Politics

The Power to Influence Decisions and How Elected Officials, Political Appointees, and Groups Wield It

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Anonymous brought up what he had heard from wildlife folks, and I think it’s worth talking about more deeply. Most Administrations help their friends by doing what the friends want. Is it who are the beneficiaries, or what exactly is done that’s the issue, and do we apply those tests fairly across Administrations? That would be a great thing for us to figure out, since we might be the only people who care about a consistent set of judgements across Admins.

Bios are people, some can be trusted and others cannot. Bios are not a decision maker and are subject to political pressure.

In my recent work on grazing as a senior agency wildlife bio, I’ve been told by forest leadership that ranchers have been directed to contact HQ if they feel regulations are affecting them in a negative way. There is no ability to push back on anything involving extractive interests in the name of wildlife. I have also personally witnessed a very shady situation with a wealthy connected rancher complaining to DC and getting special treatment that amounted to a massive subsidy of their operation. Please stop painting this with broad brushstrokes as a D vs R thing or an industry vs enviro thing. There is a deep state, it’s working for the producers and is very real. I have also worked on projects for which the white house receives a weekly briefing and those in my chain of command are on notice that their job is on the line. The staff bios are sickened by what they are doing.

When I read this, I had a strange flashback to 1981, when our local ranchers (I worked in Lakeview, Oregon) were invited to the Inaugural festivities for President Reagan. It does seem that there is an R vibe to the ranching community, so as much as I’d like to, I’m not sure we can completely remove the fact that they tend R. Also, mainstream media tends to report D people who are discomfited by agency actions, and not so much R people or even independent people. So unless you are involved directly, it is hard to know who minds silly things D’s dream up, or the way they influence decisions on the ground. Plus more employees are D’s and some are quite strongly so. As my old friend used to say “it’s not good or bad, it just is.”

I’d also add that decision makers in the Forest Service are also subject to political pressure, possibly a great deal more, through meetings they might not tell us underlings about. For example a Chief supposedly told my boss “unless you make NGO x happy, Colorado Roadless is not going out.” Perhaps this came from higher up? States, counties and the feds all have friends they would like to put a thumb (or a sack of feed) on the scale for their druthers. Then there is litigation, where plaintiffs sit with DOJ and come to a settlement- where neither elected officials nor folks who read the public comments get a voice (in my experience).

From what I’ve read, it wouldn’t be unusual for individuals to contact HQ in the interests of getting their way. As far back as the Clinton Admin, I remember folks calling the Undersec with concerns about specific projects on specific districts. And when you think about ranchers contacting HQ, I would also think about many folks and groups know and have the political standing to get meetings with DC FS folk. Let’s take solar folks in the last Admin- I’m suspicioning that they had industry groups that yarded up concerns and delivered them to the folks at Interior. Perhaps the difference is how the Admin reacts- with more general “nice things”

The Biden administration finalized a Bureau of Land Management rule reducing public land acreage rental rates and cutting capacity fees for solar and wind energy projects by up to 80% through 2035

– say via rulemaking or RMP decisions (determined by phone calls from DC) compared to goodies are more directed at individual landowners and therefore must go through more layers to specific allotments, involving more field people? So is it the level involved?

Or is it the exact nature of the goodies? A rulemaking, a reduction in fees, a local decision for or against something, a change in how a permit is administered?

Or there’s simply the idea that there is a “right answer” out there somewhere with no political influence, which could be a Forest Supe’s or Ranger’s druthers, or their idea of the appropriate balance, given what they’ve heard from everyone. In my work, I’ve seldom found there to be one right answer to any land use dispute.

It seems to me Administrations favor certain groups and give them a preferred seat at the decision table. In settlement of litigation certain groups also have a preferred seat at the table. Does it really matter for these purposes whether the benefits granted are financial or ideological?

In the old days, line officers seem to have been left more or less alone. Older folks tell me that the inflection point was the Clinton Admin in terms of what we might call “meddling from above to the forest or district level.” But as my retiree friends tell me, Admins tend to just double down on what the previous Admin got away with for their friends, and never go back to a more hands-off posture.  And now most of those who remember the old way are probably retired.

Chief Schultz’s vision

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The first Chief of the Forest Service with no experience working for the Forest Service gave a keynote speech at a policy summit for the all-GOP Congressional Western Caucus, a gathering of Republican members of Congress in Whitefish, Montana on August 19.  I’m not sure how widely this has been reported but these excerpts are from reporting in the Missoulian., which is probably paywalled.  (Indents are quotes from the Missoulian, quotes are the reported words of the Chief.)

… he left few doubts about the agency’s priorities under President Donald Trump.

“We’ve seen this happen throughout the West,” he said. “… We pulled back as an agency over time, and then what happens? The industry goes away. The jobs go away. The education declines. People become addicted to different things.”

“We’re going to manage for minerals management, we’re going to manage for active forest management, grazing management,” Schultz said. “We’re looking at recreation, how we encourage and increase access, even to the existing lands we have. I met with the recreation community, the motorized folks here just a few weeks ago.”

That’s (recent personnel actions) left the Forest Service with a 25% loss of permanent full-time staff who don’t primarily fight wildfires — 5,200 workers, Schultz confirmed in an interview outside the event. And he acknowledged that some of those losses include the types of expertise needed to plan and implement logging projects on federal forest lands.

“We did have people that had that expertise that left,” Schultz told the Missoulian. “They were close to retirement and they left, but what I’m excited about is the people that are here really want to be here, I mean there are a lot of dedicated Forest Service people.”

“In terms of the firefighting effort, we have 11,400 firefighters grade GS 9 and below that are currently on staff, which is what we’re supposed to have,” Schultz told the Whitefish audience on Tuesday. “So when you’re hearing people saying we don’t have firefighting resources, that’s not accurate.”

“There’s still going to be a footprint in Missoula, we haven’t decided exactly how that’s going to function yet,” he said. “… So it could be fire, it could be other things. We haven’t figured everything out there just yet.”

“If there is no certainty from government, industry cannot function,” he said.

It’s not clear whether the “firefighters” he referred to that are “what we are supposed to have” includes those regular employees activated for fires.  I’ll only comment that the multiple uses of fish and wildlife and non-motorized recreation were NOT among the things “we’re going to manage for” (or apparently for “addictions” either).  And it’s kind of laughable for this administration to talk about “certainty in government” being necessary (unless this administration plans on never leaving).  Less snarkily, lack of certainty has always been an issue for federal timber supply and it would be interesting to see what they have in mind to change that.  Not hard to believe they “haven’t figured everything out.”

Oh, and for employees who are “really wanting to be here,” see the new hiring questions  (and trust that this Administration won’t use this as “an ideological litmus test on candidates” taking precedence over their professional skills).

 

For Sale – half million acres of federal lands

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La Citta Vita, Flickr

The ball is rolling on selling federal lands for housing with the creation of a task force that would identify federal land that would be suitable for housing.  The task force would be run by the Departments of the Interior and Housing and Urban Development.

“The aim of Trump’s new task force is to identify the land parcels suitable for building. It will then transfer or lease them out to public-housing authorities, nonprofits or local governments to develop homes.  The land might occasionally be sold to private developers, according to a HUD representative.  The federal agencies would determine that on a “case-by-case basis” in coordination with the local government.”

Really?  One might suspect this money-grubbing Administration would sell the most valuable land and to the highest bidder.  Especially if this is going to be used to finance its sovereign wealth fund.

No mention here of whether the Forest Service or national forest lands would be involved – it could be limited to lands not otherwise “designated,” including national forests.  The other interesting thing is this:

“Developing even 512,000 acres of the Bureau of Land Management’s lots could yield between three million and four million new homes across western states such as Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona, according to a preliminary analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., center-right think tank.”

It’s hard to picture where those acres would not be, given that …

“Only a small portion of U.S. government-owned land is near cities with housing shortages. About 47 million acres, or 7.3% of all federal land, falls within metropolitan areas that need more homes, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of government land maps and housing-shortage data from the National Association of Realtors.

In a few cases, local housing shortages overlap with an abundance of federal land in the area, such as Salt Lake City and Las Vegas.  This policy could make a big difference for those housing markets.”

But what about Seattle, Portland, Spokane and … Missoula.  The prices in many northwestern national forest-adjacent cities (and towns) indicate a housing shortage in these places.  This article says the Secretaries want “affordable” housing, but it’s hard to imagine what kind of constraints that would put on the process – anywhere that has a housing shortage has an affordable housing shortage, and I can’t imagine this federal government adding requirements to local real estate deals to ensure housing affordability.  Given the lack of guardrails being recognized by this Administration, I can  imagine that any community that is interested could be coming into some new real estate.

“HUD will pinpoint where housing needs are most pressing,” and Interior “will identify locations that can support homes while carefully considering environmental impact and land-use restrictions,” the agencies’ secretaries wrote in the Journal’s opinion piece.

So they say.  Will they consider the effects on national forest management of expanding the WUI?  Land management plans should have identified lands suitable for disposal (or maybe a process for doing that) – would this matter?  (Maybe someone with a WSJ subscription can pry out some more details about what these Secretaries have in mind.)

Environmental executive orders from T2

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I happened to pick up this post from LinkedIn that looks like it netted many of Trump’s recent executive orders that are most likely to affect federal lands.

A lot of executive actions came out of the White House yesterday and thought I would unpack ten of many radical new policies that you (or the media) might not have noticed yet.

(A reminder that Executive Orders and Presidential Memoranda are policy and priority statements and directives to staff from a president that offer interpretation within the limits set by all the laws of the country… all Presidents use them) https://lnkd.in/eTxhxheF

These orders are found here – if you want a document/section reference for something let me know:
https://lnkd.in/euDE8tvR

1. 🫎 Requires the ‘god squad’ under the Endangered Species Act to meet every 3 months and directs the Secretary of Interior to figure out procedures that would allow the committee to complete it’s reviews of every submission within 140 days; this authority has very rarely been used within the last 50 years, but could be used to allow big infrastructure projects to have no, fewer, or different requirements to avoid, minimize, or offset impacts on endangered wildlife and plants.
2. 🌊 Directed the Army Corps to use general permits and emergency procedures under the Clean Water Act far more often and the same for emergency procedures for permitting (or consulting) on projects under the Endangered Species Act.
3. Weirdly revoked President Carter’s executive order on NEPA that told agencies to make environmental impact statements shorter, clearer and more useful to the public; I assume this is because it also gave CEQ direction to issue regulations under NEPA.
4. 🌲 Rescinded the executive order protecting ancient forests across US National Forests and that created a national goal to reforest areas in the US where trees have been lost.
5. 🌵 Rescinded direction for US agencies to expand international work and cooperation to fight deforestation.
6. Rescinded the order that directed the Office of Management and Budget to provide guidance on ecosystem service valuation
7. Rescinded direction to federal agencies to report and act on ways to expand the use of nature-based solutions.
8. Required all agencies to develop action plans to change or eliminate all regulations, orders, guidance, policies, settlements or other actions that hinder or slow down US energy production (except offshore wind energy permitting and leasing which is suspended completely and agencies are directed to add policies to slow down)
9. Suspended about a dozen policies or decisions related to energy production and roads in Alaska.
10. Makes thousands of “policy-influencing” career federal jobs into a new category of employment that is subject to different performance requirements and dismissal if they fail to “faithfully implement” policies of the current president.

Bad and worse, from an environmental perspective

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NBC News

As the election campaign overheats, here are a couple critiques of current Biden and future Trump policies affecting the Forest Service.

WildEarth Guardians recently reviewed a FY 2022 Forest Service Report to Congress, which discusses “timber program performance.”  (I’d note that the context was “the unexpected increase in demand for lumber during the recent period of quarantine and social distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic…”)  WildEarth Guardians said,

The document outlines how the agency can increase logging in our national forests by at least 25 percent above current levels, to four billion board feet each year! The last time the Forest Service sold that much timber from our national forests was 1993, the year the agency started developing the Northwest Forest Plan to address habitat loss for the northern spotted owl caused by—that’s right—overlogging. That level of logging was not sustainable then and it isn’t sustainable now, especially in light of what we know now about the importance of protecting mature and old-growth forests to mitigate the effects of climate change. Nevertheless, the Forest Service wants to turn the clock back and actually spells out just how it wants to do that.

The remedy, according to the Forest Service, is not to stop proposing ecologically damaging timber sales that violate the law, but rather to ask Congress for “legislative fixes” that make it harder, if not impossible, to challenge ecologically damaging timber sales in court. Streamlining environmental reviews and limiting public input, the Forest Service says, “will help increase timber volume sold.”

We shouldn’t wonder why there is skepticism from these parts when the Forest Service says “trust us.”  As WildEarth Guardians summarized (with their emphasis):

Such perverse incentives are a stark reminder that timber production remains the overarching priority for the Forest Service while all other values, like wildlife or climate mitigation, are a distant second. As the Forest Service seeks to push timber production levels even higher, those of us who care about our national forests must be ready to speak up and tell the agency and lawmakers that we cannot turn the clock back to a time when unsustainable logging pushed species like the northern spotted owl to the brink of extinction.

An article in the Huffington Post focused on the Department of Interior (but has implications for national forests), and indicates the incentives would be even more perverse for management of our public lands under Trump II, requiring even more public oversight (if they don’t take away the ability to do that):

Pendley’s blueprint for Trump, if he should win in November, includes holding robust oil and gas lease sales on- and offshore, boosting drilling across northern Alaska, slashing the royalties that fossil fuel companies pay to drill on federal lands, expediting oil and gas permitting, and rescinding Biden-era rules aimed at protecting endangered species and limiting methane pollution from oil and gas operations.

Along with a series of actions to boost drilling and mining across the federal estate, Pendley calls for a future Republican administration to not only dismantle existing protected landscapes but limit presidents’ ability to protect others in the future. He advocates for vacating Biden’s executive order establishing a goal of conserving 30% of federal lands and waters by 2030; rescinding the Biden administration’s drilling and mining moratoriums in Colorado, New Mexico and Minnesota; reviewing all Biden-era resource management plans, which cover millions of acres of federal lands; and repealing the Antiquities Act, the landmark 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate 161 national monuments.

If that reads like a fossil fuel industry wish list, it’s because it is. Rather than personally calling for the keys to America’s public lands to be turned over to America’s fossil fuel sector, Pendley let the head of a powerful industry group do it for him.

“Beyond posing an existential threat to democracy, Project 2025 puts special interests over everyday Americans,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group that shared its research on Project 2025 with HuffPost. “The dangerous initiative has handed off its policy proposals to the same industry players who have dumped millions into the project — and who will massively benefit from its industry-friendly policies.”

“They could have found any number of mainstream conservatives to write their agenda for them. They didn’t,” Weiss said. “They picked the notorious anti-public lands extremist, because that is at the end of the day what they want.

 

Presidential election has consequences for BLM plan?

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The Rock Springs (WY) office of the BLM has recently released a draft of its resource management plan.  The DEIS includes the traditional four alternatives:  no-change, protection, development, and “balanced.”  As Governor Gordon’s natural resources policy advisor put it, “In this case they kind of broke precedent and chose (alternative) B, the most resource-restrictive development.”  A retired BLM employee has alleged that presidential politics played a role.

The most balanced plan for managing millions of acres of federal land in central Wyoming — and the alternative that Bureau of Land Management employees and others put the most time, effort and money into — was rejected by the past two presidential administrations, a retired BLM employee said.

The Trump administration likely would have pushed Alternative C because it favors more drilling for oil, he said.

But the Biden administration has gone to the opposite extreme, so the BLM now is pushing forward with Alternative B, which designates 1.8 million acres as “areas of critical environmental concern” (ACES).

Evans said it’s disheartening that two presidential administrations boosted the plans with the least amount of effort put into them.

“The science and the work to do that was all done on D,” Evans said. “And it’s kind of a shame that what the people in the field office and the cooperators spent all that time doing was rejected.”

Now many of those same BLM insiders who worked for years and spent millions of dollars fleshing out a balanced alternative instead have to push the administration’s preference and sell it to Wyoming residents and officials.

The State of Wyoming is considering suing over the plan (even though is not final yet).  Road management and minerals are key issues.

Based on my experience, I would agree that there may not be a precedent for selecting the most resource-restrictive land management plan alternative .  I also have not seen this level of direct political involvement in picking an alternative in Forest Service planning.  Typically in the Forest Service, any political “wants” would be built into the “balanced” alternative that would end up being selected.  Please let us know if anyone has had a different experience.  (Maybe this is a result of the different structures and cultures of the Forest Service and BLM.)
I have mixed feelings about this approach, where all but one are essentially straw alternatives.  Legally, all action alternative must be given equal treatment in the effects analysis, but that doesn’t preclude more serious thought being put into to the design of one alternative.   If one of the others is actually selected it would create the problem the employee described here – it has to be prettied-up at the end of the process.  I think it is important to meaningfully evaluate all reasonable alternatives, but there is a difference between “reasonable” meaning “what would meet the purpose and need” and “reasonable” meaning, “what the agency could realistically select.”  I think what is missing from public disclosure is the actual iterative alternatives that are considered in building the preferred alternative.
On October 9, the BLM extended the public comment period to January 17.  I guess that would buy them more time to refigure out the details of this alternative, or as they point out “In any resource management planning process, the final plan may mix and match portions from all the alternatives.”   “Rebalancing” them I suppose.

Undermining science to undermine renewable energy

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We’ve talked a little about energy transmission, especially in conjunction with renewable energy production, and the need to improve the electrical grid.  One thought seems to be that conservation interests are a barrier to that.  It turns out that the coal industry may be an even bigger barrier.  At least, here’s an example from the Trump Administration.

The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions.

But a study like Seams was politically dangerous territory for a federally funded lab while coal-industry advocates—and climate-change deniers—reign in the White House.

According to interviews with five current and former DOE and NREL sources, supported by more than 900 pages of documents and emails obtained by InvestigateWest through Freedom of Information Act requests and by additional documentation from industry sources, Trump officials would ultimately block Seams from seeing the light of day. And in doing so, they would set back America’s efforts to slow climate change.

The fallout was swift: The lab grounded Bloom and Novacheck (the lead researchers), prohibiting them from presenting the Seams results or even discussing the study outside NREL.  And the $1.6 million study itself disappeared. NREL yanked the completed findings from its website and deleted power-flow visualizations from its YouTube channel.

If NREL researchers are able to work unencumbered by political concerns and release Seams in its entirety, it could help point the U.S. toward a greener future, in which a robust economy runs on renewable energy. But for now, Seams is demonstrating an unintended finding—that when administrations stick their hands into scientific research, politically inconvenient truths are in peril.

The author indicated later that Congress had demanded that the study be released (and here it is).

This story is another example of political interference in science production and distribution.  I remain a strong skeptic that the pro-environment side can match this kind of interference by the coal lobby and “climate-change deniers” (as some have suggested here, including self-proclaimed climate-change “skeptics”).  It also seems obvious that this direct intervention is a lot more influential than any bias that exists in research funding.

Over the Weekend – Blue Mtn. blues, Flathead secrets and monumental benefits

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I guess this is a bookend to Sharon’s “Friday News Roundup.”

 

BLUE MOUNTAINS

I recently provided an update on the status of the Blue Mountains forest plan revisions here.   And here’s a little more detail on that, especially on the question of “access.”  (This term gets used for a couple of different things, and this one is about closing roads on national forests rather than creating access across private property to reach public lands.)

One group says its leading the charge to fight for what they call “original rights” is Forest Access for All.  “We defend the rights that we’ve had since Oregon was a territory, free reign where we go and utilize the forests which are public lands,” says Bill Harvey, a group member and former Baker County Commissioner. “A couple decades ago the Forest Service began closing off sections of the forest and that’s when Forest Access for All was formed.” Harvey says his group’s particular ire is at the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest (WWNF), which he claims “have closed thousands of miles of roads in the forest the last twenty years.”

The group also has other “conflicts” with the Forest Service include the need for  more vegetation management, economic benefits of (motorized) recreation, and better public engagement.

“By law right now, we have an open forest. They will admit it, everybody admits it, and it’s in the books, I’ve seen it a million times. It is an open access forest,” says Harvey. “Why in God’s name would we want to give that up? Nothing benefits us to give up our rights that we have currently. We’re not asking for more rights, we’re asking for the existing rights to stay in place.

I’m going to disagree with him on this one, and I hope the Forest Service does, too (although it looks like they could have done a better job of setting the locals straight on this before now).  In 2005, Subpart B of the Travel Management Rule changed the culture of motor vehicle use on roads, trails, and areas from “Open unless closed” to a system of designated routes.  As for why?  The goal was to reduce resource damage from unmanaged motor vehicle use off that road system.

 

FLATHEAD

Newly revealed emails show that the Flathead National Forest under then supervisor Kurt Steele looked to keep a proposal of a tram up Columbia Mountain from public view for more than year prior to it being first proposed.

Does this sound familiar?  It sounds to me like the “Holland Lake Model” that got the forest supervisor a “promotion” to forest planning.  In this case the Forest properly rejected the proposal as inconsistent with its forest plan (thank you forest plan!).  But it does suggest a pattern of incentives and behavior that may be broader than the Flathead National Forest.

“The process where the public comes into play is when it becomes the NEPA process,” Flathead Forest spokesperson Kira Powell said about the emails.

“Bringing you into the conversation about this potential project on the Flathead NF because it’s coming from investors who apparently have the financial resources to build a tramway, meaning they likely have political savvy also … wrote Keith Lannom, who was deputy regional forester for Region 1 at the time …”

This account offers a window into the role of “political savvy” in Forest Service decision-making.

 

ORGAN MOUNTAINS – DESERT PEAKS NATIONAL MONUMENT

Since President Barack Obama created the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in 2014, visitation has tripled and the national monument has spurred economic growth in the Las Cruces area as well as other communities near the national monument, according to a new report.

According to this overview, the report looks at the various factors that made this particular monument so successful, including its location relative to population centers and the uses it caters to.  Also local community support.

“We have always recognized that the establishment of the monument was due in large part to the grassroots effort at the local community organizations and individuals,” Melanie Barnes, the state BLM director, said. “And due to this engaged and proud community, the monument has seen an increase in visitation.”

She said the BLM is working on a resource management plan that will address land use and resource protection. The public scoping period for that plan recently ended.

 

House of Representatives v. BLM – monuments and the public lands rule

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Grand Staircase – “visitutah.com” (Larry C. Price)

Dismissal of a lawsuit against President Biden’s proclamation restoring the boundaries of the Grand Staircase and Bears Ears national monuments allows the NEPA process to develop a management plan for these areas to proceed unhindered.  Biden ordered the BLM to work on replacing the Trump Administration’s resource management plan, and the BLM published its draft RMP on August 11 for public comment.

BLM may proceed unhindered, that is unless Congress decides to hinder them.  The FY2024 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Bill the House Appropriations Committee passed in July, which the full House of Representatives is expected to vote on in September, includes a rider that would require the BLM to manage the Grand Staircase NM in accordance with the plan finalized after Trump reduced the monument.

Which is the better planning process – RMPs based on public involvement through NEPA or RMPs based on appropriations riders?

The bill would also deny funding to implement the BLM’s public lands rule (a popular topic with many posts here from Sharon).  Another bill would force BLM to withdraw the rule (without considering all those public comments).

Kya Marienfeld, wild lands attorney for SUWA, called the Utah congressional delegation’s lack of support for the state’s public lands disappointing but adds that opposition is offset by more enlightened members of Congress who actively support the Grand Staircase and other public lands.

Appropriation riders seem to be kind of crap-shoot in the turmoil of budget negotiations, so I have no idea what the betting line would be on President Biden signing off on this one.  The “more enlightened members of Congress” may have more of an influence on defeating the withdrawal proposal.  Is that a bad thing?

 

 

The Amazing World of Political Byzantinery… How a CEQ Underling Overruled a Senate-Confirmed Cabinet Secretary

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And I’ve been interested, as you know, in how alignment in the USG currently works. Because if the Admin has a stated policy, then are the agencies working together to implement it? What if they disagree? How are arguments worked out in practice? Who is really holding the cards, and why.. and what makes political power exactly.. donations, the buddy system??? And when we think about voting, we need to think not only about the candidate themselves, but who in the Admin will be making decisions and why. Because I’m not a political person (I consider myself politically-impaired and many of my former bosses will agree) but based on my experience, every notable decision from here on in has some 2024 considerations involved. (We used to call this “silly season” and like many things it was shorter during less partisan times).

So today, we have an interesting example, based on the rumor mill (several sources). In this case, the USDA wanted to support the bill on fire retardant that was discussed last week at the Federal Lands Subcommittee Hearing (which was interesting and I’ll have a post or two just on that).

However, as I understand it, the Secretary of Agriculture (a Senate-confirmed Cabinet member) was overruled by an underling at the Council on Environmental Quality. How did this happen? I filed a FOIA to learn more, but anyone who has more information please contact me.

Right now, I can think of two rational reasons for this point of view. 1. Giving more power to the EPA or 2. “They shouldn’t live there anyway”.- kind of a pre-re-wilding point of view. But we’ll see what it says in the FOIA.