. He was senior communications strategist for the George W. Bush presidential campaigns and has worked for former House Speaker John Boehner. According to his HDMK profile, he has “provided long-term communications and media strategy for several chief executives at leading trade associations and corporations.” Notably, HDMK was hired in 2010 to do communications and PR for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal industry lobby group.

HDMK boasts on its website about its work to build localized support for expanding big energy infrastructure: “To reset the conversation about the construction of energy infrastructure at the national level, HDMK built a grassroots coalition of workers, small and medium sized businesses, civic leaders, unions, and other local supporters. By activating local supporters and giving them a voice at the national level, we created favorable news coverage during the heated debate about the expansion of America’s energy infrastructure.”

The Empowerment Alliance appears poised to undertake this sameindustry-funded “grassroots” strategy. Holt told Politico the group plans to “run ads, engage in grassroots work and reach out to the media and may set up a lobbying operation down the road.” The group’s anonymous donors are hoping it will be a “significant factor” in the 2020 election.

The group also revealed that it intends to “mount an aggressive fundraising campaign in the coming months with plans to announce a formal leadership structure and new initiatives before the end of the year.” TEA has started running paid ads on Facebook spending a total of more than $8,000 so far.

Anonymous Donors?

A parade in Everett, Washington, in 2017 features an anti-dark money sign]

TEA says it intends to “engage the American people in an open and honest dialogue” and decries the “billionaire mega donors” and “deep pockets” supporting policies to curb fossil fuel production. Yetthe organization is notably opaque about its own funding sources and donors. TEA explicitly states its “policy is to not disclose its donors to the general public.” It also clarifies that there are no limits on donation amounts “by an individual, corporation, union, or trade association.” In other words, unlimited dark money is welcome.

Holt explained to Politico that the group’s donors are kept secret to protect them from opposition and protesters. And as E&E News reported, Holt also claimed donors feared safety risks from anti-fossil fuel activists, or as he called them — “eco-terrorists”: “Because ofviolence and trespassing and other criminal behavior, the Empowerment Alliance is going to protect its donors from that kind of risk,” he said. “We are offering donors this protection out of the concern that we would have should they come forward and the scrutiny of some of these eco-terrorists.”

Oil and gas industry veteran David Blackmon (who was involved in creating petroleum advocacy groups Energy In Depth and the American Natural Gas Alliance) praised TEA for “filling a void” left by the industry itself, but questioned why the industry wasn’t promoting and advocating for itself.

“However, it remains a wonder why the companies whose bottom lines depend on increasing the use of natural gas in this economy aren’t mounting a well-funded national effort of their own,” said Blackmon. Blackmon noted TEA’s lack of transparency invites skepticism and negative perceptions: “But the desire to hold its list of contributors confidential also opens TEA up to being labeled a ‘dark money’ operation in media reports, with all the attendant negative news coverage and public perceptions that inevitably come along with that designation.”

Gaslighting and the Green New Deal

One of the primary objectives of the Empowerment Alliance is attacking the comprehensive climate policy framework known as the Green New Deal. TEA seems to be pushing natural gas as some kind of Green New Deal alternative, its answer to energy security, economic growth, and climate change concerns.

This narrative contradicts the scientific reality of the climate crisis — which the United Nations says requires “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

As Bill McKibben recently wrote in the New Yorker, “Many of [the gas defenders] will say that, thanks to natural gas, our ‘emissions’ have declined. But that will be themost literal gaslighting imaginable, a lie of real gravity.”

Chevron's LinkedIn ad promotes a common industry talking point about natural gas and reducing U.S. carbon emissions.

A Chevron ad on LinkedIn promotes a common industry talking point about natural gas and reducing U.S. carbon emissions.]

The fracking boom has led to an explosion in natural gas production over the past decade, contributing to the decline of coal power — as well as a decline in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions — as gas power plants have popped up. While burning natural gas releases fewer pollutants than burning coal, natural gas is comprised almost entirely of the potent greenhouse gas methane, and leaks in gas systems and industry venting and flaring are common. After accounting for these leaks, researchers at Cornell University have warned that fracked gas may be even worse for the climate than coal.

In contrast to TEA and industry messaging, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions actually rose last year by 3.4 percent, which included a nearly 2 percent increase in power-sector emissions. According to a 2019 report spearheaded by Oil Change International, continued oil and gas exploitation from new reservescould result in new carbon pollution equivalent to building nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants.

Echoes of Industry

Nevertheless, conservative media and officials and associates of the Trump administration repeat these kinds of myths early and often. While some right-wing attacks on serious climate plans are clearly hyperbolic, like the false claim that Green New Deal proponents want to ban hamburgers or air travel, others are more cautiously veiled in concerns around economic impacts.

For example, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, recently told a room full of environmental journalists that resource extraction is deeply tied to the region’s economy and jobs, calling it a “life or death issue” forcommunities. While oil and gas does have a heavy economic presence in the region, that framing downplays the ways fracking has also devastated local communities with documented negative health and safety impacts.

[gorgeous BS navajo v ideo: carlyle begay ex rep, gowan ex spkr, lots of cowboy hats, peterson spox]

And Dina Gilio-Whitaker, an Indigenous studies scholar and member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, countered Pendley, pointing to the massive social impact of “man camps” in booming oil and gas fields, which have led to the exploitation and abuse of women.

Pendley also said that a “keep it in the ground” policy for fossil fuels would be “absolutely insane.” But that is in fact a prescription from scientists and experts analyzing the impact of fossil fuel exploitation on the carbon budget, with the goal of avoiding catastrophic climate disruption.

Mandy Gunasekara attacking the Green New Deal on Fox News

Former Trump EPA official and current pro-Trump dark money group founder, Mandy Gunasekara attacked the Green New Deal resolution on Fox News. Credit: Fox News via Mandy Gunasekara on Facebook

Speaking at the same conference, former Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official and founder of the pro-Trump 501(c)(4) Energy 45 Fund, Mandy Gunasekara also defended oil and gas, echoing the industry message about natural gas reducing emissions. Gunasekara, who was the aide that handed a snowball to Sen. James Inhofe during his infamous climate science denial speech on the Senate floor, claimed that climate proposals like the Green New Deal or carbon pricing are “premised on making energy more expensive.” This prompted fellow panelist Heather McTeer Toney of Moms Clean Air Force (and a regional EPA administrator under Obama) to push back.

“That is not true,” Toney said. “It’s information like that that gets put into the sphere of voters all over this country, and they believe rhetoric.” She explained that higher energy costs are the result of energy companies passing along their costs to consumers. “It’s that little piece you leave out about what’s really going on and does not connect all the dots,” Toney said.

The key, she added, is figuring out a way to not pass these costs on to ratepayers, “so that people are not paying for it and our children are not paying for it, and we stop lying to the American public.”

Like TEA, Gunasekara’s Energy 45 group does not disclose its donors, but the talking points coming from these dark money groups sound like a perfect echo of the oil and gas industry itself.

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talk radio?

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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/former-trump-administration-official-liz-cheney-primary-challenge

no lnx vid grafix fedsoc invite

Former Trump administration official mulling GOP challenge against Cheney

Cheney is facing multiple primary challengers after voting to impeach Trump

Paul SteinhauserBy Paul Steinhauser | Fox News

Facebook

Fox News Flash top headlines for April 22

EXCLUSIVE – Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the Trump administration, is expected on Thursday evening to give a speech in his home state of Wyoming where he'll strongly hint at launching a Republican primary challenge against embattled Rep. Liz Cheney.

Cheney, the third-ranking lawmaker in House GOP leadership, was the most high-profile of the 10 House Republicans who voted in January to impeach then-President Donald Trump. Cheney immediately came under verbal attack by Trump and his allies and remains at the top of his list of Republican enemies he hopes to topple in the 2022 midterms.

TARGETED BY TRUMP, CHENEY BRINGS IN IMPRESSIVE FUNDRAISING HAUL

Pendley, a Wyoming native who also served as an Interior Department deputy secretary during the Reagan administration, is scheduled to address and take questions at an event with the University of Wyoming College of Law chapter of the Federalist Society.

Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the Trump administration, is expected on Thursday evening to give a speech in his home state of Wyoming where he’ll strongly hint at launching a Republican primary challenge against embattled Rep. Liz Cheney.

"Wyoming needs a congressional delegation united in the fight for economic survival. It is a fight that must be waged with 100% of our energies, for 100% of the time, in 100% of the arenas available," Pendley will say, according to an excerpt of his remarks obtained by Fox News.

"We have no time for distractions whether they are with forums or issues of marginal and little real interest to Wyoming. We have no time for warring against one another, against fellow Republicans, or against a former president who served Wyoming well," Pendley will emphasize.

CHENEY EASILY SURVIVES PUSH BY TRUMP LOYALISTS TO STRIP HER OF HER HOUSE GOP LEADERSHIP POSITION]

Cheney, who sits on the House Armed Services and Natural Resources committees, has long followed in the footsteps of her father – former Vice President Dick Cheney – in advocating for a hawkish and muscular U.S. role overseas.

Pendley was appointed as BLM deputy director in July of 2019. Soon after, he was elevated to acting director, but was never confirmed by the Senate. Environmental and conservation organizations, as well as tribal and racial justice groups, opposed Pendley’s nomination, saying he was unfit to lead the bureau, as they pointed to his past support for the selling off of some federal lands and to controversial comments about immigration and race. Pendley moved to a different role at BLM after a federal judge ruled last September that he had served unlawfully as director.

Sources close to Pendley tell Fox News that he is mulling a primary challenge against Cheney, and point to Thursday’s speech as the next step as he moves toward potentially launching a campaign.

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the House Republican Conference chair, is joined at right by Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., and Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House minority whip, as they speak with reporters following a GOP strategy session on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 20, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)]

Cheney, a longtime vocal GOP critic of Trump, was the most senior Republican to vote to impeach the then-president on a charge of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists and other Trump supporters, who aimed to disrupt congressional certification of Trump's presidential election defeat to now-President Biden.

Trump loyalists in the House attempted to strip Cheney of her role as House Republican Conference Chair, but the three-term congresswoman easily crushed the effort to dump her from her leadership position.

CHENEY CALLS GAETZ ALLEGATIONS 'SICKENING' BUT MUM ON WHETHER HE SHOULD RESIGN]

But Cheney already faces multiple GOP primary challenges when she is up for reelection next year. At least four contenders have already filed, including Republican state Sen. Anthony Bouchard.

Trump has continued to target Cheney, as well as the other nine House Republicans who voted to impeach him and the seven GOP senators who voted to convict the now-former president in his impeachment trial in February.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, Trump urged his supporters to "get rid" of Cheney and added "hopefully they'll get rid of her with the next election."

Last week, Trump endorsed Wyoming GOP chair Frank Eathorne's reelection bid, pointing to Eathorne's censure of Cheney earlier this year.

"Perhaps, most importantly, Frank has Censured the incompetent Liz Cheney, who couldn't care less about our brave soldiers overseas, and who is willing to fight ridiculous, endless wars instead of preparing for the Big Time enemies that may someday soon face our Country," Trump wrote in a statement.

Trump has yet to endorse any of the primary challengers or potential challengers to Cheney. But both he and his son, Donald Trump Jr., have warned against multiple primary challengers.

The younger Trump called into an anti-Cheney rally in Wyoming earlier this year, emphasizing "let's not split this vote up and blow an opportunity to get rid of a RINO."

RINO is the acronym for Republican in name only.

The attacks from Trump and his supporters seem to have energized Cheney’s fundraising. Earlier this month the congresswoman reported a record $1.54 million haul during the January-March first quarter of fundraising for her 2022 reelection campaign.

And Cheney hasn't backed down in her criticism of the former president. After Trump once again claimed without providing proof that the presidential election was "stolen" from him – during a recent speech to the Republican National Committee's spring donor retreat – Cheney said the next day in an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" that the former president continues to wage "war on the Constitution."

Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in New Hampshire.

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oct 23 2020

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/william-perry-pendley-acting-director-blm-ruling/

at what point does the symbolic nature of defying an enemy’s victory begin to compromise the goals you’re actually trying to achieve?

That’s a question members of the Trump administration must be asking themselves right now,

because the continued presence of William Perry Pendley at the Bureau of Land Management increasingly looks like it might undo much of their work to benefit the oil and gas industries.

Pendley is the face of those industries’ attempts to steal public land from the American people. He’s also the author of a plethora of racist, homophobic, and xenophobic op-eds. If you don’t think that sounds like the kind of character that could pass a Senate confirmation vote, then you’re not alone. Pendley’s boss, interior secretary David Bernhardt, must agree, as he engaged in a scheme that had Pendley reauthorized as acting director of the BLM over and over, in what a federal court ended up ruling was an illegal attempt to avoid those confirmation hearings.

The decision, written by federal judge Brian Morris reads:

Pendley has served and continues to serve unlawfully as the Acting BLM Director. His ascent to Acting BLM Director did not follow any of the permissible paths set forth by the U.S. Constitution or the [Federal Vacancies Reform Act]. Pendley has not been nominated by the President and has not been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM Director. Pendley is not a member of the permitted category of individuals who can serve in an acting capacity in a [Presidential appointment and Senate confirmation position] under the FVRA. Secretary Bernhardt lacked the authority to appoint Pendleyas an Acting BLM Director under the FVRA. Pendley unlawfully took the temporary position beyond the 210-day maximum allowed by the FVRA. Pendley unlawfully served as Acting BLM Director after the President submitted his permanent appointment to the Senate for confirmation—another violation of the FVRA. And Pendley unlawfully serves as Acting BLM Director today.

That ruling came after Montana’s Democratic governor (and Senate candidate) Steve Bullock brought a suit arguing that Pendley’s authority at the agency was illegal and that land-management decisions created under his leadership were invalid as a result.

That was three weeks ago. Since that time, Pendley has defied the court ruling ordering him to stand down, and that court has again ruled in favor of Bullock’s suit, this time invalidating several BLM actions in Montana. And that decision looks like it has opened the door to further lawsuits, potentially undoing anything the BLM has accomplished since Pendley first ascended to acting director in July 2019.

Confused? Me, too. Let’s unpack this.

“I have not been ousted,” Pendley told Wyoming’s Casper Star-Tribune a week after the federal court ruled that he had “served unlawfully as the Acting BLM director for 424 days.”

“We are going to recognize that authority of the court and will obey it,” Pendley said, seeming to contradict himself.

The BLM is one of 11 agencies managed by the Department of the Interior. The DOI’s leader, the secretary of the interior, is a cabinet-level position within the executive branch and requires confirmation by the Senate, as do the leaders of each of those 11 agencies. Like other federal departments and agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump administration has attempted to avoid congressional oversight by using temporary “acting” directors rather than putting those political appointees up for a confirmation vote.

What Pendley and Bernhardt appear to be doing is taking a very narrow interpretation of the court’s ruling that, to most people, seemed to remove him. The decision ordered that Pendley’s authority as acting director be revoked; however, it didn’t state that he couldn’t continue other work at the agency. The order also removed Bernhardt’s authority to appoint anyone else to run the BLM, either in acting or confirmed capacity. Pendley’s actual title is deputy director of policy and programs, so he’s carried on in that role, while Bernhardt (who has passed a Senate confirmation) has simply taken over the duties of acting BLM director.

It gets more complicated: in an October 13 press release issued by the BLM, Pendley argues he’s “never been acting director [of the BLM]. I have been Deputy Director of Policy and Programs.”

The press release continues: “Pendley said that the Secretary of the Interior had given him the authority to exercise the delegable, non-exclusive duties and functions of the Director.”

But in a press release from June 26, the DOI contradicts that claim, stating, “Mr. Pendley currently serves as the Bureau of Land Management’s Deputy Director for Policy and Programs, exercising the authority of the director.”

Now, following the ruling, it appears as if Bernhardt and Pendley are attempting to continue their arrangement, with Bernhardt signing anything that requires director-level authorization and delegating any other authority at the BLM to Pendley.

“I’m still Deputy Director for Policy and Programs doing what the Deputy Director for Policy and Programs does,” said Pendley in the October press release. “And that’s: provide leadership in managing the Bureau of Land Management, consistent with the directives I get from the Secretary. But… if there’s something that needs action by the director of the Bureau of Land Management, I won’t be doing that. The judge said I can’t do that. And so, I won’t be doing that.”

The BLM and DOI have not responded to multiple requests for comment from Outside.

Meanwhile, the federal court in Montana reconvened last week and ruled that the BLM’s three management actions in Montana (one of which would have opened up 650,000 acres in the state to drilling with virtually no regulation) were, as Governor Bullock argued, illegal since they’d been created under Pendley’s leadership. As part of that hearing, the judge ordered the BLM to provide a nationwide list of actions taken during Pendley’s tenure, but the agency refused to comply.

“Despite Federal Defendants’ disagreement with the exercise and apparent refusal to engage in such a search in good faith, it remains probable that [there are] additional actions taken by Pendley that should be set aside as unlawful,” Judge Morris wrote in the decision.

His decision could open the door for further challenges to BLM actions taken since last July. Sixty conservation organizations already sent an open letter to Bernhardt on October 6 detailing 30 projects they intend to fight; these include everything from management plans for lands formerly contained within Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to ongoing attempts to open up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The letter reads like a list of virtually every attempt the Trump administration has made to benefit of the oil and gas industries over the past 15 months. It also challenges the BLM’s controversial relocation of its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to an office building shared with oil companies in Grand Junction, Colorado. And by keeping Pendley in his role, Bernhardt will likely open the door for those organizations to challenge any actions the agency may take in the future, too.

Both the DOI and BLM plan to appeal Judge Morris’s rulings, but no date has been set for that hearing. It’s unlikely the appeal will reach court before the new year. The ruling on the appeal will undoubtedly provide clarification on whether the BLM’s actions under Pendley will need to be challenged all at once or individually. So, until then, this whole thing is in a holding pattern. The results of the upcoming election will determine if Pendley and Bernhardt get to continue their scheme past January 20.

Despite the delay, public-lands advocates remain extremely optimistic about the outcome of these challenges. That includes the chairperson of the House Natural Resources Committee, Raúl Grijalva. While he plans to wait for the appeal hearing before bringing the matter before Congress, he also believes that Judge Morris’s ruling is clear.

“Our understanding of the ruling is that nobody needs to pick and choose which actions should be reversed, because none of his actions were legitimate in the first place,” Grijalva told Outside. “The administration needs to drop its delaying tactics in court, escort William Pendley out of the building, and start the long process of restoring public faith in BLM’s legitimacy.”

Update: October 23, 3 P.M.: Today, Grijalva's office sent the following letter to Secretary Bernhardt.

20-10-23 RG to Bernhardt Re… by Wes Siler

Filed to:

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huh?

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/520889-booted-from-top-blm-role-pendley-says-he-will-respect-court-order

embattled Bureau of Land Management official William Perry Pendley told a Wyoming public radio station he has not been “ousted” from his job at the agency despite a court ruling saying he illegally served as its acting director.

The Friday interview was distributed by BLM’s press office Tuesday evening, couched as a way to “correct the record” after Pendley garnered attention inan interview with another outlet saying the court ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever” on his role within the department.

“If there's something that needs action by the director of the Bureau of Land Management, I won't be doing that,” Pendley said in an interview he requested with Wyoming Public Media the next day.

“The judge said I can't do that. And so, I won't be doing that.”

A Montana-based U.S. District Court judge ruled last month that Pendley "served unlawfully ... for 424 days," giving the Department of the Interior 10 days to justify why it shouldn’t throw out many of the decisions Pendley has made during his tenure.

Pendley, who had served as the de-facto head of BLM for over a year, was only nominated to the position this summer, but the nomination was withdrawn shortly thereafter. Pendley has a long history of opposing federal ownership of public lands, and the entire Democratic caucus planned to oppose him — putting the spotlight on vulnerable Republicans up for reelection.

Pendley served as the acting director through a series of temporary orders that were challenged in court by Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D). His role is now limited to his official title of deputy director for policy and programs.

“I see these headlines in these newspaper stories saying I've been ousted; I have not been ousted. I'm still at my desk, I have the confidence of the President of the United States, I have the confidence of the Secretary. And my task is to fulfill the President's commitment to the American people to have jobs, to have conservation, and to increase recreation on our public lands,”Pendley said in the latest interview.

He went on to say the Department of the Interior, which oversees BLM, will appeal the ruling.

Pendley’s comments are a bit of a departure from his prior interview with the Powell Tribune.

“I’m still here, I’m still running the bureau,” Pendley told the outlet. “I have always been, from day one.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-pulls-nomination-of-pro-polluter-to-oversee-nations-public-lands

common dr

environmental campaigners on Saturday welcomed news that President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination of “pro-polluter” and “unapologetic racist” William Perry Pendley for director of the Bureau of Land Management, with groups saying he should no longer be allowed to continue in his role as unofficial head of the agency.

We are hearing the Trump administration is pulling down their nomination of William Perry Pendley for BLM director. It’s about damn time.

— Martin Heinrich (@MartinHeinrich) August 15, 2020

Pendley, who’s called fracking an “environmental miracle,” was panned by civil rights, environmental, tribal, and immigrant advocacy groups as “the worst possible person you could conjure to be a leading steward of our shared public lands” given his public record that includes a history of racist and sexist comments, “overt racism” toward native people, dismissal of the climate ciris, suggestion that “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” and a 17-page listof 57 potential conflicts of interest.

“Pendley never should have been nominated, and the fact that he was shows you what you need to know about this administration’s conservation priorities,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said in a statement Saturday.

Trump formally nominated Pendley in June to lead BLM, an agency within the Interior Department (DOI). However, he has been overseeing—to the outrage of progressive groups—BLM for over a year, with the agency’s website describing him as “exercising authority of the director."

outdoor Life first reported on the news of the withdrawal.

Interior spokesperson Nicholas Goodwin confirmed the nomination withdrawal to The Hill but provided no explanation for the decision. “The president makes staffing decisions.Mr. Pendley continues to lead the Bureau of Land Management as Deputy Director for Programs and Policy,” Goodwin said.

Critics of Pendley responded to the news with fresh attacks on his record.

According to Lena Moffitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign, “Pendley’s tenure as head of the Bureau of Land Management, like the entire Trump administration, has been a disaster for our public lands. At best, he’s demonstrated a total disregard for the health of our communities and our wild places, prioritizing giveaways to polluting fossil fuel corporations. At worst, he actively worked against marginalized communities.”

Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, suggested the withdrawal simply represents the administration seeing Pendley as unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate.

“Unfortunately, the ignominious end of Pendley’s nomination is more of a cynical nod to political realities than a retreat from the nihilist ideology he championed—and provides small solace for the communities and wildlife affected by the unbridled leasing of wildlife habitat and recreation lands across the West to energy development,” said O’Mara.

Further dampening any reason for progressive applause is that Pendley is not yet ousted from his current role at BLM.

“This is a sham,” tweeted climate scientist Peter Gleick. “Trump is withdrawing the nomination but leaving Pendley in charge anyway.”

“Another unconfirmed, illegal appointment,” he added.

Udall, in his statement, demanded that Pendley “not be allowed to continue in this role in an acting, unconfirmed capacity.”

“It’s time for DOI stand up for our public lands and our trust and treaty obligations to tribes,” he said.

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https://theintercept.com/2020/08/01/william-perry-pendley-blm-native-americans/

a brown

in THE FIVE BOOKS authored by President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley rails against “environmental extremists,” endangered species protections, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Al Gore — all of whom, in his view, would illicitly limit private development on the lands of the West. He had another target too: policies supporting Native nations’ treaty rights.

Pendley has been the acting leader of the BLM, which is responsible for managing the nation’s public lands, for more than a year. With confirmation hearings expected in the coming weeks, his long history of attacking Indigenous people is getting new scrutiny.

For years, Pendley was head of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a right-wing organization that has fought multiple high-profile cases favoring private property rights in states west of the Mississippi, including in Native territories. In court and in his voluminous writings, Pendley attempted to undo protections for sites considered sacred to tribes; fought Justice Department efforts to support Native voters’ rights; argued in favor of toppling key legal precedents that uphold treaty rights; and made statements about Native identity and religion that Indigenous scholars and attorneys call deeply offensive.

In his 2006 book “Warriors for the West,” for example, Pendley suggested that Native people may soon cease to exist. “The day may soon come when Congress and the Supreme Court will be asked to take a serious and very hard look at whether there remains a need for the federal government’s policy of paternalistic protection,” Pendley wrote, apparently referring to the U.S. government’s legal obligation to fulfill treaty commitments, known as its “trust responsibility.” The statement continued, chillingly, “The day may come sooner than many expect given that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial convenience.”

Pendley’s views on Indigenous people have engendered fierce opposition to his nomination to lead BLM — with his positions on “blood quantum” being only the latest to come under scrutiny.

Jill Doerfler, a first-degree descendant of the White Earth Nation and professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, has written extensively about “blood quantum,” a term meant to describe the proportion of “Indian blood” a person carries, used by some tribes as a prerequisite for citizenship. Doerfler’s scholarship shows that blood quantum was imposed by European Americans attempting to diminish the number of tribal citizens able to access land. “This seems like a long, old argument going back to the reason the federal government ever tried to push blood quantum as a way to identify American Indians. That has always been done as a way to access resources,” she said. She added that the blood quantum has always been used “to diminish the number of people that have that legal and political status as American Indians.”

Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University and member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, put it bluntly. “That’s just a crazy, crazy racist perception of what Indian people are and what tribes are,” he said. “Somebody who talks like that about people should not have a place in any public position in government. That is just overt racism.”

Pendley, who has lately come under fire for his views on racial justice, worked for the Interior Department in the 1980s as well, and his record there provides further evidence that he could prioritize private development over treaty rights. As acting assistant secretary for energy and minerals under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Pendley sought to delay oil and gas industry royalty payments owed to Indigenous people, according to documents shared with The Intercept by the Western Values Project, a public lands and accountability nonprofit.

Neither Pendley nor the Interior Department answered a detailed list of queries from The Intercept. “Based on the misleading and accusatory questions sent by the Intercept, it is apparent your intention is to create the appearance of disagreement where none exists, and to smear the reputation of a public servant and former Marine who is one of the most highly qualified individuals ever to be considered for the position of BLM Director,” said Conner Swanson, an Interior Department spokesperson, in an email. “The Department looks forward to Mr. Pendley’s swift confirmation.”

Of course, Pendley’s critics are urging Senators to reject the attorney. “William Pendley’s record of actively working against the interests of Native Americans and tribal governments during the Reagan administration and while heading up the right-wing lawsuit factory Mountain States Legal Foundation should be as disqualifying as his racist and bigoted views,” said Jayson O’Neill, director of the Western Values Project. Instead, given what O’Neill called the “culture of corruption” promoted by Trump and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, “They are actually trying to promote him.”

Undoing Treaty Rights

In “Warriors for the West,” Pendley offers his version of the history of the European invasion of Indigenous lands. “In the nation’s early days, the United States sought to balance its ‘Manifest Destiny’ — to settle, colonize, and utilize the resources of the land — with the desires of the independent and diverse indigenous peoples who inhabited that land and used its resources and who wanted to keep both,” Pendley wrote. “The history of the federal government’s treatment of American Indians has not involved overt, intentional racial hatred, but instead an attempt to achieve a Jeffersonian ideal of a United States of America in which all adopted the English language, Christian religion, and Anglo/American culture and lived side by side.”

Pendley was omitting some details. “In the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, our children were kidnapped and forced into mandatory military and religious run boarding schools — against their parents’ will,” said Angelique EagleWoman, co-director of the Indian Law Program at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law and a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton (Dakota) Oyate. “They were sexually, emotionally, and physically abused. If that isn’t overt, intentional racism, I’m not sure what is. We have never fully received reparations or acknowledgement of that history.”

It’s not the only part of history Pendley might like to see left out. While Native tribes certainly suffered racist abuses, their relationships with the U.S. were actually established through and are still governed by nation-to-nation treaties, which carry constitutional weight as the “supreme law of the land.” The vast body of what is known as Indian law exists to support the United States’ political – not racial — obligations to tribes, which came in return for the relinquishment of vast lands and resources.

In his book, Pendley acknowledges this history by citing the 1974 Supreme Court decision knowns as Morton v. Mancari, which affirms the U.S.’s obligations to Native people under the Constitution. But in legal documents, his monthly column, and book passages, Pendley has repeatedly and inaccurately argued that the decision supports unconstitutional racial preferences.

Pendley’s push to overturn Mancari ties into his past efforts to disrupt racial justice programs. In the 1990s, Pendley was the attorney for a highway guardrail construction company that objected to a Department of Transportation program favoring “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which in 1995 issued a ruling that severely curtailed affirmative action programs by imposing onerous burdens on racial preferences. In the wake of the decision, Pendley — again ignoring the weight of the treaties — repeatedly argued that “Mancari is likely unconstitutional.”

“This is fringe theory,” said EagleWoman. “Nothing that he’s saying has gained any traction in the law.”

That hasn’t stopped right-wing legal groups from pushing the argument in court, including efforts by Pendley himself.

If Pendley and these groups are successful, the repercussions would be enormous. “If Mancari were overturned, it would be an enormous legal and political disaster,” said Robert Coulter, executive director of the Indian Law Resource Center and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “Almost nothing would be the same. Around 200 years of congressional legislation would suddenly be unconstitutional and invalid.”

“Some of the right-wing legal theories are like that,” Coulter added. “The aim is to create a disaster so that the legal framework as we know it would cease to exist, and Indian tribes would have virtually no rights.”

Stripping Protections for Sacred Sites

Mancari isn’t the only target of Pendley’s attacks on Native rights. As a lawyer with Mountain States Legal Foundation and in his writing, he has argued against tribes and Native people in cases related to voting rights, tribal courts’ jurisdiction, tribes’ tax-exempt status, and the right of Indigenous people to speak theirlanguages in the workplace. However, Pendley has perhaps most frequently argued to deny protections for sites considered sacred to Native tribes, including those located on and near public lands.

Pendley’s approach is especially significant given that the Bureau of Land Management oversees 245 million acres of public lands — 12 percent of the United States — many of which border tribal land. Any pollution emitted by development projects could impact tribal citizens’ health or the health of the wild flora and fauna on which they rely. Located on the land itself are numerous cultural resources, including sacred sites, that are important to Indigenous people’s ways of life.

In February 1995, the National Park Service decided that Devils Tower, a butte in Wyoming, would be voluntarily off-limits to climbers every June, in order to respect area tribes’ religious practices. Pendley was incensed and fought the policy in court. Despite the fact that several tribes continue spiritual practices at the site today, he claimed in acolumn that “Devils Tower was never a sacred site for American Indians!” As evidence, he noted that there were no “sightings” of American Indians at Devils Tower in the mid-to-late 1800s and pointed to a document from 1934 that claimed there was no “physical evidence” that the structure was important to people.

More recently, he represented a county defending the Trump administration’s reduction in size of the Bears Ears National Monument, which is considered sacred to multiple tribes. And he fought against the Interior Department on behalf of the oil and gas company Solenex, which sought to drill in the pristine Badger-Two Medicine area of Montana, considered sacred to the Blackfeet people. (Pendley recused himself from work related to Bears Ears and involvement in the Solenex case after he came on as acting BLM head. A federal court upheld the cancellation of the energy company’s lease in June.)

As a lawyer, Pendley also battled a decision by the Arizona Department of Transportation to refuse to buy rocks for highway projects from a company that mined the material from Woodruff Butte, considered sacred to the Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo people. And he opposed the federal government’s decision to cancel a timber sale near Medicine Mountain and the Medicine Wheel, a national monument and a sacred site to Indigenous people, located in the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming. Pendley represented a nearby sawmill that he claimed was prevented from purchasing the unharvested wood.

In his writings, Pendley frequently compared protections for sacred sites to legal cases barring Christian symbols in public spaces, like crosses removed from public property and prayers at public school. He claimed in “Warriors for the West” that “the law of the land regarding government activity ‘respecting an establishment of religion’ is Judeo-Christian, ‘no,’ and pantheism, ‘yes.’”

Fletcher, the Indigenous law expert from Michigan State University, dismissed the idea that the federal government too frequently protects sacred sites. “I would say that 95 percent of sacred sites cases that Indians or tribes bring, they lose,” said Fletcher. “The Devils Tower thing is particularly ridiculous. There is a voluntary climbing ban for one month in the summertime. There is no protection for Indian people on Devils Tower or really anywhere else.” Proportionally, efforts to maintain Christian symbols in public spaces are more successful than cases to protect sacred sites “by an incredible margin,” he added.

At a hearing regarding the BLM’s move to Colorado last September, Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., asked Pendley about one of his dismissive statements about sacred sites. “I was not speaking as a member of the BLM. I was speaking as a private attorney representing private clients,” Pendley replied. “I’m proud to speak on behalf of the Bureau of Land Management now, and I’m particularly pleased with the opportunities to work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribes to establish tribal energy resource agreements to permit tribes to develop their energy resources.”

“I have a new client,” he claimed. “My client’s the American people.”

Delaying Payments to Tribes

At face value, Pendley could be seen as a natural ally to tribes and Native people that have sought to increase resource extraction on their lands. Yet he has even sided with energy companies against those very tribes interested in extractive development.

Large numbers of Native people rely on royalties paid by the oil and gas industry for extraction on their land. In many places, mining takes place on Native land that is held in trust by the federal government. Essentially, because of a long history of dispossession, the land is owned by a tribe or an American Indian person, but the federal government controls the leasing to ranchers, miners, or oil and gas companies. Royalties are then distributed by the federal government back to the tribal members who own the land. Many tribes and individuals plan their budgets with the royalties in mind and, for those living on razor-thin margins in economically depressed areas, they are an essential lifeline.

For decades leading up to the 1980s, oil and gas producers operating 21,000 leases located on land held in trust were required to pay Native owners their royalties within a month of production. But in 1983, while Pendley was serving as assistant secretary for energy and minerals in Reagan’s Interior Department, his agency changed the policy, allowing the companies two months instead of one. Several people objected, mostly Comanche tribal members from the Anadarko area of Oklahoma, submitting a petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs describing the hardship they would face if the change moved forward.

Royalty payments had already been delayed while the Minerals Management Service, which distributed royalty payments, updated its accounting system. “We have suffered from non-payment of royalties for months. Many of us have lost our cars and other property while the government failed for months and months to collect or disburse millions of dollars in royalties belonging to us,” the petitioners wrote. “Now just as we are beginning to get some of these back royalties and pay our bills and living costs, the government proposes to cut off our royalties again.”

“If you permit these new regulations our royalties will be cut off in the middle of winter,” they continued. “How will we pay for our food and housing and fuel? Do you think, Mr. Secretary, that our creditors are as lenient with us as you propose to be with the oil companies? No! Our mortgages and car payments are due every month. We must pay for our groceries when we buy them — not sixty to ninety days later.”

The move was even opposed by other officials in Reagan’s Interior Department. “It will be very difficult to to explain this change satisfactorily to the Indian people,” Ken Smith, a member of the Wasco Tribe of Oregon who was then serving as assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, wrote in a 1983 memo to Pendley. “To suspend royalties for another month, probably in mid-winter, when change of regulations takes place, would work a tremendous hardship and create create a great deal of criticism.”

Pendley declined to comment on whether he heeded the tribal members concerns. Current regulations indicate that royalty payments are due one month after the month of production.

Echoes of Pendley’s failure to properly consult with tribes during the Reagan era are already visible during his tenure as BLM’s acting director. The area surrounding the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, for example, is considered sacred to many Indigenous people. As the region became a hotbed for Covid-19 cases in the U.S., Pendley’s BLM was finalizing a resource management plan for the area. Rather than rescheduling public meetings regarding the plans, the bureau transferred them online, to take place while many of those most impacted were scrambling to manage the health emergency wreaking havoc on the community.

“Secretary Bernhardt and Acting Director Pendley are using this crisis to hand our public lands over to the oil and gas industry, and are silencing communities in the process,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said at the time in a statement. “Native Americans are contracting and dying from coronavirus at an alarming rate, and the Trump administration should be working to make sure they have the resources they need to stop deaths, not keep drilling at record speed.”

“Many folks near the Chaco region live in areas without internet access,” Haaland added. “By moving forward, the Department is failing to fulfill its trust and treaty obligations to Native Americans, and it is failing to protect a national treasure.”

Ultimately a public comment period was extended, but similar scenarios have played out throughout Native communities around the U.S.

“The BLM can and does have a big impact on tribes and tribal resources,” said Coulter. “It would be horrifying to see him really in charge.”

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https://www.ecowatch.com/oil-gas-leases-public-lands-2645367415.html

A federal judge threw out oil and gas leases on nearly one million acres of public lands that are important habitat for the greater sage grouse, arguing that a Trump administration policy that curtailed public input on the leases was "arbitrary and capricious."

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At the start of 2018, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had issued a memo shortening the period for public comment and protest on oil and gas leases from 30 days to 10, Huffpost reported. But U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush ruled in Idaho Thursday that around $125 million worth of leases issued under the new policy be tossed out and the full 30-day comment period restored. In his decision, Bush argued that BLM could not only consider the economic needs of fossil fuel industries at the expense of all other concerns.

"If the words 'justice so requires' are to mean anything, they must satisfy the fundamental understanding of justice: that it requires an impartial look at the balance struck between the two sides of the scale, as the iconic statue of the blindfolded goddess of justice holding the scales aloft depicts," he wrote. "Merely to look at only one side of the scales, whether solely the costs or solely the benefits, flunks this basic requirement."

The lawsuit was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Western Watersheds Project in a bid to protect greater sage grouse habitat, The Washington Post explained. The sage grouse, whose numbers have fallen from around 16 million to fewer than 500,000 because of disease and development, reflects the overall health of the Western sagebrush habitat that also houses hundreds of other species.

Bush's ruling tossed out five leases on more than 1,300 square miles — or more than 800,000 acres — of public lands in Nevada, Utah and Wyoming, according to HuffPost and The Hill. However, it could have implications for around 67 million acres of sage grouse habitat in 11 Western states.

"This is an enormous victory for greater sage grouse and hundreds of other animals and plants that depend on this dwindling habitat," CBD senior campaigner Taylor McKinnon said in a press release. "The judge confirmed that it's illegal to silence the public to expand fossil-fuel extraction. It's a win for millions of acres of our beautiful public lands and a major blow to the Trump administration's corrupt efforts to serve corporate polluters."

The BLM said it was considering whether or not to appeal the ruling, according to The Washington Post. However, spokesperson Derrick Henry told The Washington Post that the agency remained committed to streamlining the leasing process.

"To do this, we have been working within our legal authorities to alleviate or eliminate unnecessary and burdensome regulations, while at the same time upholding public health and environmental protections, including sage-grouse conservation," Henry said.

However, environmental advocates have complained that, under the Trump administration, streamlining often comes at the expense of public participation. In one particularly ironic example last week, Democratic Congresspeople, activists and former government workers said that the White House's Council on Environmental Quality is making it harder to comment on its plans to restrict the National Environmental Policy Act, itself a law designed to give communities a say in projects that might impact their local ecosystems. However, Earthjustice attorney Drew Caputo told The Washington Post that the administration's attempts to work around public input also often ended up flouting the law, leading to court defeats like Thursday's.

"This administration has been relentless in its efforts to cut the public out of public lands decision-making, starting in 2018," Western Watersheds Project staff attorney Talasi Brooks said in a press release. "The court wasn't fooled by the agency's efforts to disguise its intention to provide greater influence to extractive energies, and the sage grouse and 350 other sagebrush-dependent species will benefit from today's win."

Correction. An earlier version of this article stated that a judge had banned oil and gas leases on nearly one million acres of public land. It has been updated to reflect the fact that he threw out existing leases rather than banning leasing generally.

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public lands greater sage grouse animals trump administration oil and gas positive news conservation

new

https://www.ecowatch.com/blm-public-lands-pendley-2643719726.html

The man who once wrote that "the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold" has had his time in charge of U.S. public lands extended.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed an order Thursday leaving William Perry Pendley in charge of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) until April 3, The Hill reported. Pendley has been criticized for his support of selling public lands or opening them to fossil fuel extraction and other industrial uses, The Washington Post reported. He also sued the Interior Department in support of oil and gas exploration and against endangered species protections when he ran the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Despite this, he is now in charge of 245 million acres of public lands and 700 million acres of natural resources.

"Secretary Bernhardt's redelegation of the BLM director's authority to anti-public lands zealot Pendley is a slap in the face to all public land users and the U.S. Constitution," Western Values Project Deputy Director Jayson O'Neill said in a statement reported by The Washington Post. "[Putting Pendley] in charge of the BLM again is the equivalent of the Trump administration openly putting America's public lands up for sale."

Bernhardt's decision came only days after 91 conservation, wildlife and outdoor groups signed a letter to Bernhardt calling for Pendley to either resign or be removed.

One major concern raised in the letter is that Pendley is running the BLM without having been appointed by the president or confirmed by the Senate. Instead, Bernhardt appointed him "deputy director for policy and programs — exercising authority of the director" in July, according to InsideClimate News.

The BLM has not had a Senate-confirmed director during the Trump administration, and some critics are concerned the series of temporary leaders are part of an attempt to dismantle the agency.

"Only a Senate-confirmed Director or a Presidentially-appointed Acting Director would have legal legitimacy to lead the Bureau," the letter read.

The letter writers also raised concerns about Pendley's actions and opinions in and out of office.

In November, he publicly expressed support for the views of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an extremist public lands organization affiliated with armed militants Ammon and Cliven Bundy.
He has various conflicts of interests. He represented three Utah counties in their attempt to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and still receives payments from former-employer the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which is still suing the BLM.
He is overseeing a controversial move of the BLM headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado that has not been approved by Congress.
He holds controversial views. In addition to arguing in support of selling off public lands, he also thinks that wild horses are the biggest issue facing Western public lands, ignoring issues like fossil fuel extraction and the climate crisis, the fate of the endangered greater sage-grouse and Gunnison sage-grouse and overgrazing by livestock.

"Putting someone like William Perry Pendley in charge of what happens on these public lands is likely to just accelerate climate disruption," Shelley Silbert, letter signatory and executive director of conservation group Great Old Broads for Wilderness, told InsideClimate News.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns of the letter writers.

"For this group of environmental extremists to call themselves sportsman and conservationists is as laughable as this letter. Mr. Pendley brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Department and is committed to carrying out the Administration's priorities for the betterment of the American people," an Interior spokesperson told The Hill Monday.

But environmental groups argue that Pendley's positions are the extreme ones.

"William Perry Pendley is an ideological zealot with values that are deeply out of touch with the mainstream," Wilderness Society conservation director...said

new

https://blog.ucsusa.org/andrew-rosenberg/recusal-is-not-an-excusal-william-pendley-and-conflicts-of-interest-at-the-blm

Recusal Is Not an Excusal: William Pendley and Conflicts of Interest at the BLM

ANDREW ROSENBERG, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR SCIENCE & DEMOCRACY | OCTOBER 4, 2019, 7:19 AM EST

This week, the Department of the Interior extendedthe appointment of William Perry Pendley, acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, until after the first of next year.

Pendley’s qualifications and objectivity have been called into question because of his virulently anti-government efforts in the past, including advocating to sell off public lands. Notably, he was previously president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative group advocating for federal land selloff and generally opposed to the federal land policy Pendley is now in charge of. As the BLM acting director, Pendley is now responsible for the management of those public lands he wants sold, which cover huge areas of the United States.

I have previously catalogedTrump appointees as conflicted, opposed, or unqualified. The conflicted are those that have deep conflicts of interest in much of the work of the agencies they are leading, as does Mr. Pendley. The opposed are those who are fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agency they are leading, as Mr. Pendley seems to be. And unqualified are those without the credentials and experience, as I would argue Mr. Pendley is. A trifecta! Nice work Secretary Bernhardt.

Conflicted leadership and recusal

Acting Director Pendley recently announcedhe would recuse himself from any matters related to nearly 60 former clientshe represented in the past. They include major energy and oil companies, the National Mining Association, and several state farm bureaus. All of them have major interests and activities on federal lands that are affected by BLM actions and regulations.

But what does recusal really mean? The way Pendley talks about it seems to suggest that all he needs to do is stop talking to his former clients for a period of two years. But that’s not really it. In my previous position in the federal government as a senior executive service professional, recusal meant steering clear of anything that might appear to affect my impartiality. It wasn’t just about not contacting or talking with former or prospective clients, it was also about not working on issues that might affect those clients.

Department of the Interior guidelinesrequire DOI employees to “avoid a conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest.” And to recuse when such a conflict or appearance of conflict exists with the employee’s job duties and financial interests. That includes future employment, business or personal relationships, and outside activities. The guidelines recommend that a gatekeeper be appointed to screen phone calls, correspondence, and all communications to see if the employee needs to recuse themselves.

So pardon me for asking, but how the heck can the acting director of the BLM do his job if he fully recuses from all issues that might impact his former clients, future employment, or future activities? He has already listed nearly 60 former major clients—a staggering number of companies, all of whom work on BLM lands.

This isn’t about agreement or disagreement with Pendley’s previous policy positions. It’s about the fact that he can’t be the right person for the job given his huge list of acknowledged conflicts of interest.

Conflicts through and through Interior

Unfortunately, Interior Secretary Bernhardt has exactly the same problem as his acting BLM director. He has worked broadly with many clients lobbying for government action, suing the government, and representing their interest in many ways. He has a recusal list too. But that hasn’t stopped him from working on many matters that affect his former clients.

It isn’t enough to have a list that you carry around. Recusal is not an excuse so you can still fill the job minus a few phone calls. It is taking action to avoid conflicts or the appearance of conflicts. That isn’t happening with Bernhardt nor the acting BLM chief.

William Pendley unfortunately fits into the broader pattern of this administration sidelining science and “undermining the norms that safeguard objective research.” One of those norms is recusal.

Pendley is simply inappropriate to lead the Bureau of Land Management on an acting basis or otherwise. He has too many conflicts of interest to do the job. If he properly recused himself, he would no longer be involved in most of the issues BLM is charged to cover and he should resign. In the meantime there is no way he should be making policy or resource commitments.

Our public lands are for all the people. We deserve a BLM chief who can spend all their time working for us.

Posted in: Science and Democracy Tags: BLM, David Bernhardt, Department of Interior, Trump Administration, William Pendley

ref

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/463724-advocate-for-selling-off-public-lands-will-remain-blms-acting

newly signed secretarial order means acting Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director William Pendley will stay in his position despite objections from lawmakers over his anti-government philosophy.

The order signed Monday by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt leaves Pendley in that position through Jan. 3.

Pendley is a controversial figure in conservation circles given his longtime advocacy for selling off public lands. His ethics pledge includes a 17-page recusal list that shows his ties with a number of industries that stand to benefit from greater access to public lands.

On Thursday, a dozen Democratic lawmakers voiced their opposition to Pendley, asking Bernhardt to withdraw Pendley’s acting status as director of BLM.

“As the BLM considers a major reorganization, there is no reason for this effort to be led by an Acting Director who spent his career attempting to dismantle the agency,” the senators wrote, saying the role should go to someone who believes in multiple balanced uses of the agency.

They nodded to a quote from Pendley that called the federal government “the world’s worst neighbor.”

“We can think of no worse neighbor than one who spent the last thirty years trying to burn down the neighborhood,” the senators said.

Many of those senators are also opposed to Interior’s plans to uproot nearly all of BLM’s Washington-based staff, moving 27 employees to a new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo., and spreading another 300 employees at existing offices across the West. The relocation would leave just 61 employees in Washington, something critics say would functionally dismantle the agency.

“As the BLM considers a major reorganization, there is no reason for this effort to be led by an Acting Director who spent his career attempting to dismantle the agency,” the senators wrote.

Bernhardt’s order is just the latest that keep a rotating cast of characters in charge of various Interior functions on an acting basis. Critics argue it may be illegal and avoids having controversial nominees face senatorial scrutiny.

Pendley is one figure who would likely face heavy questioning from lawmakers. His recently released recusal list shows he would be in a position to regulate or impact a number of former clients.

The 60 entities outlined by Pendley include at least seven energy companies he is recused from dealing with, including the National Mining Association and various oil companies.

The list also shows he was involved with a number of farm and ranch groups, which sometimes advocate for greater access to public lands, and helicopter tour companies along with the United States Air Tour Association, which offer tours over national parks.

ref

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/463079-blms-top-leader-releases-17-page-recusal-list

Pendley, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has released a 17-page recusal list highlighting a number of people, companies and advocacy groups he must avoid while working at the agency.

The disclosure shows Pendley’s ties to a number of industries that BLM regulates as it works to balance energy, grazing and recreational interests along with conservation. The recusal document was first reported by E&E News.

Pendley, who has drawn controversy over his past advocacy for selling off the nation’s public lands, shared the recusal list with BLM leadership.

“I understand that preserving a culture of ethical compliance within the BLM begins with me, and I must set the example for the Bureau," Pendley wrote in an email sharing the recusal list.

"To do so, I am following the DEO’s guidance and sharing my recusal agreement with you,” Pendley wrote, referring to the Department of Interior's Departmental Ethics Office.

Pendley, who was appointed acting director over the summer, added he has “established a rigorous screening process to ensure that I will remain in full compliance” with ethics laws.

The 60 entities outlined by Pendley include at least seven energy companies he is recused from dealing with, including the National Mining Association and various oil companies. The list also outlines a number of other companies that stand to benefit from the use of public lands.

“This is a long list of recusals,” said Delaney Marsco, legal council for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center. “If these matters relate to his job in some way, and they likely do if has to recuse himself from them, it’s troubling that there’s so much of a person's job that they can’t do.”

Aaron Weiss, deputy director of Western Priorities, a conservation watchdog group, also questioned whether the bureau chief's recusal list would interfere with his ability to lead the agency.

“A BLM director has to balance multiple uses and that means balancing conservation and recreation and energy development and ranching, and if in any given decisions the BLM director is conflicted in one way or another with any of those interests, there’s no way for them to make good decisions,” Weiss said.

“Looking at the breadth of Pendley's conflicts, it’s hard to see how he can do the job because he has worked for so many clients across the West.”

The list released Wednesday shows that Pendley has recused himself from dealing with a number of state-based farm bureaus as well as the South Dakota Cattlemen’s Association. Those groups sometimes advocate for greater access to public lands for farmers and ranchers.

Pendley also recused himself from dealing with four different helicopter tour companies and the United States Air Tour Association. Websites for the companies advertise tours over the Grand Canyon.

The recusal list additionally bars Pendley from dealing with some of the entities for just one year, despite the Trump Ethics Pledge requiring a two-year recusal period.

“I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts,” the pledge reads, which includes similar language for former lobbying clients.

Pendley also vowed to consult ethics officials before taking speaking engagements tied to his books: “War on the West: Government Tyranny on America’s Frontier” and “Warriors for the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups, and Liberal Judges on America’s Frontier.”

new

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102019/blm-move-western-states-federal-land-control-mining-sagebrush-rebel-interior

no lnx grx

no lnx

Inside Climate News

What the BLM Shake-Up Could Mean for Public Lands and Their Climate Impact

With a self-described Sagebrush Rebel in charge, moving nearly 300 Bureau of Land Management staff could give Western states more influence over federal land use.

BY JUDY FAHYS, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

OCT 8, 2019

Coal mining in Wyoming. Credit: Bureau of Land Management

The Bureau of Land Management oversees coal leasing on about 570 million acres of land. Nearly 300 BLM employees are being moved from Washington, D.C., to Western states as the Trump administration puts a federal focus on "energy dominance." Credit: Bureau of Land Management

The changes underway at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management might not seem like much: A few hundred employees are being relocated from offices near the White House and dispersed throughout the West, while agency leaders move in next door to energy companies in newly leased headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado.

But along with the appointment of a self-described Sagebrush Rebel as acting director, the shuffling of staff could help position conservatives to accomplish substantial political goals: expanding fossil fuel development, easing national environmental protections, and shifting more power to state governments for managing federal forests and energy development.

Many environmental advocates are watching warily in light of what the changes could mean for environmental policy, including actions related to climate change.

"Their steps threaten to set back efforts to manage our public lands as part of a national climate solution," said Chase Huntley of the Wilderness Society's energy and climate program. The extraction and use of fossil fuels from public lands accounts for nearly a quarter of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions, and the BLM oversees more than 245 million acres of that land as well as 700 million acres of minerals underground.

Moving nearly 300 staff members from Washington to the West will give states' rights advocates something they have been clamoring for: more state influence over day-to-day federal land decisions, as well as potential increases in revenue tied to fossil-fuel development. That's already happening as the Trump administration grants western state and local leaders bigger roles in managing public lands.

The Trump administration and its supporters say reorganizing the BLM will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of natural resource programs, including grazing, logging and managing federal coal, oil and gas development.

The bureau is tasked under the Federal Land Planning and Management Act with balancing that resource extraction with recreational and environmental values, including wildlife conservation and cultural resource protection. The changes could tilt that balance further toward industry interests.

Map: BLM Manages Large Areas of the Western U.S.

Jayson O'Neill, deputy director of the left-leaning public lands advocacy group the Western Values Project, described the BLM reorganization as "lands-transfer lite." Some Westerners have demanded that the federal government hand over title to public land to the states. The Trump administration rejected that idea early on, but "transfer-lite" amounts to a compromise that gives states more control over natural resources on federal lands, he said.

The states' mandate "is to generate revenue, which is a lot different than the mandate of the Bureau of Land Management ... to balance uses," O'Neill said. He sees the reorganization as an "attack on our public lands so that extractive resource industries and the oil and gas industry can control public lands without public input."

The BLM did not respond to requests for comment. But Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) articulated the thinking behind the move in a video posted on Twitter in July after the BLM announced its new Grand Junction headquarters.

"This means that people will be able to have greater say, greater impact on public lands decisions that affect their community," he said.

The BLM had considered climate change impacts in its decisions until the Trump administration shifted its focus toward "energy dominance."

"American energy production is soaring to new heights thanks to President Trump's policies," proclaimed a White House fact sheet touting a record $1.1 billion in revenue from onshore oil and gas lease sales last year.

A 'Sagebrush Rebel' In Charge

Shifting more BLM resources to western states is a boon for states' rights advocates.

So was the appointment of William Perry Pendley to lead the reorganization as acting director of BLM. Pendley, who calls himself @Sagebrush_Rebel on Twitter, has authored five books arguing for limiting federal control of public lands, including, most recently, Warriors for the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups and Liberal Judges on America's Frontier.

In the Reagan Interior Department, Pendley was Secretary James Watt's deputy. He later followed Watt as head of the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Under his leadership, MSLF became a staunch advocate for private-property rights, federal-lands transfer and the New Sagebrush Rebellion—ideas that resurfaced in the public consciousness in recent years by extremists in the Cliven Bundy armed standoff with the BLM and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation.

Acting BLM Director William Perry Pendley, testifying before the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee in September, 2019. Credit: Congress

Acting BLM Director William Perry Pendley, testifying before the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, said reorganizing the BLM would bring decision-makers closer to the lands they manage. Conservatives cheered his appointment, while environmental groups fear that having a longtime anti-government lawyer is a step toward dismantling the nation's largest land agency. Credit: Congress

"I see the reorganization as an effort to get the land managers closer to the lands they're managing," said Jennifer Fielder, a GOP state senator in Montana and director of the conservative American Lands Council, a nonprofit that's led the "lands transfer" movement to have states assume ownership of most federal lands. "It's good to have somebody at the agency who's looking out for the citizens."

Jeff Ruch, western director for the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said having Pendley at the BLM "is all about an extractive agenda, an industry agenda."

The Effects of Isolating BLM Staff

Staff at BLM headquarters work closely with other federal agencies, and they are responsible for briefing Congress and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They also convey the policy goals of agency leaders at the Interior Department, which oversees BLM.

Most of the relocated headquarters staff is being dispersed to 11 state offices in the West that 97 percent of BLM's approximately 10,000 employees already report to. Just over two dozen will relocate to the new Colorado headquarters, where co-tenants include Chevron USA, an oil and gas company, and the local branch of an energy-industry trade group. The site is midway between Denver and Salt Lake City and a four hour drive to the nearest major airport.

That isolation is a concern, said Elaine Zielinski, a member of the Public Lands Foundation, a nonpartisan association of former BLM managers.

She worries that locating the agency so far from Washington will undermine BLM's communications with national decision makers, including Congress, White House budget-makers and partner agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Many important conversations about policies, budget and congressional oversight are "on D.C. time," said Zielinski, who led BLM's Oregon and Arizona state offices and worked at Washington headquarters. Staffers were expected to brief national decision makers at a moment's notice, and if knowledgeable staffers didn't get there within an hour, she said, "Don't bother. They've moved on."

"With Congress, you have a short window to answer these questions, and also with OMB," she said. With the reorganization, "all the people who have the answers are scattered all over the country."

Shrinking Government by Getting Staff to Quit

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council have been advocating for shifting power out of Washington and for shrinking the federal government, and the BLM reorganization can be seen as another move toward those goals.

BLM headquarters employees began receiving relocation notices a few weeks ago, and some are likely to decline new postings rather than uproot their families.

When two Agriculture Department agencies were reassigned from Washington to Kansas City, two-thirds of the staff refused to relocate.

Mick Mulvaney, acting chief of staff to the president, described relocating staff like that as "a wonderful way to sort of streamline government" by getting federal employees to quit.

BLM Shuffles Staff

Shifting power to the states is also a longtime goal of some conservative groups. The Trump administration has moved in that direction with the Shared Stewardship forest program, for instance, and beefing up the presence of local government on the Bears Ears National Monument management council. Recent proposals in Congress would also put state and local government in charge of energy management and law enforcement on federal lands.

Martin Nie, director of the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests, said the BLM reorganization is the administration's latest nod to Sagebrush Rebels and states' rights conservatives.

"We have seen an unprecedented transfer of management authority from the federal government to the states," he said, counting the BLM reorganization as the latest example.

Could It Influence Western Voters?

Empowering states, reducing the role of the federal government, expanding public lands energy development—while those ideas resonate in western states, what might be even more important to conservatives is the role the BLM reorganization can play in shoring up the conservative vote in 2020.

Republicans stand to lose Senate seats in Colorado and Arizona if their voters don't turn out. In the U.S. House, the GOP sees winnable Democratic seats in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Montana's sole House seat, held by a Republican now, is considered a tossup. Meanwhile, Nevada and Arizona are both considered swing states in 2020 presidential race.

With the reorganization shifting BLM headquarters and staff to their states, it could appear to conservative voters that the Trump administration is listening to their pleas to give states more influence over federal land.

---

dereg nat

etter

Democratic lawmakers are poised to “keep up the pressure on President Donald Trump and Republicans” over energy, climate, and environmental issues, reports the Washington Post.

House Democrats plan to introduce legislation that puts Trump’s regressive policies in high relief, including bills to block offshore and Arctic refuge drilling.

While the common wisdom is that these bills can’t win approval in the majority-Republican Senate, in the House they will force “coastal Republicans in states like Florida and South Carolina to take tough votes ahead of the 2020 election,” according to the Post.

Also:

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, the Arizona lawmaker heading the House committee that oversees the Department of Interior, has asked Interior’s internal watchdog to investigate the agency’s new public records policy. Trump officials changed the policy to give political appointees the authority “to review and potentially withhold documents from release,” as The Hill reports.

Grijalva’s committee also brought Trump’s public lands chief, William Perry Pendley, up to Capitol Hill today for a public grilling on Interior’s plan to relocate the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to several offices in western states. (A few hundred BLM staffers are based at DC HQ. All the rest of the agency’s 10,000+ employees work in state and regional offices.)

The hearing went pretty much as you’d expect, with Democrats asking pointed questions and Republicans heaping praise. But it may signal that the Dems will use their oversight powers to try and block the plan.

Some of the questions seemed informed by The Hill’s Monday story that despite assuring staff and the public otherwise, the Trump administration may try to move even high-level legislative staffers out of DC HQ: people whose work revolves around reporting to or communicating with Congress, other federal agencies, and international officials.

I watched the Pendley Q&A and had some thoughts:

Emily J Gertz

@ejgertz

My analysis of this House Q&A with Acting Director Pendley on Trump admin plan to move @BLMNational out of DC?

• Everyone on both sides knows the goal here is to shed staff, weaken federal hold on #publiclands.

• But one's saying so in plain English.

September 10th 2019

3 Retweets4 Likes

Emily J Gertz

@ejgertz

@BLMNational This is how the Congressional oversight game has long been played. But the Trump administration's BAU is: bogus justifications for enviro+climate rollbacks, actively gutting top climate research offices, muting/retaliating against career climate, enviro, weather scientists.

September 10th 2019

2 Retweets2 Likes

Emily J Gertz

@ejgertz

@BLMNational • In this era, playing the usual game could mean that the House Dems are really not even on the game board.

• But it's not clear that meeting Trump & gang's constitutional hardball will work, either. You're either for a gov't of laws, or you're not.

September 10th 2019

1 Retweet

Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico has demanded federal ethics information on former Interior political appointee Joe Balash, reports Greenwire. Before jumping ship last month “for a job with a foreign oil and gas company” with interests in Alaska, Balash spearheaded the Trump administration expansion of oil and gas extraction on federal lands, including opening the Arctic Refuge to drilling.

Pendley papers: 'Sell all BLM lands E. of Miss.'

Jennifer Yachnin and Timothy Cama, E&E News reporters

Published: Friday, August 30, 2019

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Ever since Interior Secretary David Bernhardt's decision last month to name self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel William Perry Pendley as the temporary leader of the Bureau of Land Management, the Trump administration has been fighting allegations that it is open to selling off the nation's public lands.

bad: Trump’s new federal lands chief believes in selling off federal lands

Interior SecretaryDavid Bernhardtlast week appointed conservative Wyoming lawyer and activist William Perry Pendley asactingdirector of the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees a quarter-million acres of federal public lands.
“The thing is, Pendley thinks the government shouldn’t even own those lands,” reports Utah Public Radio.
Pendley has “for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands,” reports the Denver Post. “He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of ‘tyranny’ and ‘waging war on the West.’”
On the conservative speaking circuit, “Pendley said that ‘you can’t understand the battle against fossil fuels without understanding what is at the core of the environmental movement and the environmental extremists. . . . They don’t believe in human beings,’” reports the Washington Post.
A Department of Interior spokesperson told the Post that despite Pendley’s support for transferring federal lands to state control, “the administration adamantly opposes the wholesale sale or transfer of public lands.”
(To my reporter’s ear, “wholesale sale or transfer” reeks of non-denial denial.)
Pendley worked for three decades as president and lead lawyer of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a right-leaning group funded in part by the Koch brothers and Big Oil firms. In a 2007 article, High Country News reported that the group had “lost far more often than it's won” in its lawsuits against federal environmental regulations.
Pendley takes up management of a quarter-million acres of federal land just as the BLM has kicked off its plan to disperse its most of its D.C. headquarters staff across the western U.S. (where the vast majority of BLM staff are already based).
“Acting” appointees evade scrutiny by the Senate, along with any press coverage that might arise during confirmation hearings.

a bit more on William Perry Pendley

In 1982, when Pendley was acting head of minerals leasing in the Reagan-era Department of Interior, a massive sale of coal-mining leases in Wyoming (his home state) and Montana was “marred by the leak of a confidential memo with information about bid amounts,” notes the “Department of Influence” project.“Pendley was later criticized by the commission assigned to study the sale for sending a ‘clear signal’ to potential lessees that DOI would accept low bids.”

In 1983, the Senate failed to confirm Pendley to a more powerful role at Interior, after it emerged that under his watch, the agency had been “politically screening scientists advising the department about oil and gas drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/07/17/senior-bureau-land-management-official-right-wing-pundit-who-has-said-climate-change-isn-t-real-and/224235

no lnx twt

Senior Bureau of Land Management official is a right-wing pundit who has said climate change isn’t real and diversity is killing people

Blog ››› July 17, 2019 1:01 PM EDT ››› ERIC HANANOKI

The Bureau of Land Management has appointed William Perry Pendley, a right-wing lawyer and commentator, as its new second-in-command. On Twitter in recent months, Pendley has argued that climate science isn’t real, claimed that the “Endangered Species Act is a joke,” and asked, “How many have died and how many more will die because of diversity and race-based decision making?”

E&E News reported on July 15 that the Bureau of Land Management, which is under the Department of the Interior, appointed Pendley as the “deputy director of policy and programs. Pendley started today, a BLM spokesman confirmed. The deputy director of policy and programs is the bureau's second-highest-ranking political position, behind the director.”

Pendley previously worked as the president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that has represented clients in cases against environmentalists and the federal government. He is also a right-wing pundit who has written for publications such as the Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, and FoxNews.com. He was also an active Twitter user through his account @Sagebrush_Rebel (he wrote last week that he is “taking a break” from the social network).

On Twitter, Pendley repeatedly attacked diversity initiatives in the United States. In response to former Minneapolis, MN, police officer Mohamed Noor's killing of unarmed 911 caller Justine Damond, Pendley wrote: “How many have died and how many more will die because of diversity and race-based decision making?” He told Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) to get over busing because he “was bused to five different elementary schools” as a child. And discussing his future agency, Pendley wrote that he was “impressed” that President Donald Trump “picked a tried, true, and experienced expert from the West” -- Interior Secretary David Bernhardt -- instead of listening to advisers who “pressed for ‘diversity’ at the top position.” (There is very little diversity in the senior positions of the Trump administration.)

Pendley also frequently attacked environmentalists and climate science, writing that climate science “is political science or junk science, not real science, and it is, as with real science, far from settled”; “#ClimateChangeIsReal NOT!”; and the “Endangered Species Act is a joke.”

Here are some of the worst tweets from his account:

Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

How many have died and how many more will die because of diversity and race-based decision making? https://twitter.com/MarkSKrikorian/status/1121831360723812355 …

Mark Krikorian

@MarkSKrikorian

"None of the indications of Mohamed Noor's unfitness to [be] a police officer mattered to Minneapolis officials. They had too much invested in his success to acknowledge that their exercise in diversity and multiculturalism was a miserable failure." https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/04/minneapolis-muslim-cop-who-killed-unarmed-woman-says-he-shot-her-to-stop-the-threat …

11:09 AM - Apr 26, 2019

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Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

I'm impressed that, as @realDonaldTrump advisers pressed for "diversity" at the top position @Interior he picked a tried, true, and experienced expert from the West, @DOIDepSec. https://twitter.com/jackgerard/status/1098301477666185216 …

Jack Gerard

@jackgerard

Why Trump is so relatable.

View image on Twitter

11:08 PM - Feb 23, 2019

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Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

Oh, the Minnesota teens or youths, if you prefer. Never Somali. https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto/status/1132666604594925568 …

Christian Toto

@HollywoodInToto

So, Can You Guess Why There's Media Silence Over This Gang Assault In Minnesota? https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/05/21/the-media-is-silent-on-reported-gang-attack-in-the-land-of-ilhan-omar-n2546645 …

8:18 AM - May 26, 2019

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(Pendley was responding to a Townhall commentary piece about supposed “media silence in Minneapolis over an attack executed by a group of Somali teens.” However, Snopes.com debunked that Townhall report, writing: “According to University of Minnesota police, the incident did not involve a physical attack, did not cause any injuries, and was not racially motivated.”)

Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

There was a little boy in Cheyenne, Wyoming who was bused to five different elementary schools. That little boy was me. I got over it @KamalaHarris you should too.

, 2019

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Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

Get the point. Like so much that comes out of her mouth that is not anti-American or anti-semitic, this is stupid. https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1137492248613064705 …

Ilhan Omar

@IlhanMN

It is wrong for Big Pharma to profit off of sickness.

We need Medicare for All — because healthcare is a human right. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drug-prices-oxycontin-predaxa-purdue-pharmaceuticals-boehringer-ingelheim/ …

10:06 AM - Jun 9, 2019

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Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

69 degrees and sunny today. Sky is falling tomorrow. #ClimateChangeIsReal NOT! https://twitter.com/ChrisCBS4/status/1115677264195325953 …

Chris Spears

@ChrisCBS4

BREAKING #COwx news ... Denver, Greeley, Fort Collins, Castle Rock, Limon, Sterling and vicinity are under a blizzard warning ahead of tomorrow's storm. More on CBS4 now. #4wx

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1:29 PM - Apr 9, 2019

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Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

News flash: it is political science or junk science, not real science, and it is, as with real science, far from settled! Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science https://nyti.ms/2YQAnEA

The Huntington Canyon coal-fired power plant in Utah. The White House, already pursuing major rollbacks of greenhouse-gas emission restrictions, is amplifying its attack on fundamental climate-science conclusions.

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

In a significant escalation, policymakers are seeking to undermine or discard research showing the most dire risks of inaction on climate change.

nytimes.com

10:57 AM - May 28, 2019

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@Sagebrush_Rebel

About time. So-called environmental groups have become rich on these payoffs! .@Interior will develop a webpage to publicly list details of legal settlements and cases. https://dailysign.al/2w4COHf via @MikeBastasch @DailySignal

Trump Administration to 'Shed Light' on Secretive Practice That Costs Taxpayers Millions

“This is a big deal that will shed light on the millions of dollars the DOI pays out every year in attorneys’ fees” under federal laws, a DOI official says.

dailysignal.com

1:35 PM - May 17, 2019

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@Sagebrush_Rebel

There was no mention of unicorns either because neither exists. https://twitter.com/newsbusters/status/1093025253360652288 …

NewsBusters

@newsbusters

.@JohnKingCNN denounces Trump's popular #SOTU as a 'disgrace' because he didn't mention climate change http://ow.ly/9fkT101tqo6

11:19 PM - Feb 5, 2019

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@Sagebrush_Rebel

Endangered Species Act is a joke. Westerners know it is used by bureaucrats, their lawyers, and rich environmental groups to seize private land and stop economic activity.As Grizzlies Come Back, Frustration Builds Over Continued Protections https://n.pr/2Rd0phl

As Grizzlies Come Back, Frustration Builds Over Continued Protections

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service keeps trying, and failing, to get grizzly bears taken off the endangered species list. Some worry that frustration over this could hurt efforts to protect the bears.

npr.org

9:25 AM - Feb 4, 2019

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It is not just on climate change. The worst offender, as the indispensable Dr. Rob Roy Ramey has pointed out, is the "endangered species cartel" that runs the #EndangeredSpeciesAct. Bureaucrats, left-wing nonprofit groups, and highly paid "scientists" make up the cartel.https://twitter.com/MDempseyCO/status/1071053999351177216 …

Matt Dempsey

@MDempseyCO

CU Researcher Raises Questions Surrounding Conflicts Of Interest In Climate Research http://westernwire.net/cu-researcher-raises-questions-surrounding-conflicts-of-interest-in-climate-research/ … via @WesternWireNet #ActOnClimate

Wm Perry Pendley

@Sagebrush_Rebel

As a lawyer, the Secretary is spot on regarding what the law provides. Interior Secretary Won’t Stop Oil And Gas Development Because Of Climate Change Concerns http://www.tinyurl.com/y4mxy4lt

Interior Secretary Won't Stop Oil And Gas Development Because Of Climate Change Concerns

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee Wednesday it wasn’t his job to combat climate change. His comments came

kuer.org

8:33 AM - May 9, 2019

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Environment & Science, Government

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/07/30/new-interior-department-senior-adviser-christian-palich-climate-denier-and-former-coal-group/224357

The Department of the Interior has hired former coal association president and right-wing energy commentator Christian Palich as a senior adviser. Palich previously appeared in the media to praise President Donald Trump for rolling back environmental protections and has tweeted that climate change is “junk science” and the Sierra Club wants to “kill jobs & destroy families for a phony cause.”

Under the Trump administration, the Department of the Interior has been rolling back environmental protections and pursuing actions to benefit the oil and gas industry. A recent analysisby the Center for Western Priorities found that the department “has completed or taken action on at least 53 policy changes requested or supported by energy companies and associations as of June 2019.”

In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report documenting that senior political officials at Interior “have unleashed constant—and ongoing—attacks on science, from sidelining the work of the agency's own scientists to systematically refusing to acknowledge or act on climate change.” The House recently held a hearing in which former Interior employees said that the department had suppressed its work on climate change.

Palich’s hiring continues the department’s anti-environmental trend. Palich, who states on his LinkedIn page that he started working at Interior last month, was previously the president of the pro-Trump Ohio Coal Association from 2013 to 2017. From April 2017 to February 2019, he worked as the deputy associate administrator for congressional and intergovernmental affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency -- an appointment that drew criticism from environmentalists because of his coal industry connections.

In the first half of 2019, he briefly worked as the vice president of government and public affairs at the lobbying firm Siekman, Siekman & Associates. In his now-removed biography for the firm, Palich touted his role as a commentator in the media, describing himself as a “leading, national voice” on energy issues and noting that he has “appeared multiple times on Fox & Friends, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Fox Business, and NBC” and been “published in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and across Ohio media.”

Palich praised Trump in the media for undoing environmental protections. He appeared on the March 29, 2017, edition of one of the president’s favorite programs, Fox & Friends, and hailed Trump for signing an order rolling back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, calling it a “great day”and saying that “we have a president of the United States that stands with” the coal industry. He also praised Trump in a November 25, 2016, op-edin The Columbus Dispatch, writing: “Just as he recognized an untapped potential in the American electorate, Trump recognizes similar potential in American coal. Making America Great Again will create a huge demand for energy -- and coal, with all of its technological advancements, will be there to meet it.”

Palich has frequently attacked climate science and environmentalistson his Twitter account. Here are some examples:

In response to President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union speech, he wrote: “I walked to work in -7 temps this morning same day #POTUS says the debate on global warming is settled. Seems legit... #SOTU.”
He wrote of the Clean Power Plan in August 2015: “Even if you buy #EPA's bad science (which I don't), #CPP is still bad policy for America.”
In November 2015, he wrote that the Sierra Club wants to “kill jobs & destroy families for a phony cause.”
In February 2016, he tweeted in response to Obama’s criticism of Republicans for not wanting to act on climate change: “Not destroying our economy over junk science & a radical enviro agenda. Sign me up. #GOP #CoalCountry.”
After Trump’s election, he tweeted: “Time to push fight back on all the radical enviro regs that have been illegally been brought on America over last 8 yrs.@realDonaldTrump.” He also tweeted: “Really enjoying the radical enviro panic right now. Americans flat out rejected this agenda yesterday by a large margin. #CoalCountry.”
In January 2017, he celebrated the news that the new Trump White House had deleted references to climate change from its website, tweeting: “Looks like there is a new sheriff in town. #MAGA.”

He also attacked his future employers and colleagues while working for the Ohio Coal Association. In a February 2016 tweet, he promoted a FoxNews.com op-ed byright-wing lawyers John Yoo and Dean Reuter, who claimed that the federal government bureaucracy is unaccountable.Palich wrote: “All great points & being in the #coal industry we see everyday just how unaccountable @EPA, @OSMRE, & @Interior are.”

Media Matters previously documented that William Perry Pendley, who has just been made acting chief of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, is also a climate denier. Pendley has additionally argued that the federal government should sell its public lands, that environmentalists want to “destroy” civilization, and that diversity is killing people. Pendley’s appointment comes as two former directors of the bureau “say plans to move the agency’s headquarters to Colorado are an early step toward abolishing the entire agency and transferring millions of acres of federal land to the states,” as Bloomberg reported.

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ref

Bernhardt names Pendley as acting BLM chief

Scott Streater, E&E News reporter

Published: Monday, July 29, 2019

The Interior Department has named William Perry Pendley, the conservative lawyer who supports the selling of millions of acres of federal lands to Western states, as the Bureau of Land Management's acting director — a move that is certain to rile congressional Democrats and environmental groups....[$]

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ref 3

https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/ex-blm-chiefs-say-interior-is-moving-to-transfer-land-to-states

Ex-BLM Chiefs Say Interior Is Moving to Transfer Land to States (1)

Posted July 20, 2019, 2:00 AMUpdated July 22, 2019, 8:54 AM

Former directors say BLM headquarters move will cripple agency’s ability to manage its land
BLM hires former Mountain States Legal Foundation head as deputy director of policy

Two former Bureau of Land Management directors say plans to move the agency’s headquarters to Colorado are an early step toward abolishing the entire agency and transferring millions of acres of federal land to the states.

“I think the endgame is to try to make it almost impossible to manage these public lands,” said former BLM Director Robert V. Abbey, who served in the Obama administration from 2009-2012. “It’s just another step that they are taking that will add credence to those advocates that say these lands should be managed by the states.”

The Interior Department said July 16 that it plans to move the headquarters of BLM, an Interior agency, out of Washington and transfer 222 positions from headquarters across offices in 11 Western states. The new headquarters will be staffed by 27 people, including the BLM director, in Grand Junction, Colo., about 250 miles west of Denver.

Joseph Balash, assistant Interior secretary for land and minerals management, said in a July 16 letter to Congress that moving the BLM out of Washington would move officials closer to the land they manage and to the local governments affected by their decisions.

But Abbey, along with a former BLM director from the Obama administration and other former Interior officials, say the move will isolate the agency, and hobble it to the point of eventually convincing Congress that public land would be better overseen by another federal agency or by states themselves, which may be eager to develop the land and remove environmental protections.

The BLM manages about one-tenth of the land area of the U.S., mainly in the West, and is central to the Trump administration’s fossil-fuel-focused energy agenda. The agency is in charge of all federally owned onshore oil, gas, and coal in the country.

Property Rights Defender

Some politicians in the West have long opposed federal management of public land. Utah passed a law in 2012 demanding—thus far unsuccessfully—that Congress transfer more than 30 million acres of federal land to the state. Congress ignored the request.

The BLM this month hired a champion of the land transfer movement as its deputy director of policy and programs—William Perry Pendley, former president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which is dedicated to defending property rights. He started work July 15, a day before Balash sent the letter to Congress announcing the details of BLM’s restructuring.

The Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded by former Interior Secretary James Watt, has long fought the BLM and other federal agencies over land use issues. Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton worked as an attorney for the foundation prior to serving in the George W. Bush administration.

Pendley has written that he opposes federal public lands protections, including national monuments, and wrote a column in the National Review in 2016 supporting the land transfer movement in Utah and advocating for the federal government to sell off BLM land.

BLM spokesman Derrick Henry confirmed when Pendley started in the job, but declined to respond to questions about why he was chosen.

Chance to Meet State Governors

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) also praised BLM’s decision to move its headquarters in order bring the agency closer to public lands under its management, and the people it serves.

“The problem with Washington is too many policy makers are far removed from the people they are there to serve,” he said in a July 15 statement.

Interior Press Secretary Molly Block said BLM’s realignment will allow its leadership in the West to be physically close to other career senior executives in other bureaus who are making decisions affecting the agency.

“We are not doing anything to change the legal basis of BLM’s role in land management, or the continued federal ownership of public lands administered out West by BLM,” Block said.

She said Western state governors will have more chances to meet in person with the BLM director in Grand Junction, and they’ll be more likely to be in the same time zone. BLM is currently operating without a director.

Grand Junction is at least four driving hours from Denver, the nearest state capital. The city’s airport offers nonstop flights to only two other state capitals—Phoenix and Salt Lake City. The shortest flight to Grand Junction from Sacramento, Calif., is about 90 minutes shorter than a nonstop flight from Sacramento to Washington.

Isolate and Dissolve?

Patrick Shea, who served as BLM director for part of the Clinton administration and is now a Salt Lake City lawyer, said the bureau is meant to serve all U.S. citizens, not just those from Western states. He said it was essential for the BLM director to be in Washington in order to engage with Congress and other Interior agencies, and to advocate for the budget.

“They want to dissolve gradually the federal BLM agency and transfer the responsibility and, more importantly, the assets to states, which robs the rest of the country of an asset they’ve been paying for,” said Shea about the move.

David J. Hayes, a former deputy Interior secretary in the Obama administration, also said the headquarters move “threatens to devalue the mission and importance of the Bureau of Land Management.”

Scattering headquarters employees around the West will make it difficult for them to coordinate with each other, and with other Interior agencies that control land bordering BLM property, said Abbey, the Obama-era BLM director. BLM’s structure already requires many land management decisions to be made locally, Abbey said; More than 90% of the bureau’s staff is already based in the West.

Without staff in Washington ensuring that decisions keep the national interest in mind when it comes to public lands and minerals, the headquarters move would also make BLM more vulnerable to influence from local interests, especially from the fossil fuels industry, Abbey said.

‘Sagebrush Rebellion’

Those views are also shared by some former employees in BLM’s headquarters, who worry the new 27-employee Colorado office will be largely symbolic.

Kit Muller, a strategic planner for BLM in Washington until he retired in 2018, said Interior’s plans to scatter staff will make it “difficult for BLM to do anything systematic at a regional or national level except authorize oil and gas development.”

The planned structure and its philosophical underpinnings make it easy for the BLM to defer to local governments on decisions unrelated to oil, gas, and coal development, Muller said.

“They’ll say the governor and county commissioners should be making these decisions,” Muller said. “If that’s your approach to centralize certain kinds of decisions and defer to state and local governments for other kinds of decisions, then what do you need a headquarters for?”

Interior’s inclination to diminish the federal government’s role in public lands is evident in its decision to hire Pendley, said George Stone, a director at large at the Public Lands Foundation, a BLM employee retirees group that “works to keep public lands in public hands,” according to its website.

Pendley is a “Sagebrush Rebellion, let’s-turn-land-over-to-the-states kind of guy,” Stone said, referring to the backlash against federal management of public lands. “This administration is not a fan of the BLM.”

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalnewsline/:{2018/05:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/02/hold-government-to-higher-standard-former-ca-ag-says-of-climate-change-lawsuit-controversy/#77ede6b7134e

A Texas judge has decided California officials suing the energy industry over climate change are talking out of both sides of their mouths, and the former top lawyer of the Golden State is disappointed in their actions.

It might be embarrassing, but California officials need to address their inconsistent claims, says Dan Lungren, California’s attorney general from 1991-1999 who recently penned an opinion piece on the subject in the Sacramento Bee.

Sued over the alleged future effects of climate change, Exxon’s argument (which has been signed off on by a Texas judge) is that the cities and counties alleging these impending disasters have failed to disclose them in their bond offerings.

“If this was happening in the private sector, I think I’d have a lawsuit for fraud,” said Lungren, who has also spent 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“I don’t think public entities should be held to such low standards that all we do is make sure they’re not found liable for intentional fraud. I would expect those acting in the name of the people to be held to a higher standard.”

The California officials might soon be forced to explain themselves. Exxon’s Texas strategy seeks to depose them and an attorney at Hagens Berman, which represents some of the California governments on a contingency fee.

On April 24, Tarrant County District Judge R.H. Wallace, Jr. signed proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, changing little from what Exxon is claiming.

“While the California municipalities alleged in their complaints against the energy companies that the impacts of climate change were knowable, quantifiable and certain, they told their investors the exact opposite,” the document says.

“These contradictions raise the question of whether the California municipalities brought these lawsuits for an improper purpose.”

The California counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond and Imperial Beach have filed suit against several energy companies - including Exxon, Chevron and BP - over climate change. The company is also being targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.

Similar lawsuits have been filed by New York City and Boulder, CO.

San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."

“I find it difficult to understand how, on one hand you can make a statement to the court with 92% certainty that these things are going to happen, and going to the people and saying it is unknown,” Lungren said.

As AG, Lungren was tasked with making sure state bond offerings were accurate – “Had we come across anything contrary to pleadings we were making with the courts, we would have corrected that.”

No matter how embarrassing it is, lawyers for the California plaintiffs should tell the judges presiding over their cases that they need to withdraw or amend their claims, Lungren said.

“If I were to find we inadvertently made statements in documents before the court that were contradicted by other documents – particularly those that the public is relying on the good faith offerings of the state - I would immediately take action to reconcile that,” Lungren said.

At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, an attorney representing Boulder noted that the bond offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.

But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims, which was noted by Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney who attended the event.

“You presume when you file, whether filing as an officer of the court or under oath, you’re saying what is contained in your document is truthful and factually correct,” Lungren said.

“So if you have two different documents contemporaneously - one before the court with respect to the lawsuit and the other under the various rules that say you have to have honest statements to potential investors, otherwise it’s subject to fraud – it’s at least hypocritical and a failure of legal responsibility in those instances.”

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ref

https://legalnewsline.com/stories/511398628-in-suing-exxon-over-climate-change-boulder-is-hoping-company-s-deep-pockets-will-pay-for-its-left-wing-agenda-group-says

BOULDER, Colo. (Legal Newsline) – It remains to be seen if Exxon will fight the latest climate change lawsuit against it in the same way it is attacking the first round, by scrubbing municipal documents for evidence of hypocrisy by the public officials filing them.

According to a conservative group following the case, mounting such a defense might be overkill. The lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colo., and two Colorado counties is so frivolous, Exxon could end up seeking reimbursement for the costs of defending itself, according to Mountain States Legal Foundation.

William Perry Pendley, president of MSLF, says he isn't surprised that politicians in Boulder are going through Exxon's deep pockets "to pay for their costly, radical, left-wing boondoggles."

"But taxpayers who think at least they will not have to pay for this pricey misadventure and might even get some tax relief if it is successful, should think again," Pendley said.

"This lawsuit could not be more frivolous and if the judges do what other judges have done, legal sanctions and hefty fines will be imposed."

To defend itself from the California lawsuit, Exxon is seeking to depose government officials and a private lawyer in Texas court over whether their allegations of impending climate change-caused doom are contradicted by bond offerings that make no mention of it.

Asked if Boulder ever disclosed climate change-related threats to its property in any bond offerings, the City declined to comment.

It's unclear whether the bond argument is a possible defense for Exxon in Colorado, and the company did not return a request for comment.

As for Boulder, which filed its lawsuit with Boulder and San Miguel counties, its most recentofficial statement does not include references to climate change.

The official statement on acquisitions of land does not contain the terms “climate change,” “weather” or “global warming.”

Pendley said there is no science to support the lawsuit. Judges in the California lawsuits have yet to rule on motions to dismiss filed by the energy industry.

"Causation between the alleged inactions of the companies and the imagined harms is missing in its entirety and the demand that whimsical injuries be redressed (‘Help us pay to paint our streets white,’ one imagines) is laughable," Pendley said.

Addressing the bond topic last week was David Bookbinder of the Niskanen Center, which is one of two nonprofits representing Boulder on a pro bono basis. A third firm is taking as much as a 20% contingency fee, according to Boulder County's website.

Bookbinder was a speaker at an American Enterprise Institute discussion of California climate litigation the same day his lawsuit was being filed in a Colorado state court. He used an expletive to describe Exxon’s strategy and said that he was “ashamed” of the law firm representing the company.

“If we needed more evidence that no one thinks this was improper or fraudulent or disingenuous, my former adversaries in the plaintiffs securities bar – those people are extremely aggressive. The time lapse between bad news coming out and lawsuits filed by what were called the ‘strike bar’could be measured in, you know, one day, 48 hours, 72 hours, maybe four days – 96 hours,” Bookbinder said.

“There have been no lawsuits filed against any of these cities for their bond disclosures. That should tell you something as well.”

In 2017, the counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach filed suit against dozens of energy companies, including Exxon and 17 other Texas-based businesses, over climate change. The company has previously been targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.

“It is reasonable to infer that the municipalities brought these lawsuits not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California,” attorneys for the company wrote.

In doing so, they must have lied to potential investors in their respective bond offerings, the company claims.

Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, the filing says.

For example, San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."

Bookbinder noted that the offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.

But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims, which was noted by Devin Watkins, an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who attended the event.

The CEI has called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the matter.

Panel member Andrew Grossman, a partner at BakerHostetler, said he isn’t sure whether there is evidence of securities fraud or violations of other regulations.

“It seems like it’s enough, at the very least, that it would be warranted, and that it is warranted, for there to be an investigation, for there to be somebody, you know, for the regulators who look at these things to take a look at them and determine, you know, did the cities live up to their obligations,” he said.

“If there was something that was inconsistent in the lawsuits versus the disclosures, honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me because, probably, nobody thought about it. And if they are consistent, well good for them. I guess they got it right.”

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http://www.prwatch.org/node/326

http://www.prwatch.org/files/pdfs/prwatch/prwv8n4.pdf

Terrorism as Pretext by Sheldon Rampton

References to Pearl Harbor prevailed during the first days following the terrorist attacks of September 11. President Bush joined a chain of pundits and government officials in warning that the “war on terrorism” would be prolonged and difficult like World War II and would require similar sacrifices. Whatever those sacrifices may entail, however, the public relations industry is determined to ensure that they do not include wartime frugality. “PR Needed to Keep Consumers Spending,” proclaimed a headline in O’Dwyer’s PR Online on September 24. It cited marketing and PR executive Maureen Lippe’s opinion that the “greatest service PR pros can provide in support of the country is to ensure that the consumer continues to buy.” The world’s largest public relations firms all have offices in New York and Washington, D.C., and their employees felt the same shock, horror and confusion as the rest of the country when airplanes slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Public relations pros joined other volunteers in disaster relief efforts and in raising money for assisting the survivors. America’s home-grown propaganda machine nearly ground to a halt for several days as PR firms advised their clients to hold off for awhile on product launches, news releases and story pitches to reporter...

• U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick used the September 11 tragedy to call for fast-track negotiating authority to help President Bush expand the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) into a Free Trade Area of the Americas. “Trade is about more than economic efficiency,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “It promotes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle.” In a September 24 speech before th...

The Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) used the terror attacks as a pretext to demand that the U.S. Supreme Court override a Clinton Administration decision blocking drilling for oil and natural gas in Montana. “The terrible tragedy of exactly one month ago and the uncertainty as to the reliability of foreign supplies make clear the importance of the United States developing its domestic natural resources,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the IPAA.

• The San Diego-based SureBeam Corporation took the opportunity to promote its food irradiation technology as a way to kill anthrax — even though it would take years and untold millions, if not billions, to install irradiation equipment in post offices throughout the United States. Worse yet, “SureBeam has made these claims without any supporting scientific evidence that the company’s ‘electron-beam’ irradiation equipment is capable of killing the anthrax bacteria or its spores,” observed a Public Citizen news release. “In fact, radiation is ineffective against anthrax spores, called ‘endospores,’ which are surrounded by numerous thick layers of material including protein and calcium.” • The Cato Institute, a libertarian, corporate-funded think tank in Washington, DC, used September 11 as... [guns on planes]

omg

http://www.booktv.org/Program/14782/Sagebrush+Rebel+Reagans+Battle+with+Environmental+Extremists+and+Why+It+Matters+Today.aspx

"Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today"

William PerryPendley

About the Program

William Perry Pendley talks about Ronald Reagan's energy and environmental policies and discusses President Reagan's efforts to balance environmental protection and economic growth. This event was hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.

William Perry Pendley served as deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals at the Department of Interior during the Reagan administration and helped to author President Reagan's environmental policies. He is currently president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation. Mr. Pendley is the author of "It Takes a Hero" and "Warriors for the West."

claims RR est more park? in lower 48 than any other pres; but pendley tried to revoke BC wilderness,

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Book Review AZ

Mr. Pendley, currently president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation, served in the Reagan administration as deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals in the Department of the Interior. That experience gave him an insider’s view to write about “Reagan’s battle with environmental extremists and why it matters today,” the book’s subtitle.

This is a well-written, very detailed, and meticulously-documented book that shows how Reagan’s policies brought America out of the economic disaster of the Carter administration. Sadly for America, presidents after Ronald Reagan did not follow his policies.

To give you the flavor of this book, I will start with a quote from the last chapter:

“When President Reagan took office, he faced the worst economy since the Great Depression. What was the economy like when Barack Obama became president? Was it worse than the one Reagan faced, or not as bad? That is irrelevant. What matters is what each man did and the results. Reagan slashed federal expenditures, cut taxes, and reduced regulation, including opening federal lands to the private sector to discover and develop energy. The economy boomed. Obama launched a trillion-dollar ‘stimulus,’ unleashed federal lawyers and regulators, and increased taxes. The economy bombed.”

Ronald Reagan was an environmentalist, but he knew the difference between pragmatic conservation and mindless preservation. He also knew that conservation of the environment was best done when the economy is strong.

Pendley begins in Chapter One by recounting how President Carter’s “War on the West” incited the “Sagebrush Rebellion.” Reagan intended to quell the rebellion by opening up federal land, particularly the Outer Continental Shelf, for oil and gas exploration and development. That theme continues in Chapters Two and Three. Reagan instituted a “good neighbor policy” toward the states. In his first inaugural address Reagan said, “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.”

In Chapter Four: “We print what we know – so we print lies,” Pendley discusses the press and especially their attack on Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. “What environmentalists find so infuriating about Watt is not just that he disagrees with them, but that he challenges their most deeply held convictions…”

In Chapter Five: “Modern day Luddites,” Pendley details the clash between radical environmentalists and James Watt. It was “a battle between two competing systems of government: between big and powerful New Deal-style government run by progressives and technocrats, … and a limited government that emphasized individual and economic freedom.” And “Reagan was about to present the first presidential challenge to the moral authority of the environmental establishment…”

Chapter Six deals with “The pit bull of environmental laws,” the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Reagan said, “Since the beginning of life on this planet thousands of species…have disappeared…as part of the evolutionary process in an ever changing world….shouldn’t we now and then remember nature’s partin the elimination of some species and separate the serious from the silly in our own policy?”

Pendley recounts the history of ESA and its predecessors. Reagan changed the emphasis from mainly just listing species to trying to actually recover species. This change in policy and procedure is what saved the California Condor. About environment groups, Pendley notes “litigation is their business, and business is good.” Pendley also notes that what is wrong with ESA “is how it has been implemented by the FWS [Fish & Wildlife Service], enforced by environmental groups, and interpreted by federal courts.” “Today, lawsuits by environmental groups are driving nearly everything the FWS does regarding the ESA.”

By the way, did you know the ESA has a sunset clause and that it must be reauthorized periodically by Congress? Congress has failed to reauthorize ESA since 1992. But like a zombie, it survives on annual appropriations of funds, sometimes hiding as a rider in another bill.

Chapter Seven, “If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined,” deals with America developing its mineral resources, especially strategic minerals, something the Carter administration was indifferent about.

“Reagan’s plan emphasized ensuring the availability of federally owned land for mineral prospecting and development so as to ‘achieve proper balance between wilderness and mineral needs of the American people.’” That plan was, of course, opposed by environmental groups.

Chapter Eight deals with federal land grabs and the growth of the National Park Service. Chapter Nine, “Inside the beltway” recounts how Reagan set about to tame the federal bureaucracy. Chapter Ten deals with America’s great coal resources and Obama’s war on coal. Chapter Eleven, “A department of miscellany” deals with many smaller issues.

In Chapter Twelve, Pendley sums up the state of the Union and Reagan’s philosophy: “…as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours…”

Pendley does a good job with this book as both an inside look at history and political philosophy, and as a cautionary tale.

This book will be officially released July 8 and will be available from the publisher, Regnery Publishing, Amazon, Barnes & Noble as well as in book stores.

No Greater Evil

Submitted by janeybell on Fri, 04/11/2008 - 11:03am

I think the author of these blog posts did a fine job, so there's no reason for me to try to rewrite her stuff.

Taken from The Endless Chain Pig Club:

William Perry Pendley. Ya’ll… get a clue.

Posted by admin on April 11th, 2008

Start reading, Beaufort County, NC. This man has offered to ride into our town on his black horse and defend Stan and Hood’s bigotry. Your tax dollars at work. Personally, I’d rather have an illiteracy rate below 60% than have my money go to lawsuits against Beaufort County.

Rightwing ‘Version’ of the Sierra Club Challenges Clinton Monuments

29-Nov-02

corporate front groups

One of the most arrogant rightwing corporate front men is William Perry Pendley. Posing as a “wise use environmentalist” and backed by corporate dollars, Pendley runs several slick anti-environmental groups under various names, including the Mountain Legal Defense Foundation. This outfit is a dark imitation of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Pendley sucks people in the same way the Bush Reich does - preaching fear via the usual tactic: job loss, intrusive government, etc. But who on Earth would buy Pendley’s rants against intrusive government when his biggest backers are the same ones who back G.W. Bush? At presentPendley is seeking to undo Clinton’s efforts to save 3.7 million of America’s last unspoiled wildlands through establishng national monuments.

For the record, the Hood and Stan she's referring to are Hood Richardson and Stan Dethrage, two of Beaufort County's County Commissioners. These two right-wing retards decided to declare English the official language in Beaufort County and then used that declaration to have all signs in Spanish removed from county government buildings (including the menu options on the county's phone systems). Since the two (who should be the laughingstock of the Republican party) cut off access to public health and other services for non-english speaking residents, they've drawn the attention of the ACLU. This leads us to Pendley, who's offering to defend Hood and Stan, pro-bono.

Here's more:

Guess who’s behind drilling for oil off the NC coast?

Posted by admin on April 11th, 2008

You got it –Reagan era love-child, William Perry Pendley. Welcome to Washington, Mr. Pendley. Hood and Stan will see you now. Citizens, ask yourself why this man would offer to pro bono “defend” the Beaufort County Commissioner’s ruling to remove Spanish from the local governmental phone directory options? Ain’t it just a little weird?

Strategic and Critical Mineral Development in the Exclusive Economic Zone: Solutions and Strategies

Pendley, W. –*WILLIAM PERRY PENDLEY*

W Comiskey and Hunt;

This paper appears in: OCEANS

Publication Date: Sep 1986

Volume: 18, On page(s): 296- 301

Posted online: 2003-01-29 10:32:23.0

Abstract

The author addresses the evolving regulatory scheme being developed by the Department of the Interior to permit mining for non energy resources in the Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States under theOuter Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953.Compares and contrasts OCS Lands Act statutory scheme, as implemented with draft regulations, with Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act and onshore mineral development authorities. Discusses the alternative of potential enactment of new statutory authority, with delay and dislocations involved in the legislative process. The regulatory scheme is discussed in detail, exploring potential problems and offering solutions.

Want more?

Mining lobbyist info.

Or about our coastal waters?

Okay guys, your turn now. Google you some Pendley. Keep going, further into the internets than just his name. Try Assistant Secretary of Interior for Energy and Minerals William Perry Pendley, or Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, come on .. .dig dig dig…

Oh yeah, makes me damn proud to live in Beaufort County right about now. If the ACLU does actually take them to trail, do you think I would get camera coverage on CNN if I held a sign outside the courthouse that says "Please don't judge us by these idiots."?

---

William Perry Pendley, Esq.

William Perry Pendley is president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation and has litigated against the United States at the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal courts of appeal. Mr. Pendley is a former Marine officer, Capitol Hill lawyer, and Reagan administration official.

In Warriors for the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups, and Liberal Judges on America’s Frontier, Mr. Pendley puts human faces on Westerners’ historic and often precedent-setting fights against environmental laws, “lying and cheating” bureaucratsand their ethically challenged lawyers, seizure of “private Property” for “public use” without “just compensation,” and more. Mr. Pendley is also author of War on the West: Government Tyranny on America’s Great Frontier and It Takes A Hero: The Grassroots Battle Against Environmental Oppression.

Born and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics and Political Science from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He was a captain in the United States Marine Corps, after which he received his J.D. from the University of Wyoming College of Law, where he was Senior Editor on Land and Water Law Review. He served as an attorney to former Senator Clifford P. Hansen (R-Wyoming) and to the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. During the Reagan Administration, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Minerals of the Department of Interior, where he authored President Reagan’s National Minerals Policy and Exclusive Economic Zone proclamation. He was a consultant to former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., and was engaged in the private practice of law in the Washington, D.C. area before his return to the West in 1989. He is admitted to practice law in Wyoming, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

E-mail: wppendley@mountainstateslegal.com

Conference Speech

“A National Pattern: Historic Oil & Gas Producers in Allegany National Forest Head Off Environmental Litigators” - Speech from the Fourteenth Annual Conference

“The New Wars for the West” - Speech from the Eleventh Annual Conference

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### Biography - William Perry Pendley

prfamerica.org/biography/Biography-Pendley-William-Perry.html‎

William Perry Pendley is president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal **...** Mr. Pendley is a former Marine officer, Capitol Hill lawyer, and Reagan **...

### William Perry Pendley - Conservative Columnist and Political **...

townhall.com/columnists/williamperrypendley/‎

Born and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, William Perry Pendley received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics and Political Science from George Washington **...

### William Perry Pendley's Articles | Human Events

www.humanevents.com/author/wpendley/‎

William Perry Pendley a constitutional lawyer served in the Reagan Administration, is author of the forthcoming book from Regnery Publishing, "Ronald Reagan **...

### Amazon.com: William Perry Pendley: Books, Biography, Blog **...

www.amazon.com/William-Perry-Pendley/e/B001K8A8O4‎

Warriors for the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups, And Liberal Judges on America's Frontier by William Perry Pendley (Jan 24, 2006). (6) **...

### Book Review – Sagebrush Rebel by William Perry Pendley - Wry Heat

tucsoncitizen.com/.../book-review-sagebrush-rebel-by-william-perry-pen...‎

Jun 26, 2013 - Sagebrush Rebel cover Mr. Pendley, currently president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation, served in the Reagan **...

### William Perry Pendley | LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/pub/william-perry-pendley/3a/65/3a3‎

Greater Denver Area - President and Chief Operating Officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation

View William Perry Pendley's professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like William Perry Pendley **...

### MSLF - Press Releases - Mountain States Legal Foundation

www.mountainstateslegal.org/news-updates/press-releases‎

Jul 09, 2013 | by William Perry Pendley. A Colorado federal district court ruled today in favor of a Colorado man and a national gun rights group holding that a **...

### William Perry Pendley - The Virginia Land Rights Coalition

www.vlrc.org/authors/101.html‎

Each month, MSLF president and chief legal officer William Perry Pendley publishes his monthly column, Summary Judgment. A hard-hitting commentary on **...

### Stupid White Man of the Week: William Perry Pendley

thelocalcrank.blogspot.com/.../stupid-white-man-of-week-william-perry....‎

Mar 3, 2008 - Stupid White Man of the Week: William Perry Pendley. William Perry Pendley (and what a precious little name that is, too! Could he possibly **...

### :{► 3:01:(style="background-color:#000000ff"):}:► 3:01

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ufH65XRdng‎

Jul 12, 2009 - Uploaded by Brooks Imperial

7/11/09 Elbert County Republican Breakfast Forum William Pendleyis executive director of the Mountain **...

More videos for William Perry Pendley »

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Stupid White Man of the Week: William Perry Pendley

William Perry Pendley (and what a precious little name that is, too! Could he possibly sound any whiter?) of the "Mountain States Legal Foundation" argues that tribes shouldn't have any jurisdiction whatsoever over non-Indians because...wait for it...Indians are too stupid and savage to understand the brilliance that is the white man's law. Oh, you think I'm exagerrating? Read this drivel for yourselves. Note that his brilliant legal reasoning utterly ignores tribal sovereignty, or rather treats it as something that Congress and the Federal Courts can wipe effortlessly away lest it inconvenience any white people in the slightest.

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President and Chief Operating Officer at Mountain States Legal Foundation

Past

Partner at Comiskey & Hunt
Attorney at United States Government
Attorney at United States Congress

see all

Education

University of Wyoming College of Law
The George Washington University
The George Washington University

Connections

17 connections

Websites

Company Website

United States Government

Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Government Administration industry

January 1981 – March 1984 (3 years 3 months) Washington, D.C.

U.S. Department of the Interior - Deputy Assistant Secretary; Acting Director, Minerals Management Service; Assistant Secretary, Energy and Minerals (Nominated)

U.S. Department of the Navy - Secretary John F. Lehman, Jr.

Attorney

United States Congress

Partnership; Myself Only; Political Organization industry

August 1976 – January 1981 (4 years 6 months) Washington, D.C.

United States Senate - Personal Staff

United States House of Representatives - Committee Staff

Captain

United States Marine Corps

Government Agency; 10,001+ employees; Military industry

March 1969 – August 1973 (4 years 6 months) CONUS and the Far East

Naval Flight Officer - RF-4B and EA-6A

William Perry Pendley's Education

University of Wyoming College of Law

J.D., Law

1973 – 1976

Activities and Societies: Senior Editor - Land & Water Law Review

The George Washington University

M.A., Economics and Political Science

1967 – 1968

Activities and Societies: Omicron Delta Epsilon - The International Honor Society for Economics

The George Washington University

B.A., Economics and Political Science

1963 – 1967

COMISKEY & HUNT

8251 GREENSBORO DRIVE

SUITE 1100

McLEAN, VIRGINIA 22102

Telephone: 703-734-4680

Personal Counsel to Individuals, Families, Closely-Held Companies and Private Foundations. Crisis Management. General Civil and Trial Practice in all State and Federal Courts in Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland. Federal and State Legislative and Administrative Law Practice. Entertainment and Sports, Government Contracts, Corporate, Labor, Domestic and International Business Transactions, Negligence, Personal Injury, Military, Wills, Trusts and Estate Planning, Taxation, Energy, Environmental and Natural Resources Law.

MEMBERS OF FIRM

STEPHEN W. COMISKEY, born Wantagh, New York, July 14, 1947; admitted to bar, 1976, Virginia and U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District of Virginia; 1977, U.S. Court of Military Appeals; 1980, District of Columbia; 1982, U.S. Supreme Court; 1983, Maryland, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia and U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; 1984, U.S. Claims Court; 1986, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Education: U.S. Naval Academy (B.S., 1969); American University (J.D., magna cum laude, 1976). American Honor Society. Member, 1974-1975 and Managing Editor, 1975-1976, American Law Review. Author: A Good Lawyer™: Secrets Good Lawyers [and their best clients] Already Know, http://www.agoodlawyer.com, 1996; "Don't Pass The Buck to Your Lawyer," Government Executive, January, 1989; "Debarment: Government Approved Blacklisting," Fastener Technology International, February, 1989. Special Counsel, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps, 1976. Chief Trial Counsel, Marine Corps Air Station, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1976-1978. Special Assistant, General Counsel of the Navy, 1978-1980. Miller & Chevalier, Chartered, Washington, D.C., 1980-1983. Member: The District of Columbia Bar; The Bar Association of the District of Columbia; Arlington, Fairfax, Virginia, Maryland State and American (Member, Sections on: Entertainment and Sports; Public Contract; Litigation; General Practice; Labor and Employment Law; Taxation; Natural Resources, Energy and Environmental Law) Bar Associations; Virginia State Bar; Master, George Mason American Inn of Court; The Association of Trial Lawyers of America; U.S. Naval Institute. [Major, USMC: Aviation, 1969-1973; Judge Advocate, 1973-1980]

SARAH HUNT, born Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 25, 1951; admitted to bar, 1976, Virginia; 1977, District of Columbia; 1978, U.S. Supreme Court; 1980, U.S. Tax Court. Education: College of William & Mary (B.A., 1973); American University (J.D., 1976); Georgetown University (LL.M., Tax Law, 1981). Member, 1974-1975 and Member Editorial Staff, 1975-1976, American Law Review. Attorney, Office of Chief Counsel, Internal Revenue Service, 1977-1979. Senior Trial Attorney, Tax Division, Department of Justice, 1979-1985. Special Assistant, Assistant Attorney General, Tax Division, Department of Justice, 1985-1987. Member: The District of Columbia Bar; Virginia State Bar; American Bar Association (Member, Taxation Section). Practice Areas: Wills, Trusts and Estate Planning; Taxation Law.

OF COUNSEL

JAMES H. WEBB, JR., born St. Joseph, Missouri, February 9, 1946; admitted to bar, 1977, District of Columbia (Not admitted in Virginia).Education: University of Southern California; United States Naval Academy (B.S., 1968); Georgetown University (J.D., 1975). Recipient: Vietnam Veterans Civic Council's Outstanding Veteran Award, 1976; American Legion National Commander's Public Relations Award, 1979; Emmy Award, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, 1983; Patriot Award, Congressional Medal of Honor Society; Department of Defense Distinguished Service Award, 1987. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, U.S. Department of Defense, 1984-1987. Secretary of the Navy, U.S. Department of the Navy, 1987-1988. [Capt., USMC: Infantry, 1968-1972]

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comiskey pk white sox, shoeless joe tavern?

---

From powerbASE eur but scary flag b/c tttps?

looks like sw?

Mountain States Legal Foundation

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Mountain States Legal Foundation calls itself “is a nonprofit, public interest legal center dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system”

A long-standing player against the environmental movement. It was set up with money from the ultra-conservative Coors family, and Joseph Coors sat on the board for three years. Its first President was Reagan’s ex-Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who was labelled as “public enemy Number One” by the Sierra Club. Watt was so unpopular that Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation asked a then unknown writer to pen a glowing biography of Watt. The writer was Ron Arnold, who went on to become one of the leaders of the Wise Use anti-environmental movement[1].

During Watt’s Tenure in office the MSLF “tackled such enemies of western business interests as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Department of the Interior. In the process the organisation picked up the reputation of being anti-consumer, anti-feminist, anti-government and above all, anti-environmental[2]”

According to CLEAR: “The bulk of MSLF's activities have been focussed on public land litigation and on “takings” issues. In recent years, MSLF has attempted to block wildlife management plans, defended the American Farm Bureau Federation against the Department of Interior over wolf re-introduction, and defended oil and gas companies that violated EPA pollution regulations. The group also opposed President Clinton's national monument designations, represented Rep. Helen Chenoweth(R-ID) in a suit against Clinton's American Heritage Rivers Initiative, backed a suit claiming the ESA violates the Commerce Clause, and unsuccessfully challenged a voluntary climbing ban on Devil's Tower designed to protect Native American religious rites.”[3]

| Contents <ul><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Funding">1 Funding</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Links_to_the_Bush_Administration">2 Links to the Bush Administration</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Staff">3 Staff</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Board_of_Directors">4 Board of Directors</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Issues">5 Issues</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-6"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Links_to_Wise_Use_movement">6 Links to Wise Use movement</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-7"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Labelling_Greens_as_terrorists_.2F_exploiting_terrorist_attacks">7 Labelling Greens as terrorists / exploiting terrorist attacks</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#Contact">8 Contact</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-9"><a href="https://neoconeurope.eu/index.php/Mountain_States_Legal_Foundation#References">9 References</a></li></ul> |

| --- |

Funding

Early funding came from Coors, the National Legal Foundation, Amoco, Chevron, Marathon, Philips and Shell[4]

The Institute received $734,000 from 1985 to 2002, in 19 grants from the following five foundations[5]:

Castle Rock Foundation

JM Foundation

Sarah Scaife Foundation

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Carthage Foundation

Links to the Bush Administration

Rebecca W. Watson - Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management –served on the Board of Litigation at Mountain States Legal Foundation and is listed on the Defenders of Property Rights Attorney Network. A close friend of Norton her appointment caused outrage amongst environmentalists. "I think it’s quite clear that the most polluting industries in this country are in complete control of the Interior Department," said Jim Jensen, executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. "It’s just blind adherence to industrial ideology. Becky Watson’s appointment is an affront to the American people who own these lands. What Becky Watson and Gail Norton are trying to do is convert them from the public domain to the private dominion of corporations bent on destroying the lands for profit[6]."

Bennet William Raley - Assistant Secretary, Water and Science –has been a member of the Defenders of Property Rights Attorney Network and a member of the Board of Litigation at Mountain States Legal Foundation.

Ann Gorsuch-Burford - Reagan's EPA Administrator was also ex-MSLF[7].

Staff

William Perry Pendley - President and Chief Legal Officer. He served as an attorney to former Senator Clifford P. Hansen (R-Wyoming) and to the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. During the Reagan Administration, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Minerals of the Department of Interior (under James Watt), where he authored President Reagan's National Minerals Policy and Exclusive Economic Zone proclamation. Pendley is a long-term ally of the Wise Use movement

Board of Directors

Recent additions to the board include:

Mark Sexton - President and Chief Executive Officer of Evergreen Resources. Board member of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), Independent Petroleum Association of the Mountain States (IPAMS), Colorado Energy Assistance Foundation (CEAF), and the Colorado Board of Science and Technology. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE)[8].

Duke R. Ligon - Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Devon Energy Corporation, the largest U.S.-based independent oil and gas producer and one of the largest independent processors of natural gas and natural gas liquids in North America[9],

Ron Krump - Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Krump Construction[10]

Terry T. Uhling - from J.R. Simplot Company, an agribusiness corporation[11]

Other Board members include numerous small oil and gas producers, retailers, and lawyers including Diemer True, the secretary of the Board, who is chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and served on the transition committee for the Bush administration. His brother is a director of the American Petroleum Institute and the National Petroleum Council[12].

The Board “At large” also includes Patrick P. Davison, who is a Republican senate nominee. His democrat counterpart questioned Davison's "ties to a conservative group that has challenged American Indian rights, public access to Montana rivers, and bans on oil and gas drilling, road building in forests, and mining restrictions… This is an organization, on many issues, that is out of step with mainstream Montana”[13].

Another “At large” board member is Helen Chenoweth-Hage.[14] Chenoweth-Hage is a member of the Council for National Policy a “clandestine clearinghouse for key-right wing activists”. A long-term Wise Use and anti-environmental activist, Cenoweth’s anti-green and anti-government speeches are distributed by the Militia of Montana. She considers Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb from the Center for the Defence of Free Enterprise as “heroes”[15].

Issues

The MSLF has been involved in repealing environmental and Indian rights regulations such as the Endangered Species Act, American Indian rights, public access to Montana rivers, and bans on oil and gas drilling, road building in forests, and mining restrictions[16]. For example MSLF, like the PLF (see below) is at the forefront of repealing environmental regulations Some examples are:

In 1996 the then President Clinton proclaimed 1.7 million acres of southern Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The MSLF challenged the designation, and after six years, the case was finally due to be settled by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson In January 2004[17]. Working with the Wise Use off road group the Blue Ribbon Coalition, the MSLF also unsuccessfully challenged President Clinton's designation of six sites as national monuments in 2000 and 2001[18]

It has also sought to overturn judgements under the Endangered Species Act such as the listing of the Preble's mouse[19]

In May2003 MSLF lost a case when the U.S. Supreme Court refused a suit against Montana's law that gave the public access to state rivers and streams. It also lost a case challenging state wildlife regulations that bans non-Indians from hunting on reservations[20].

In 2001 MSLF sued the Bureau of Land Management over shooting restrictions on federal lands that protected the endangered black-footed ferret. It has also opposed wolf reintroduction in the Yellowstone National Park, and fought President Clinton's ban on road construction in 50 million acres of roadless national forest areas. It also challenged Montana's 1998 ‘voter-passed initiative’ that had banned use of cyanide in new open-pit gold mines. It has also represented the oil industry in challenging the Forest Service's ban on oil and gas drilling along the Rocky Mountain Front[21].

Links to Wise Use movement

The MSLF is an intricate cog in the Wise Use movement. Ron Arnold has called the MSLF the “litigating arm of the Wise Use Movement." It was a sponsor of the first "wise use" leadership conference in Reno, Nevada in 1988, and has participated in many conferences hosted by "wise use" organizations. Over the past two decades, MSLF has served as a training ground for a number of attorneys most active in the anti-environmental movement[22].

Roger and Nancie Marzulla. Roger was the second president of MSLF and served in the Reagan Justice Department under Edwin Meese (see CRC). Nancie is a former staffer at MSLF and worked with her husband at the Justice Department. The Marzullas are co founders of the Defenders of Property Rights, another Wise Use organisation. Founded their own law firm in the late nineties, Marzulla and Marzulla. Gale Norton was on the Board of Advisors of Defenders of Property Rights [23]

Another Director of the MSLF was “Dixy Lee Ray” famed for her book Trashing the Planet, which attacked the environmental movement and issues such as acid rain and global warming. She was a fierce advocate of nuclear power[24].

In 1994, the Free Enterprise Press, the publishing arm of Alan Gottlieb and Ron Arnold’s Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise published a book called “It takes a hero – the Grassroots battle against Environmental Oppression”. Although published by the Free Enterprise Press, the book was called “ a project of the MSLF” and was written by MSLF’s President Perry Pendley. Among the Heroes were Wise Use stalwarts such as Dixy Lee Ray, Elizabeth Whelan from ACSH, Clark Collins from the Blue Ribbon Coalition, Chuck Cushman from ALRA, Bruce Vincent a timberman from the Alliance for America and of course Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb[25].

Two years later in 1996, CLEAR reported how “The March issue of Field and Stream (the nation's largest selling hunting and fishing magazine) took aim at War on the West, William Perry Pendley's book subtitled "Government Tyranny on America's Great Frontier." The review said "War on the West is laced with paranoid babble about a conspiracy of elite Eastern environmentalists whose mission is to communize America. It shamelessly distorts statistics, uses data out of context....William Perry Pendley is president and chief counsel for the Mountain States Legal Foundation and it shows. He's not interested in truth, but advocacy[26]."

In October 2003 Tom Paine magazine reported how 5the MSLF was part of a group calling itself Partnership for the West (PFTW) that was formally unveiled aiming to influence environmental legislation in Washington. Partnership for the West grew out of summit in Denver, Colorado, attended by elected officials, corporate representatives and long-standing anti-environmental organizations such as American Land Rights Association (see above), the Blue Ribbon Coalition (see above), and People for the West. Its president, Jim Sims, is the former communications director for the National Energy Policy Task Force - also known as Cheney's secret panel - and helped craft the administration's energy policy. According to Scott Silver, who heads a real environmental group called Wild Wilderness, “These people are paid lobbyists and public relations consultants serving the needs of every imaginable sort of polluter, developer, resource extractor or despoiler of the environment”.[27]

Labelling Greens as terrorists / exploiting terrorist attacks

Pendley was one of the first people to label environmentalists as “terrorists[28].” The MSLF also used September 11th attacks on the US to argue for drilling in America’s national parks. According to PR Watch: “The Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) used the terror attacks as a pretext to demand that the U.S. Supreme Court override a Clinton Administration decision blocking drilling for oil and natural gas in Montana. "The terrible tragedy of exactly one month ago and the uncertainty as to the reliability of foreign supplies make clear the importance of the United States developing its domestic natural resources," said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the IPAA”[29]

Contact

Address: Mountain States Legal Foundation, 2596 South Lewis Way, Lakewood, Colorado 80227

Web address: http://www.mountainstateslegal.org

References

[1] A. Rowell (1996) Green Backlash – Global Subversion of the Environment Movement, Routledge, p8-10

[2] R. Bellant (1991) The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism, South End Press, Boston, p 84; quoting Rocky Mountain Magazine (1981) March/ April, p29

[3] http://www.clearproject.org/reports_nortonWU.html

[4] R. Bellant (1991) The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism, South End Press, Boston, p 85, 86; M. Megalli & A. Friedman (1991) Masks of Deception: Corporate Front Groups in American, Essential Information, December,

[5] http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?1082

[6] http://www.indiancountry.com/?2798

[7] http://www.commondreams.org/news2001/0110-02.htm

[8] http://www.mountainstateslegal.org/press_releases.cfm?pressreleaseid=324

[9] http://www.mountainstateslegal.org/press_releases.cfm?pressreleaseid=326

[10] http://www.mountainstateslegal.org/press_releases.cfm?pressreleaseid=323

[11] http://www.mountainstateslegal.org/press_releases.cfm?pressreleaseid=325

[12] The Associated Press State & Local Wire (2004) “Wyoming Family Honored as ‘Citizens of West’”, 14 January

[13] The Hotline (2003) “Montana: Schweitzer Questions Davison's Views On Land/Water Use”, 19 November.

[14] http://www.mountainstateslegal.org/boards.cfm

[15] A. Rowell (1996) Green Backlash – Global Subversion of the Environment Movement, Routledge, p63-64

[16] The Hotline (2003) “Montana: Schweitzer Questions Davison's Views On Land/Water Use”, 19 November.

[17] Donna Kemp (2004) “Judge to Rule on Monument”, Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), 16 January

[18] D. Berman (2003) “Supreme Court Declines To Hear Challenges To Clinton-Era; National Monuments”, Land Letter, 9 October; Inside Energy /with Federal Lands (2003) “High Court Declines Monument Appeal, Leaving Clinton Designations In Place”, 13 October

[19] J. Kohler (2003) “Federal Agency Rejects Bid To Take Mouse Off Endangered List”, The Associated Press State & Local Wire, 18 December

[20] B. Anez (2003) “Schweitzer Assails Davison Tie To Conservative Legal Foundation”, The Associated Press State & Local Wire, 18 November

[21] B. Anez (2003) “Schweitzer Assails Davison Tie To Conservative Legal Foundation”, The Associated Press State & Local Wire, 18 November

[22] http://www.clearproject.org/reports_mslf.html

[23] http://www.clearproject.org/reports_nortonWU.html

[24] A. Rowell (1996) Green Backlash – Global Subversion of the Environment Movement, Routledge, 138-139

[25] W. Pendley (1994) It Takes a Hero – the Grassroots Battle Against Environmental Oppression,

[26] http://www.ewg.org/pub/home/clear/view/CV_Vol3_No7.html

[27] Source: TomPaine.com, November 3, 2003; reported on http://www.prwatch.org/spin/November_2003.html

[28] A. Rowell (1996) Green Backlash – Global Subversion of the Environment Movement, Routledge, p134

[29] http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2001Q4/terror.html

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Conflicts

Learn more about William Perry Pendley's conflicts

William Perry Pendley: Carrying Concealed At The Post Office Is ...

Chair Grijalva, Rep. Porter Seek Documents on Another Incident of Potential Bribery under the Trump Administration

Press Contact

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Undoing Treaty Rights

Stripping Protections for Sacred Sites

Delaying Payments to Tribes

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Conflicted leadership and recusal

Conflicts through and through Interior

Pendley papers: 'Sell all BLM lands E. of Miss.'

bad: Trump’s new federal lands chief believes in selling off federal lands

Bernhardt names Pendley as acting BLM chief

Ex-BLM Chiefs Say Interior Is Moving to Transfer Land to States (1)

Property Rights Defender

Chance to Meet State Governors

Isolate and Dissolve?

‘Sagebrush Rebellion’

No Greater Evil

Stupid White Man of the Week: William Perry Pendley

William Perry Pendley's Experience

President and Chief Operating Officer

Mountain States Legal Foundation

Partner

Comiskey & Hunt

Attorney

United States Government

Attorney

United States Congress

Captain

United States Marine Corps

William Perry Pendley's Education

University of Wyoming College of Law

J.D., Law

The George Washington University

M.A., Economics and Political Science

The George Washington University

B.A., Economics and Political Science

COMISKEY & HUNT

McLEAN, VIRGINIA 22102

Telephone: 703-734-4680

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Mountain States Legal Foundation

Funding

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Labelling Greens as terrorists / exploiting terrorist attacks

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References