Congress rebukes the Trump/Zinke proposal to disembowel park and conservation budgets

Yesterday, President Donald Trump nominated Michael Chamberlain to be director of the Office of Government Ethics, the federal government’s top ethics regulator. Chamberlain, who served in the first Trump administration, is the director of Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), a hyper-partisan organization that targeted Interior department officials with spurious ethics complaints during the Biden administration, including a lawsuit demanding records from […]

House leaders abruptly pulled an Earth Day vote to gut the Endangered Species Act on Wednesday, after a Florida-led revolt over provisions that could open more of the Gulf to oil and gas drilling. Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the ESA Amendments Act from the floor after an initial procedural vote showed shaky GOP support, according […]

The Bureau of Land Management finalized a proposal to update land use plans for millions of acres of public land in Colorado to better balance oil and gas development with the protection of habitat corridors for big game species including elk, mule deer, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep. The updates ;were added to comply with rules made by the Colorado […]

On Tuesday, the Biden administration revoked a land-exchange deal made during the Trump administration that would have allowed a road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement that the department would begin a new process to review previous land exchange proposals, leaving the door open for another land […]

“d in the next quarter, rather than rushing to formalize the long-overdue reforms to the oil and gas leasing system. Until the BLM has made substantive progress toward a rulemaking, it should not waste time leasing a single additional acre of public land.”