Public Land for Sale, Cheap: Project 2025
It's Drill, Baby, Drill for the Department of Interior
One of the methods used in compiling Project 2025 was to assign tasks to authors with a known agenda for destroying commissions and agencies. Nowhere is that more obvious than the plans for public lands, written by a man who defied congress during Trump’s term so he could wreak destruction of the agency he was supposed to manage.
Department of the Interior, by William Perry Pendley*
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s section on Interior is essentially a roadmap to selling off public lands to the highest bidders and encouraging resource extraction from the property it can’t sell.
As is true with all the departments, the plan starts with getting rid of civil servants and replacing them with political appointees.
Via High Country News:
The Project 2025 recommendations for the Department of the Interior were primarily authored by attorney William Perry Pendley, a vociferous opponent of protections for public lands and wildlife. As acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during the Trump administration, he transformed the agency into what one high-level employee described as a “a ghost ship,” in which “suspicion,” “fear” and “low morale” abounded.
This section goes further than others in that it includes a rebuke to President Biden, going after his first national monument designation the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado, saying it could be “adjusted downward.” Given that the area covered by the designation is primarily wilderness, it’s safe to assume such adjustments would be made in the name of economic exploitation.
While other parts of P2025 aim to increase the power of the presidency, this section calls for repealing the Antiquities Act of 1906, under which Biden made the designation.
From the Theodore Roosevelt center:
The Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities was an intentionally broad piece of legislation to set aside "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest" in order to stop their destruction. As it was worded, the Act gave the President authority to preserve a wide variety of sites by establishing them as national monuments. Roosevelt quickly took advantage of the authority given him.
During his term in office, Teddy Roosevelt designated 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods, and Mount Olympus.
During his three-plus years in the White House, Donald Trump orchestrated the largest reduction of protected public lands in U.S. history, weaking safeguards for nearly 35 million acres.
Project 2025 would have the Department of Interior continue that process, justifying sales by claiming it’s being done to help solve the housing crisis.
Since climate change caused by human beings doesn’t exist for the Heritage Foundation’s visionaries, the main goal for P2025 is to make federal land more productive by promoting coal mining, mineral extraction, fracking, and drilling.
When possible they'd also like to cede control over federal lands to the states, under the theory that they know best what their commercial needs are. So rather than having a national strategy for conservation, we’d have willy-nilly development along watersheds, and endangered species policies favoring hunters, ranchers, and dirty energy.
Who needs a big picture understanding of land use and preservation when there’s money to be made?
I’m fairly certain the language about ‘disposing humanely’ of wild horses and donkeys is a nod and wink toward sending them to dog food processors in Mexico. Rescinding the reintroduction of predators like grizzlies and wolves will mean undo natural restorations of ecosystems.
The bureau of Land Management’s law-enforcement officers would be placed under the direct supervision of political appointees rather than the agency’s state directors, a move that could undermine the agency’s ability to enforce its own regulations.
The parts of Project 2025 concerning energy were written by Big Oil lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma and others. Sgamma is the President of the Western Energy Alliance, whose board is made up of executives and lobbyists for the largest oil and gas companies, including Chevron, Occidental, and Exxon.
The vision for the department includes reopening most of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil and gas developers and cutting new protections for migratory birds.
P2025 would undo the relocation of BLM headquarters from Washington, D.C., returning it to an office building shared with oil companies in Grand Junction, Colorado. Talk about your political yo-yo…
Interior has charge over aspects of life for two constituencies; native Americans and Alaskans. Both groups’ future prosperity would be linked to expanding the amount and types of resource exploitation. The plan speaks of the large amount of coal resources on American Indian lands, saying it’s the highest quality and cleanest-burning coal in the world.
Coal burning power plants closed down as part of the Biden administration’s push to decree electric-powered cars are making people choose between food and fuel, according to the plan.
Finally, there’s a call to make educational institutions serving native Americans put “parents first,” which is Trump-speak for instilling religious doctrine as part of public education, in addition to banning books and suppressing the rights of LGBTQ+ students.
*William Perry Pendley was Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management who was removed by court order finding that he had served unlawfully in the position for 424 days. He was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a group opposing environmental and conservation protections.
Via the New York Times article on his removal:
In 2016, he wrote in National Review that “the founding fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”
In the same magazine, he expressed sympathy for Cliven Bundy, the rancher who led an armed standoff with the federal government over the bureau’s seizure of his cattle in an attempt to force him to pay decades of back fees for grazing his cattle on federal land.
Mr. Pendley has also mocked court rulings that sided with Native Americans on their religious claims to sacred sites on federal land.
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Next Up:
Department of Revenge (Justice) in Project 2025
Previously:
(Intro) Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)
Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants
Project 2025: Christian Soldiers Marching Off to Land Wars
Homeland Security’s Authoritarian Role in Project 2025
What Can You Do For Trump Today? Project 2025’s Diplomats, Spies and Spokespersons
No Soup For You: Project 2025’s Foreign Aid Program
Project 2025’s National Nightmare for “The General Welfare”
Project 2025: Junk Food and Parents Rights
Make America Dirty Again: Project 2025 on Energy and the Environment
Project 2025: Some (Christian) People Are More Equal Than Others
Programming Note:
I will be on Vacation from August 1 to August 13. The series on Project 2025 will resume upon my return. Election coverage leading up to my annual voters guide will commence on Labor Day.
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Monday News You Should Read
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A Jewish couple were rejected as foster parents because of their religion. This is the future Project 2025 envisions via The Guardian
The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.
Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
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Harris Camp Warns Supporters: Don’t Get Duped by ‘Scam PACs’ by Sam Stein for The Bulwark
Democratic operatives have spent years warning that their digital fundraising has been invaded (and, to a degree, ruined) by operatives who blitz petrified voters with pleas for more cash to help stop Trump’s impending rise.
But, in an odd way, for a politician to be a target of these groups is a signifier of status. They were less predatory during Biden’s campaign this spring and summer. But as Harris began raising tens of millions of dollars online, they sprang to life quickly, sending a barrage of text messages suggesting that they were working hand-in-hand with the campaign.
Democrats United has offered a “700%” donor match to “help Kamala Harris and Democrats win!” Democratic Congress has done the same. And in addition to touting Streisand, Democratic Power, Inc. has sent out texts explaining that—wouldn’t you know it—you can get a “7X-Match” to “defeat Trump!”
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Trump's reckless vaccine ultimatum by Radley Balko at The Watch
Given Trump’s capitulation on vaccines, it seems reasonable to speculate that if he retakes the White House, anti-vaxers would have considerable influence over the bully pulpit, the federal government’s vast public health funding, and the platforms of agencies like the CDC and HHS to spread their message — just as DeSantis has allowed in Florida.
If vaccine denialism continues to spread, it will eventually threaten our hard-won herd immunity from long-conquered diseases. We’ll create a population for mutations that could render existing vaccines useless. The long-tail potential death toll is nearly limitless.
Herd immunity is one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments — and to let reckless stupidity and craven politicians unravel it all would rank among our greatest failures.
