The region’s vulnerability, however, did not stop the previous administration from purging Arctic experts, denying the climate crisis, and debasing the role of research in the region. The damage to Arctic research, resilience, and the American reputation as a regional leader was profound.

In recent weeks, however, the Biden administration has taken important steps to repair the damage, much to the relief of scientists, policymakers, businesses, and the Indigenous People of the north.

Undoing the damage

A quick recap of the Trump administration’s actions: In addition to marginalizing agency efforts to implement climate resilience actions in the Bering Strait region and purging experts like myself from Arctic policy efforts, the administration shelved the White House Arctic Executive Steering Committee and replaced many of the well-regarded scientists and experts on the Arctic Research Commission (ARC) with unqualified, low-level political associates with no Arctic experience.

For example, Alaska’s former Lt. Governor Fran Ulmer, the prior Chair of the Commission, is a highly regarded expert with a long history of engagement on Arctic issues. She was replaced by a low-level political operative with no Arctic experience whatsoever. The president even sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to a meeting of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental body of diplomats representing the eight Arctic nations, to crow about the benefits of climate change rather than address the crisis.

These action badly damaged America’s reputation among the other Arctic states, hobbled efforts to address the climate crisis in the region, and effectively shut down research progress at the Arctic Research Commission.

Bringing back Arctic science and expertise

Not a moment too soon, the current administration has moved to repair the damage. First, they fired the unqualified Arctic Research Commissioners, sending the signal that the Arctic Research Commission was no longer a frat house to populate with allies who couldn’t find work elsewhere.

The list of new replacements, announced last week, reads like a who’s who of Arctic experts and influencers. New Chairman Michael Sfraga has been leading and convening Arctic problem-solvers for decades and currently leads the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center. Mark Myers has been active in Arctic research for decades and has worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations. David Kennedy is a holdover from the Trump years who’s known as an effective agency leader with 50 years of experience in Arctic issues. Elizabeth Cravalho is an Alaska Native and Vice President of a prominent Alaska Native Corporation. Jackie Richter-Menge is a decorated scientist and climate expert in the region. Deborah Vo, born and raised on the lower Yukon and now working with the Rasmuson Foundation, has worked closely with Senator Murkowski and others to advance Arctic policy solutions for many years.

One-third of the appointed commissioners are Indigenous, half are women, and two-thirds are residents of Alaska, mirroring the requirements for the Commission that the Trump administration had jettisoned.

The ARC is back in business, and not a moment too soon, as extreme conditions, ice loss, and ecosystem disruptions accelerate and a socially-crippling pandemic threatens community resilience.

But the work didn’t stop there. The Biden administration also announced the reactivation of the Arctic Executive Steering Committee at the White House and appointed Dave Balton, one of America’s top Arctic diplomats for decades, as its executive director. Not only does his appointment signal a reinvigoration of Arctic policy interest at the White House, installing a highly-regarded diplomat in the position also sends a message to America’s Arctic partners that the self-serving posturing of the previous administration is a thing of the past and partnership and collaboration are back on the table.

Appointed as Balton’s Deputy Director, Raychelle Aluaq Daniel is a highly qualified Yup’ik and Arctic expert born and raised in Alaska. I’m proud to say that Raychelle was one of my hires at the Interior Department years ago, and her understanding of Arctic science and policy issues was extraordinary even then. I’ve worked closely with both of these new leaders and am excited to see what they will create in the White House as they work to deliver a coordinated US answer to the many challenges in the region.

For those of us who understand the dire implications of a transforming Arctic, these actions signal that the administration is listening and is eager to bring the best and the brightest to Arctic issues and quickly put the neglect of the previous administration behind us. On the international front, exhausted from years of childish antics, colleagues around the global Arctic are optimistic once again about partnering with America on solutions to regional crises.

Not to say that all of a sudden we have a grasp on this thing, but after four years of dangerous denial and a shameful disregard for public service, just making the effort to understand the breadth of the problem and establish interim goals feels like the Great Enlightenment.

Making actual gains is another matter, however, and nowhere is this better illustrated than at my old agency, the Department of the Interior. And that’s because the agency responsible for our legendary national parks, for the protection of our nation’s fish, wildlife, and plants, for generating world-class science, and for supporting the well-being of our nation’s first inhabitants is also the agency responsible for leasing and permitting onshore and offshore fossil fuel extraction. In a time of rapid, human-caused climate change, the enormous agency that manages one fifth of our national land area is a house divided, and therefore a house diminished…for now.

Given the enormity of the multiple crises we now face, from the climate crisis to the biodiversity, social justice, and public health crises, we can’t afford to muddle through with a conflicted Interior Department. It is of national interest to unify the agency around a common purpose to both protect the land—our national life-support system—and the American people whose health and well-being are at risk.

In this post I describe some immediate opportunities—and emphasize specific recommendations—to establish the Interior Department as a purposeful catalyst for a fair and just transition to clean energy, healthy ecosystems, and thriving communities.

Interior faces a conundrum

Journalists often ask me what Secretary Deb Haaland’s Interior Department must do to address climate change right now, and I always have the laundry list handy: Restore the science enterprise, protect our nation’s life-support system of public lands and wildlife, invest in the resilience of Native American and Alaska Native communities, and, above all, find legal and just ways to slow the extraction of fossil fuels on public lands. Far easier said than done, particularly that last thing, which is the focus of this post. As we’ve already seen from President Biden’s day-one executive orders, the fossil fuel establishment and its political patrons will scream bloody murder every step of the way, ignoring the impacts all around them in order to perpetuate yesterday’s economy at the expense of tomorrow’s.

Politics aside, the overwhelming scientific consensus tells us that in order to keep warming below 2°C and limit some of the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, we must stop extracting and burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The IPCC, a renowned but generally conservative international body of scientists, tells us that to have a fighting chance of meeting global climate goals, we have to cut global emissions approximately in half within this decade, and then continue to drive them down to net zero by mid-century.

To do so, one of the first places to turn in the United States should be our shared federal lands, which are responsible for nearly 25% of our national CO2 emissions thanks to the fossil fuel extraction permitted by the Interior Department. Immediately shutting down oil and gas operations on federal lands, however, could create severe hardships in some of the states that are dependent upon fossil fuel revenues, including Wyoming, Alaska, and New Mexico, the home state of Secretary Deb Haaland.

This is the conundrum that Secretary Haaland inherited. Public lands offer an opportunity to slow emissions in the near term, but if not done thoughtfully, people will suffer. If not done at all, many more people, and the natural systems we all depend upon, will suffer. Somehow, Interior must strike a balance and work with the private and public sectors to help foster a just transition to clean energy. The guideposts for doing so are already baked into the agency’s mission: Serving the public interest, helping communities thrive, and patriotically honoring the land as the national life-support system that it is.

Blueprint for action

There are multiple bureaucratic stages to fossil fuel extraction on public lands, far more layers and steps than I can cover here. To simplify, there is a leasing stage, a permitting stage, and a production stage. There are climate and equity levers to pull at each stage, and these levers affect people and the land differently than how they affect the fossil fuel industry.

The strongest moral footing, and a fertile organizing principle for Interior going forward, is to consider how policy decisions will affect the health, safety, jobs, and economic well-being of people. In other words, in making decisions about these levers, it is important to focus on how decisions impact people and the environment while shaking off the agency’s cultural and historic desire to please industry.

In some cases it is difficult to tease those interests apart—jobs or economic well-being may be intertwined with that industry in some places. In those instances when necessary climate actions may impact people and jobs in a negative way, the focus must be on making people whole into the future rather than propping up dirty energy sources.

While Interior can’t do this on its own—making people whole during the transition will require Congress and other federal agencies—below I describe some of the climate and equity levers that Interior alone can pull at each stage of development, with the caveat that while these are some of the immediate levers, the ultimate goal must be for a full economy-wide transition to carbon-free sources of energy if we hope to avert a national—and global—catastrophe that we cannot afford.

Leasing: When you’re in over your head, stop digging

Thus far the Biden Administration has put a temporary hold on new oil and gas leasing while they review the leasing program. This has the industry up in arms, but will have no negative effect on Americans because industry has already stockpiled enough onshore and offshore acreage to provide for decades of jobs and royalty income (should we have the ill fortune to require that). I know this because when I was the director of Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis, we generated a report each year on unused leases and permits. The most recent agency numbers show that 53% of the 26 million acres already leased onshore remain unused, while 77% of the 12 million acres leased offshore are unused.

It is in the national interest to make the existing moratorium on new oil and gas leasing permanent due to the enormity of the climate crisis and the minimal economic impacts this would cause.

Of course industry doesn’t like this because it will limit opportunities to pad their speculative holdings—paper leases that, while unlikely to ever be developed, help inflate the company’s value. However, the profit margins of multi-billion dollar businesses should not prevail over American well-being. Industry argues against any constraints on industry access to federal lands by claiming that if the oil doesn’t come from our public lands it will instead come from some poorly regulated foreign country instead. Economic models have shown that his fear-mongering theory, known as “perfect substitution,” is an oversimplified myth.

In those limited instances where a fair and just transition requires ongoing leasing, say for example on Tribal lands with Tribal support, there are still climate levers that can bring benefits. Bargain basement rents (the fees paid on leases until they begin producing) and minimum bids (think eBay bidding starting at $1) encourage industry speculation and rob Tribes of revenue. Fee structure changes are within the authority of the DOI bureau responsible for managing the leasing process—the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Should fossil fuel leasing continue in some limited way, at very least the first Americans deserve a fair return for allowing development on Tribal lands.

In the case of any ongoing leasing, BLM should increase rental fees as well as minimum bids in order to raise revenue and reduce industry speculation on Tribal or federal lands.

Another area for leasing reform regards assignments and suspensions. Assignments allow lease owners to transfer leases to another entity. When the market collapses, companies can transfer leases to smaller companies. Unfortunately those companies are often at risk of bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers holding the bag for any cleanup or restoration. Suspensions, when granted by the bureau, allow a company to prolong their ownership of the lease beyond the limit of 10 years.

To reduce speculation and to limit industry gambling with the federal estate, Interior should prohibit most assignments and suspensions. In the rare instance of granting an assignment or suspension, the agency should add stipulations to protect taxpayers from industry abuses.

Permitting: Bring back transparency and public review

The Biden administration has been less bullish about restricting permitting for drilling operations because of the potential to impact jobs. There are also legal considerations associated with lease contracts that give the owner the right to drill. That doesn’t mean that the permitting process isn’t ripe for immediate reform.

Those reports we produced at Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis covered permitting trends as well as leasing, and showed that a substantial percentage of permits, like leases, were not being used. Conversations with industry partners confirmed that many permits, like many leases, were paper assets only and never intended for development. Currently, there are approximately 7,770 approved, unused permits.

One first step that Interior can take to reform the permitting process is to get speculative permits off the books so public servants can focus on decisions more closely tethered to reality. Reducing such speculative assets would have no impact on jobs or American well-being.

One way to do this may be to determine a maximum number of permits per company (including subsidiaries) at several scales of operation, derived from historical data on permit usage. Another approach would be to borrow from the coal leasing program and implement acreage restrictions.

Another means for reducing the “noise” in the permitting program is to eliminate the bad actors who flaunt federal requirements but still obtain permits by forming a new company or entity. Interior could follow the lead of Montana, which established a “bad actor” law against individuals in the hard rock mining sector, preventing them from obtaining permits no matter what company flag they operated under.

Interior should utilize these three innovative means to reduce the workload and bureaucratic distractions of needless permit processing so staff can focus on aligning the program with the public interest.

The second step would be to evaluate drilling permits with a much tighter focus on the public interest. While the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) calls for a review of the environmental impacts of a development, and recent court cases have determined they should also include climate impacts, these assessments are generally conducted at the leasing stage and not at the permitting stage. In other words if an approved lease includes many potential wellheads across a vast acreage, the impacts of individual well permits are not assessed. Not only does this forsake an accurate environmental review, it eliminates the opportunity for communities to weigh in on a specific project—one of the most valuable means for disenfranchised communities to be heard. The Trump administration became particularly famous for eliminating transparency and public input on projects in order to speed up oil and gas development.

In addition to shielding environmental and climate impacts from public scrutiny, this eliminates any means to identify those projects that support communities. This information is needed to flag projects that communities depend upon, and where it will be necessary to provide some other form of support when drilling is no longer viable due to the severity of the climate crisis.

The permitting process should be reformed to ensure a full, transparent review of environmental and climate impacts and provide an opportunity for community input. In order to ensure such a process, Interior should conduct a review of NEPA adequacy in the permitting program—both program-wide and, in the interim, on a case-by-case basis, and follow up with meaningful, transparent reforms.

Another climate change problem that Interior can address at the permitting stage is the condition of the land after fossil industries pull out. Unlike the “leave no trace” ethic of campers and hikers, wealthy corporations often leave behind a contaminated landscape dotted with abandoned wells and mines, in some cases emitting uncontrolled methane and in other cases throttling the land’s ability to support biodiversity or sequester carbon well into the future. Inadequate bonding requirements—financial commitments to restore the land—and loopholes associated with bankruptcy have allowed fossil fuel companies to get away with this, and it comes at a tremendous cost to taxpayers. The Biden administration recently announced an investment of $16 billion, as part of its infrastructure proposal, to clean up the abandoned mines and orphaned wells left behind by these companies.

Correcting this is an environmental justice lever that has little or no negative impact on the economy yet could save taxpayers billions of dollars and return dividends for communities in the form of jobs and cleaner air and water.

Permits to drill or dig should include near full-cost bonding requirements or other reliable financial assurances that the land can be restored when the industry leaves.

Production: Ensuring good corporate behavior and a fair return to taxpayers

This is where the rubber hits the road, according to all the scientific evidence. While there are levers to slow or stop new fossil fuel development, we ultimately have to transition away from existing production in order to avoid the worst climate impacts to come. Unfortunately for future generations, this is not going to happen overnight no matter how hard we climate advocates push.

What Interior can do, however, is set the stage for a rapid, fair, and just transition away from hydrocarbons. This means insisting that fossil fuel companies provide a fair return to taxpayers and that they act in good faith to improve the health and safety of the communities in which they operate. It means moving transition finance into place so that communities that currently depend on fossil fuel operations are made whole. And it means the Interior Department must pivot its leasing and permitting work force to clean energy projects such as offshore wind and onshore wind and solar developments.

The first step is to ensure a fair return to taxpayers. Right now industry pays pennies on the dollar to extract fossil fuels from federal lands and waters. The royalties they pay to the federal treasury are a small fraction of what they pay to for extraction on state lands such as in Texas or New Mexico. Oil corporations say they should pay low royalties because the federal bureaucracy is a burden for them to deal with. In other words, industry leaders assert that we taxpayers should pay wealthy companies for putting up with the laws to protect our shared public lands. This is as reasonable as paying every motorist for stopping at a red light.

It’s been over 100 years since royalty rates were increased, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year. A study from the Government Accountability Office showed that raising royalty rates may cut production on federal lands, but would nonetheless increase federal revenue, making it a win-win for the land and for the taxpayer. A similar opportunity exists for increasing offshore royalty rates.

The Biden administration should immediately raise onshore and offshore royalty rates to ensure taxpayers are compensated fairly.

The “bad-neighbor” problem, described in the permitting section, in which companies fail to fix the damage they do to federal lands and threaten the health and safety of neighboring communities, can also be addressed at the production stage. In fact, bonding requirements for permits will probably not be adequate to solve the problem alone.

Another means to accrue the funds necessary for restoration and reclamation—and potentially to assist communities in other ways—would be a production fee. For example, New Mexico implemented a fee on oil and gas production to generate the funds to reclaim abandoned wells. The bottom line is that taxpayers should no longer have to pay for the damage to our federal lands inflicted by the oil and gas industry.

Interior should implement a per-barrel fee on oil and gas production on federal lands to create a fund for abandoned and orphaned well clean-up and restoration. These funds may also be made available to communities to smooth the transition to carbon-free energy sources.

Methane leakage from oil and gas operations also requires immediate attention. The release of methane and other volatile organic compounds is endemic to oil and gas operations, threatening health and safety and accelerating warming. Measures to prevent, monitor, and repair such leaks are essential for protecting public health and the environment. In a win-win, they are also good for business, ultimately capturing product that industry can sell.

The Biden administration should immediately restore and strengthen limits on methane emissions, establish requirements for leak identification and repair, and establish a transparent means for evaluating compliance.

Finally, in the context of making people whole, it’s important to acknowledge and optimize the expertise and experience of the Interior Department’s leasing, permitting, and production monitoring workforce. Some argue that the revolving door between industry and these federal positions has led to “regulatory capture”—an undesirable situation in which industry controls the regulatory process. While there is truth to this, and regulatory capture must be addressed in broader Interior Department reforms, this expertise will be extremely useful as the energy economy transforms.

In fact, this is one of the several areas in which the clean energy transition can assure abundant and equivalent job opportunities. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the agency that traditionally manages offshore leasing for oil and gas, has also been permitting offshore wind for over 10 years. That expertise will come in handy for the “whole of government” approach, just announced by the Biden administration, to spur investment in the US offshore wind sector. We should expect a commensurate spike in onshore wind and solar development during the clean energy transition. All of these efforts require the leasing, permitting, and monitoring expertise that Interior is loaded with.

Secretary Haaland can support the energy transition by establishing in-house climate and clean energy training programs to enable a smooth workforce transition. In this way BOEM and the BLM will play essential roles in building America’s energy future around the rapidly growing clean energy sector.

Rowing in the same direction

Secretary Haaland can take action to address the climate crisis and unify the agency behind a common purpose. Some actions will come with more political headaches than others. Some actions will require support from Congress. But the important matter is to ensure the agency is acting in the public interest during what is likely to be a painful transition away from yesterday’s energy sources.

The question will be, how will fossil fuel industries and their political allies respond to this crisis? Will they continue to slow climate action, fund disinformation, and reject the coming transition? Will they rush to lease and drill federal lands before the rules stop them, as they did during the Trump administration? Or will they embrace the opportunity to pivot their business model toward the future, provide jobs, and help frontline communities at risk? I respect the role of those businesses in building the American economy, but I hope they recognize that their social license to operate is in the hands of the people who are struggling each day to make ends meet during a crisis they created.

The Interior Department is an immense agency with abundant human resources to bring to bear on today’s challenges, but it will not be easy to get everybody rowing in the same direction. Secretary Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, brings an abundance of experience, history, and perspective to Interior. She also has the moral standing, land ethic, empathy, and grace to make transformational changes at the agency she leads. With Interior focused once again on its core mission to patriotically protect the lands that sustain us all, we climate action advocates do indeed have reason for optimism.

Last summer, one of us was locked inside their home in the Seattle area, not because of the pandemic, but because the air was full of smoke from fires raging hundreds of miles away in California. The other was peering through an orange afternoon haze for the same reason—thousands of miles away in Maine.

And sadly this was not the first year that a long, heartbreaking wildfire season has had hemispheric consequences, or that the impacts of human-caused climate change have cost lives and livelihoods in America. It was one of the worst, however. Climate impacts in the US cost our economy nearly $100 billion in 2020—almost double the previous year’s costs.

Over the past four years our country has been battered by the advancing impacts of climate change—fires, smoke, floods, droughts, storms, heat. These costly impacts are affecting our health, our homes, our jobs, our communities, and our natural heritage. At a time when climate change impacts have outstripped some of the most dire predictions, the Trump White House relaxed rules meant to slow warming and failed to act in any way to improve our ability to prepare. The inaction of the federal government at that critical time set our nation back in terms of readiness, resources, and resilience.

Much like the present year’s pandemic run amok, climate change was left unchecked with no coherent plan of response at the federal level. One of the reasons President Joe Biden was elected was because his team has a plan for addressing the causes of climate change. It includes rejoining the Paris Accord, addressing methane and CO₂ emissions, and ensuring a just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy as we “build back better.” Addressing the compounding impacts of climate change, however, requires a game plan that has not yet been fleshed out. To address the climate crisis we must restore past adaptation efforts, innovate new ones, and develop a national resilience strategy to organize and guide our efforts in the decades to come.

We need training across all sectors for people eager to understand how they can do their jobs differently in a changing world. We need to compile and share examples of how climate-savvy companies and communities have responded successfully to help others plan for the future. We need to fund and take actions that increase the durability of our frontline communities and communities of color. We need to work with the original inhabitants of our country to support Indigenous knowledge and help foster their resilience.

We need to invest in efforts to protect the forests, rangelands, rivers, and coasts that our economy depends upon. We need better access to the science that supports our decision-making and innovation. We need to change the way we do business in every facet of the economy, with an eye toward reducing risk, increasing resilience, and ensuring equity. And, as the Biden team has pledged to do, we need to invest heavily in climate-smart infrastructure to create jobs and reduce vulnerability to ongoing shocks and stresses. In other words, we need bold, transformational action and investment.

The good news is that we don’t need to start from scratch—and we shouldn’t. Over the past decades, individual communities, organizations, and government programs have been piloting the tools and solutions we need to meet those needs. But the actions of the previous administration over the past four years did nothing but scatter and weaken those resources.

Successful state and local efforts around the country, involving partners from across civil society, were constrained and isolated by lack of federal leadership and coordination. Federal agency programs that were providing climate science tools and advancing adaptation and resilience for frontline communities, Indigenous people, farmers, fishers, and land managers were shuttered, underfunded, or obliged to obfuscate their urgent mission. Outside the government, other entities tried to fill these gaps. For example, the United States hosts the largest adaptation database in the world, but it’s run by a small nonprofit on a shoestring.

For starters, we need to take stock of these existing assets and mobilize them as soon as possible by organizing them into a coordinated climate services infrastructure that serves communities, sectors, and ecosystems across America. At a time when public budgets are strained by the pandemic, this mobilization must be strategic and operate in concert with efforts to address the ongoing public health, social justice, and biodiversity crises. If we want to “build back better” these assets are our foundation.

Such an intersectional effort will require a national resilience strategy that establishes priorities and goals, promotes win-win solutions, and addresses difficult trade-offs. The strategy must feature measurable action steps necessary to reduce risk to our health and safety while safeguarding our natural resources. The strategy will require engagement at all scales and strong leadership from President Biden, who has indeed signaled his intent to focus on all aspects of the climate crisis.

We have lost time by failing to mobilize at the scale the climate crisis requires. Truth be told, we are not just four years behind where we need to be, we’re decades behind. It is imperative, for our economy, our lands, our cities and towns, and our children that we mobilize as we would for a national crisis. The obvious first step is to reinvigorate work that has come before, we have no time to lose by reinventing solutions. The scaffolding of a national resilience strategy will help guide investments and build on the existing capacity that was constructed in the years before the disastrous Trump administration. Let’s get serious about implementing what we’ve already spent time and money developing and testing, while innovating additional approaches to further shorten the pathway to resilience.

The suffering, death, and shocking economic loss caused by the disastrous wildfires, floods, and storms of 2020 reminded us that we have a long path ahead, a path down which we need to travel quickly for our country to thrive through dramatic change. By developing a national resilience strategy and scaling up existing efforts, we will be well on our way down that path to a climate-savvy future.

But the real action wasn’t at the Capitol, or the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The real action was in the Oval Office shortly thereafter, when President Biden started signing executive orders (EOs) and announcing new hires. As a former senior executive and whistleblower at the Interior Department, I was paying close attention to what this would mean for my former agency.

It was a good day for the agency’s mission.

First, the president signed an EO directing all agencies to root out rules and regulations from the previous administration that ran afoul of agency missions and goals—an effort that will take many months, but will course-correct the executive agencies to once again honor science and expertise, and serve the American people rather than Trump’s industry patrons.

At Interior, Biden’s executive order targeted over 30 Trump administration actions that will need to be examined, several of which are simply illegal. The unlawful shrinking of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments will likely be reversed after review, as will the measure to shrink the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.

Putting a stay on the last-minute fire sale of public lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was also a notable move, as the oil and gas leases attracted little attention from bidders but violated process at every turn. In fact the State of Alaska bought most of them for pennies on the dollar, in a bizarre shell game that required the nearly bankrupt state to pony up to avoid an embarrassing non-event, while in the process insulting the Alaska Native communities whose culture depends upon the refuge.

Other shady actions by the previous administration that are likely to be scrutinized include acts to allow logging in critical habitat for the spotted owl in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest; his move to allow logging in the ancient forests of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska; multiple threatened and endangered species findings that ignored science; a new rule, noted as illegal by the courts, letting industry off the hook for killing migratory birds; reducing safety regulations for offshore oil drilling; over nine land use plans that were presided over by a BLM director who was illegally acting in that position; and an effort, modeled after a similar play at the EPA, to censor science at Interior. This is the short version of the list of illegal or inappropriate actions taken by the Trump administration to eliminate protections for lands and waters while encouraging fossil fuel development—and Biden’s team has their eye on all of them.

Speaking of the team, he also announced several new encouraging hires at Interior. In addition to the previously-announced historic nomination of Representative Deb Haaland, a Native American woman from New Mexico, for Secretary of the Interior, he selected Elizabeth Klein, an experienced hand from the Obama administration, as Deputy Secretary, and Laura Davis, another seasoned professional, to lead the Lands and Minerals hallway overseeing the Bureau of Land Management and the offshore oil and gas bureaus.

He hired top-notch people to lead the office of congressional affairs and Kate Kelly, a gifted policy expert from the Center for American Progress, as a deputy chief of staff for policy. Over at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management he hired Marissa Knodel, a whip-smart policy expert from Earthjustice, and for tribal matters he brought on two prominent tribal attorneys and experts, Bob Anderson and Ann Marie Bledsoe Downes, both of whom have done time at Interior before. Other notables who are returning to Interior include Melissa Schwartz as communications director, Janea Scott as counselor to the secretary, Tanya Trujillo for Water and Science, and Shannon Estenoz for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks—all skilled and experienced hands.

There are more announcements to come—and it’s important for the science community to make sure these announcements turn into real action—but this is a super start, and the list is refreshingly female, which is a notable change from the previous administration’s transition team that included only two women. Like the rest of America, I look forward to more good news out of the Interior Department, and might have to hit replay on that national anthem a few more times.

The Arctic is now the epicenter for the administration’s full-on assault on scientific integrity.

In a rush to hand over the iconic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas interests, Trump’s Interior Department has undercut science and federal scientists at every turn. They have minimized and sidelined existing science, altered scientific findings, and twisted themselves in knots to demonstrate that oil and gas development in a world class wildlife refuge would cause no harm. At the Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for the approval process, one employee described the rushed process as confusing and “off the rails.”

In a bizarre twist, the administration ultimately justified their decision to proceed with oil and gas lease sales by noting that climate change impacts are going to be so substantial in the Arctic’s coastal plain that the damage from oil and gas development, by comparison, would have a negligible effect. In other words, the region is done for (due to global fossil fuel extraction, no less), so they should be able to extract whatever riches they can. Try telling that to the Gwich’in people who live in the Arctic and consider the ecologically sensitive region to be sacred.

A desperate rush to drill

If the administration’s strategy had a note of rushed anxiety in the past year, the Biden victory has turned it into a full-on dumpster fire of desperation and greed. Last week they announced that the administration will be accepting nominations from industry partners for where they want to drill in the refuge. This is the first step in preparing a lease sale, which, given the various required public comment periods, would take place on or around January 19, the day before Trump vacates the White House.

They are desperate to lock the federal government into binding contracts for drilling in the refuge. This is the ultimate goal of all their science-busting, and runs counter to their stewardship responsibilities on behalf of all Americans.

A crippling loyalty test

But muzzling scientists and rushing development is not the only way they hope to hobble science in the region. They’re now going after a decidedly non-political entity, the Arctic Research Commission (ARC), an independent agency comprised of presidentially-appointed scientists, experts, and indigenous knowledge holders that develops the national Arctic research strategy and advises the executive and legislative branches on research in the region.

First Trump removed former Alaska Lieutenant Governor and University of Alaska Chancellor Fran Ulmer, a close friend and colleague with impeccable scientific credentials, as Chair of ARC. He then installed a new chair with no Arctic, professional, or research credentials whatsoever, just a bleak and short-lived stint at the State Department in which he was quickly marginalized by his own allies. In addition, the ham-fisted Trump team has said the quiet part out loud by requiring explicit political allegiance for an ARC appointment, and, judging by the utterly unqualified new chair of the commission, that loyalty is the only quality that matters.

The Trump administration is intent on crippling the science enterprise, and in the case of the Arctic, doing so with the maturity of a toddler who breaks his toy when a parent asks him to share.

The good news

The good news is that one qualified individual has been appointed to the ARC and some, though not all, of these measures are easily reversed—rushed and incomplete environmental reviews seldom stand up to legal scrutiny, and ARC appointees serve at the will of the president. What remains is a professional toll on the scientists whose faith in public service and public institutions has been shaken, a cultural toll on the Alaska Natives who have been so poorly served by colonization, and a profound ecological toll on a rapidly transforming part of the world.

The disregard for science and fact-based inquiry is jarring because they are so essential to a functioning democracy. The disregard for the people who work hard on behalf of all Americans is jarring because it has a note of sociopathy that is hard to stomach. The disregard, on behalf of industry patrons, of our nation’s world class ecosystems is jarring because they are throwing a wrench into the planet’s operating system. The disregard for the Arctic’s original human inhabitants is jarring because it is quite likely that their cultural diversity and indigenous knowledge hold the keys to resilience in a rapidly changing region.

Judging by the past few days, there will be more bad behavior in the weeks to come, and January 20 cannot come soon enough.

So when I appeared on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront on April 23, I did not expect to be asked front-page questions. I expected instead to be talking about what the world was experiencing firsthand in the coronavirus pandemic: the tragic effects that come to pass when politicians ignore science. Clearly, the role of science in policy has become an issue of interest to Americans, and Erin and her producers were keenly interested in the risks of ignoring science, and the role of whistleblowers and other civil servant experts who are trying to do their jobs despite political interference.

As a whistleblowing scientist, I had plenty of material to provide, and I was more than ready to bring it to the American living room shortly after the presidential press conference that evening.

That was the plan.

Until, that is, President Trump held forth about miracle coronavirus cures in his incoherent, and now infamous, Lysol and Sunshine speech, where he demonstrated to the world what it looks like when science is not just ignored, but completely undermined by non-expert politicians in full view of the public.

Following up on such a master demonstration of the perils of ignoring science, our conversation on CNN went straight to the nature of the political pressure on scientists and experts, and, of course, whether Dr. Fauci’s job was in danger. These are important issues, and I certainly weighed in on the anti-science agenda of the Trump administration, but as a human being with a beating heart I was still vibrating with indignation at the dangerous ignorance I had just witnessed during the press conference. The president was no longer even trying to hide his disdain for expertise.

L’esprit de l’escalier, or “wit of the staircase,” was a term coined by the French philosopher Denis Diderot to describe all the witty things one wishes they’d said before it was too late.

Here’s what I wish I had said that night on CNN.

First off, no, I do not wish I had addressed the speech directly. I had no desire to bring such ridiculous musings into a substantive conversation about science and policy.

I do wish, however, I had said that accurate and timely scientific advice during a crisis is just as important as food and shelter, and government at all levels should move to to elevate and invest in it, rather than stifle it.

I wish I had said that the coronavirus pandemic is not the only global crisis we face right now. In many ways it is an accelerated version of the climate crisis and the extinction crisis. In the pandemic we are seeing the same patterns of denial and misinformation that we see with the climate crisis, and it striking to see such evidence of betrayal over such a short time frame.

I wish I had said that the culture of fear, censorship, and suppression of science in the Trump administration has compromised one of America’s greatest advantages, its scientific capacity. Trump isn’t just leaving his best players on the sidelines, he won’t let them out of the locker room.

I wish I had said that I was listening earlier in the day to the governor of my home state of Maine, Janet Mills, talk about the very difficult decisions that state leaders will now have to make about how to re-open social and economic life in the state, and the deadly risk of getting it wrong. I wish I’d said that this might not have been necessary if we’d had a strong and timely federal response as recommended by scientific experts months ago.

I wish I’d noted that my current boss at Harvard, Dr. John Holdren, has spoken often of the deeply respectful relationship he had with President Obama during his eight years as the president’s science advisor. His stories about the president’s curiosity and intellectual probing of important scientific matters seem as distant and long ago as Darwin’s voyages.

I wish I’d said that lives are at stake, that right now there are health care workers putting their lives on the line to save those of our friends and family members, and every single one of those individuals deserves the same support that the government provides to the US military forces. Telling dangerous lies about miracle cures does just the opposite—it makes their jobs more dangerous and difficult.

I wish I’d reminded America that, as the T-shirt says, every disaster movie starts with a politician ignoring a scientist.

So no, I don’t wish I’d talked about the specific nonsense of the Lysol and Sunshine Speech, or taken the opportunity to point and laugh at the president. I take no pleasure in highlighting what has clearly become an embarrassment even to him.

What I wish I’d said is that this is exactly what we should have expected. We have arrived at a destination that was a foregone conclusion when we elected a president determined to deliver on an industry-first, anti-science agenda.

And so now, more than ever, it’s time for all of us to rise up and demand that our health, safety, and scientific integrity be taken seriously so we can get back to reducing risk and solving urgent global crises with all the tools, evidence, and personnel at our disposal.

Sabotaging science

Unfortunately it’s no longer just the scientific findings that the Trump administration is trying to sabotage. They’re now going after the very methods that scientists have depended upon for many decades to understand and accurately predict change.

This is not a new tactic. Climate deniers have long tried to demonize scientific models as false and misleading. These arguments don’t get much traction outside of denier echo chambers, largely because it’s well understood in scientific circles that no single statistical or scientific model will be right all the time, but by combining and overlaying lots of them, it is possible to generate very reliable predictions.

Perhaps because of all the scrutiny over the years, climate science has been incredibly effective at developing accurate model-based predictions. A recent assessment of climate model accuracy over the past few decades demonstrated that even the relatively primitive, punch-card driven climate models used 50 years ago were remarkably accurate at predicting what actually transpired, and modern supercomputing methods have of course become far more sophisticated.

Not surprisingly, however, these facts have not deterred the climate deniers who continue to flog the debunked notion that flawed models have predicted a false crisis. Ever eager to please the ideologues in the White House, the political appointees at Interior are following suit.

Putting the blinders on

The first ham-fisted attempt to do so was executed by none other than the Trump-appointed Director of the US Geological Survey (USGS), James Reilly. A former astronaut and geologist, Reilly was expected to be a steadying influence on the twitchy, hair-trigger impulses of the anti-science crowd at Interior. Unfortunately, in June of 2019 he caved to the Trump sycophants by declaring that the USGS—and by extension, the National Climate Assessment—would no longer consider model predictions that go beyond the year 2040, rather than the more customary 2100. This artificial constraint would erase data for the period when climate impacts are expected to be the worst and, due to the length of time that CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere, the time period when immediate climate actions could bring a pronounced positive change.

By putting the blinders on, Reilly was both stifling the bad climate news and suppressing just how important climate action is right now. Reilly was both politicizing and dumbing down his own agency’s science, a move which normally would have cost the USGS Director his job.

This action brought an uproar from the scientific community and it’s not yet clear whether Reilly intends to follow through with his threat.

It was a learning moment for Interior’s political team, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Rather than back off on politicizing science, they learned to let others do the politicizing for them. In a highly unusual move that has invited new controversy, this week the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has decided to use public process in an inventive new way.

A blatant attack on scientific integrity in Alaska’s Arctic Refuge

With all the controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s efforts to permit oil and gas development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, there has been intense scrutiny of Interior’s rushed process to start a leasing program there. First, a badly flawed draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) drew fire from scientists both within and outside Interior for relying on science that was incomplete and outdated, and then the final EIS used circular logic to determine that the ecosystem would be so disturbed by climate change that oil and gas development would not add much incremental damage. Remarkably, the EIS then recommended opening up the entire coastal plain to leasing.

In an effort to catch up with the aggressive push to drill, FWS has led several studies to fill in the missing pieces. One of those is a study of the impacts of seismic testing on denning polar bears. The results will inform the ultimate decision of whether or not to allow seismic testing in the Refuge. Typically this decision would then be subject to public comment.

However, in a Trumpian twist, FWS has invited comment on the science itself:

“We request public comments on the value of the model and the associated methodology described in the peer-viewed scientific manuscript in assisting in the evaluation of the effects of future seismic survey proposals for their potential impacts to maternal polar bear dens.”

Now, to be clear, the scientists at FWS do not need public comments to do their science—they’ve already published peer-reviewed papers on this topic. The only plausible reason for the agency to seek public comment on the study would be to give agency leadership something to point to, on behalf of fossil fuel interests, if they don’t like the scientific results. Not a good look for FWS, and it’s pretty clear that political appointees strong-armed the career staff into this blatant attack on scientific integrity.

This new tactic may be the anti-science crowd grasping at straws, perhaps, but it’s an insult to both the scientific professionals who do the work and the Americans who pay for it. In the rush to serve the needs of the fossil fuel industry, the clumsy political appointees at Interior appear to have entirely forgotten their public service role.

Americans, Alaskans, Alaska Natives, and the world class ecosystems of the Arctic Refuge deserve better.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that USGS director Reilly announced in 2013 that the USGS would no longer consider model predictions that go beyond the year 2040. The correct year is 2019. 

The recent news about the location of the new office in Grand Junction, Colorado, has certainly helped answer that question.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency responsible for multiple-use management of nearly 250 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of underground minerals, the largest land manager in the country, will share a building with Chevron and oil and gas lobbying organizations.

Par for the course

While this has shocked observers, it is par for the course during the Trump administration—a symbolic capstone to the administration’s blatant efforts to hand industry the keys to public lands.

That may be true, but it sure doesn’t make it ok.

The last time the Interior Department got this openly (and literally) cozy with industry was in the years leading up to the Minerals Management Service (MMS) scandal of 2008, when authorities discovered that regulators were doing drugs, exchanging favors, and having sex with their industry counterparts. There were literally no boundaries between industry and the agency—during the ensuing investigation one of the agency executives said “Obviously, we’re all oil industry.”

The ethical lapses of government staff in this instance were flagrant, and the dismissive attitude toward ethics rules was disturbingly similar to what we’re seeing among Interior Department’s political leadership today, so it’s not surprising that we might see similar tendencies.

Complete capture by industry

The phenomenon in which industry has direct access to regulators who promote industry interests over those of the public is known as “regulatory capture.” It is frequently characterized by a revolving door of personnel and often bribery in the form of gifts and favors. It is also really, really hard to fix. Even though the MMS was broken up and reorganized during the Obama administration—which separated the environmental enforcement branch, the offshore oil and gas leasing branch, and the revenue collection branch into separate organizations—the revolving door remains.

I saw this firsthand. When the Trump administration reassigned me in retaliation for blowing the whistle on their climate change neglect, they sent me to the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), one of the three agencies created from the ashes of the MMS. While there I learned two things: a) I know nothing about auditing and b) many staff members have long industry resumes. I have deep admiration for the ONRR executives I worked with, but there is no denying the industry presence in the workforce.

Once regulatory capture infects an agency, it is nearly impossible to eradicate because an agency is understandably tempted to hire people who know the industry from the inside. At the very least, it remains subject to “cultural capture,” in which the agency comes to think like the industry it is charged with regulating.

So now BLM, the onshore equivalent of the MMS, is drifting ever closer to the warm embrace of the industry that wants unfettered access to public lands, our lands. Even if they somehow manage to avoid regulatory capture—and many observers say it’s far too late for that—there is no question that sharing a building will turbo-charge the existing cultural capture. It’s telling that Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, who took political credit for the relocation, has received more oil money for his 2020 campaign than any other US Senator.

Ironically, and laughably, BLM spokesman Chris Tollefson said the move will be effective because it will pull the agency away from all the special interests in Washington, DC—presumably referring to Congress and the other federal agencies that historically partner with BLM. This is just as nonsensical as their assertion that the move will improve operations among BLM offices—none of which are a direct flight from Grand Junction, Colorado, where the new HQ will be located.

A move right out of the Disinformation Playbook

If you think this is an aberration and not part of the administration’s playbook, look no further than the Union of Concerned Scientists excellent Disinformation Playbook and scroll down to play #5, The Fix: Manipulate government officials or processes to inappropriately influence policy. This headquarters relocation is right out of the playbook—and we can expect to see industry pulling the BLM strings more vigorously in the near future.

Secretary Bernhardt has failed to offer compelling justification for the chaotic relocation, and his attempts have been transparently feeble (is it really more effective to have the Congressional affairs staff in Reno, Nevada?). Tellingly, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has praised such relocations as a great tool for getting career staff to quit. That said, the new address for the BLM says all we need to know about the administration’s primary motivation.

Bernhardt is not doing this for the good of the agency, or the public interest. He’s doing it for his industry sponsors. They are delighted that he is delivering the agency into their hands while Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell prevents Congressional oversight by sitting on his. Rather than quietly watch the concept of public service get turned on its head, Representative Raul Grijalva and the House Natural Resources Committee that he chairs are asking hard questions.

It’s time that Secretary Bernhardt takes responsibility for his actions and provides straightforward answers.

Leave it to the Trump administration to detonate this paragon of congeniality. In 2017 they thoroughly pissed off the diplomats from the other seven countries, and embarrassed their own team, by demanding last minute deletions of climate change language from the Ministerial Document – the Arctic Council’s biannual affirmation of ongoing work and priorities. This nearly derailed the entire diplomatic effort, but the other countries, bent on preserving the integrity of the Arctic Council’s famously united front, conceded, and all eight foreign ministers signed the document.

This week, however, they drew the line when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Congressman from the Kansas district that houses the Koch brothers climate-denying headquarters, demanded that no language on climate change or the Paris Climate Agreement be included in the Ministerial Document. That was it; for the first time ever in the history of the Arctic Council, no Ministerial Document was signed at the biannual meeting of the Ministers.

Adding insult to injury

Setting aside the possible effects upon the integrity of the Arctic Council, this level of climate denial was a profound embarrassment to American diplomats and an insult to Arctic residents who are facing ongoing and serious threats due to climate change in the region that is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet.

To add insult to injury, Secretary Pompeo spoke glowingly of Arctic warming, insisting that the loss of sea ice would yield “new opportunities for trade” and otherwise be a boon for Arctic nations.

Let’s have a look at these “opportunities.”

Rapid sea-ice loss is an indicator of warming, and recent studies have shown that Arctic sea ice is at an all-time low. In addition to creating unsafe and deadly conditions for travelers and hunters who rely on thick sea ice in the winter, this also means that coastal villages are exposed to violent winter storms and waves. As the permafrost thaws beneath these coastal villages, the loss of protective sea ice accelerates rapid erosion as villages begin planning for expensive relocations.

What this rate of sea-ice loss implies for the melting rate of Arctic glaciers is also ominous. Research has shown that, regardless of emissions reductions in the coming years, Arctic warming will accelerate until at least mid-century, potentially bringing tipping points for irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This would have dire implications for coastal cities around the world. As the president of the Marshall Islands once said to the premier of Greenland – “If your island melts, mine sinks.” Every coastal city in the world, from Miami to Hong Kong, will pay a huge price if these tipping points are crossed.

As the ice melts at an accelerating rate, permafrost thaw is also accelerating, and will continue to do so until at least mid-century. Scientists tell us that we are likely to lose nearly half of the Arctic’s permafrost in the coming decades, threatening 70% of Arctic infrastructure. Roads, pipelines, airports, buildings, homes, and, in the case of Russia, entire industrial cities will require billions of dollars to preserve or rebuild. To make matters worse, thawing permafrost has the potential to amplify global warming by releasing substantial amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide from the formerly frozen soil. Together with the loss of sea ice, which increases the heat storage capacity of the Arctic and accelerates warming, these phenomena add an ominous signature to the uncertainty surrounding global warming.

What happens in the Arctic affects us all

In the lower 48 states we experience the influence of a warming Arctic year-round. In winter, as shocking heat waves affect the Arctic region, it reduces the temperature differential between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. This slows the jet stream into a wavy meander that can usher polar air and crippling freezes into the mid-latitudes in a phenomenon that’s sometimes called a polar vortex (though technically it’s a disruption of the polar vortex). Such frigid incursions have become unusually frequent—and expensive—in the mid-latitudes. In 2018, the costs were borne by families in New England, but in any given year these events can affect nearly any mid-latitude region.

In other words, warming in the Arctic is amplifying the climate crisis worldwide, at great economic cost. Seven out of the eight Arctic nations are deeply concerned and committed to addressing the problem. The Trump administration and Secretary Pompeo, however, beholden to the fossil fuel industry and embarrassingly ignorant of the economic realities of the climate crisis, do not care. They delude themselves with fever-dreams of economic opportunity that have no basis in reality.

While it is tempting to write this off as just another absurd international Trump administration stunt to please their fossil fuel patrons, Americans cannot ignore the health, safety, and economic threats that this blithe ignorance will cause for people abroad and here at home. While the bar for American leadership has dropped shockingly low, it’s time to demand that our public servants remember who they are meant to serve.

The Trump administration, however, is not concerned about operating within the law, and newly minted Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is exhibit A.

In a hurry to deliver for industry

As a former fossil fuel industry lobbyist, Bernhardt has left no doubt as to his allegiances. Eager to bring quick “wins” for the administration, his handouts to industry came thick and fast as soon as he was first confirmed as Deputy Secretary in 2017. With Secretary Ryan Zinke attracting headlines with his scandals, Bernhardt was free to work behind the scenes, and he wanted his fossil fuel patrons to feel the love. He rushed environmental reviews of leasing programs in Alaska, reversed offshore oil and gas leasing restrictions, and even made BLM staff work during the government shutdown so he could get over 250 new drilling permits approved despite the rest of the agency grinding to a halt.

Rushing ahead with decisions that were neither supported by existing evidence nor properly vetted with the public, Bernhardt at first seemed to be very good at delivering for his industry patrons. He was described as a clever insider who knew how to pull the levers at the agency. It turns out, however, that avoiding required processes and legal scrutiny is not a recipe for ultimate success, and Bernhardt is starting to look more like an impatient grifter than a clever insider as the courts reverse his illegal decisions one after the other and the agency’s Inspector General began an ethics investigation into his actions just days after his confirmation as Secretary.

A dubious legal pretext

Given his preference to skirt the law, it is particularly rich that when asked by Congress why he has deleted climate change policies and refused to address climate change at Interior, he claimed that the law does not require him to do so. Suddenly a strict legal constructionist, Bernhardt referred to the Federal Land and Policy Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA), the law  that gives the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) its multiple-use mandate, and claimed it requires him to maximize energy development.

For reference, here is how FLPMA defines multiple use: “The term “multiple use” means the management of the public lands and their various resource values so that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the present and future needs of the American people;…”

In other words, the law that Bernhardt is hiding behind to avoid addressing climate change prioritizes a consideration of future needs of the American people—needs that even Bernhardt admits will be impacted by climate change.

Rather than maximizing energy development, the FLPMA statement of policy says that public lands shall be managed “in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values; that, where appropriate, will preserve and protect certain public lands in their natural condition; that will provide food and habitat for fish and wildlife and domestic animals; and that will provide for outdoor recreation and human occupancy and use” The FLPMA statement of policy doesn’t even mention energy development.

Ignoring inconvenient science

And while he claims to be very supportive of using the best available science, it apparently only applies when convenient, and certainly not regarding climate change. He has openly ignored, for example, the results of the US government’s 2018 National Climate Assessment, approved by his own agency, which describes the dramatic impacts that climate change is having on the agency’s mission.

In fact, rather than acknowledge the overwhelming science behind climate change, he defended his decision to rescind the agency’s climate change policy—a policy requiring Interior to “effectively and efficiently adapt to the challenges posed by climate change to its mission, programs, operations, and personnel.” It is unclear what about that policy he found inappropriate, and how he could possibly square that with the conclusive science in the National Climate Assessment.

A political appointee in the Trump administration does not get the job because he or she is a visionary or proven leader or law-abiding public servant; they get it because they have demonstrated a willingness to skirt the law, parrot the president, and serve specific special interests rather than the needs of the American taxpayer.

Secretary Bernhardt is a perfect fit for this administration, but a very poor fit for a job in public service. My heart goes out to the career civil servants who are struggling to advance the important mission of the Interior Department, on the behalf of taxpayers, in the face of Bernhardt’s hostility toward that mission.

Take the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the federal government to complete a science-based  Environmental Impact Assessment for any project that might damage the surrounding landscape, endanger wildlife, or cause other environmental harm. This helps ensure the wise use of science to protect our nation’s world-class natural heritage.

Another great law? The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which requires federal agencies to provide copies of federal documents upon request. This helps ensure a transparent government in the public interest.

When federal agencies fail to honor either of these laws, they get sued. But what about when they fail to honor both of those laws…at the same time…intentionally? We may be about to find out, thanks to the latest scandal that emerged this week from President Trump’s Interior Department.

According to documents obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and posted online this week, the Interior Department failed to consider [paywall] more than a dozen internal memos from staff scientists raising scientific and environmental concerns about proposed oil and gas operations in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These were not minor concerns; the memos described significant data gaps for understanding the habitat, and proposed studies that would be necessary to meet regulatory requirements. To make matters worse, the Department refused, when requested via FOIA, to disclose that these important documents even existed.

This failure is striking because the Arctic Refuge is one of the most sensitive protected areas on Earth as well as a sacred area for the Gwich’in people—the agency knew that its activities would be closely scrutinized. Indeed, over the past few decades efforts to drill in this sensitive area were rebuffed by Congress or the president time after time. It took a Republican sweep of the House, the Senate, and the White House to put drilling on the table, and it still required a rider on the 2017 tax reform law to start the process.

For Americans concerned about the environment and environmental justice for Alaska Natives, efforts to industrialize the coastal plain of the refuge would be a disaster. So all eyes were on the process, begun by then-Secretary Ryan Zinke, to quickly get oil and gas leasing underway there.

And yet, in the Trump Administration’s march to drill everything they can while they still can, the environmental review was rushed, incomplete, and by all accounts a cut and paste operation using out-of-date research. While the sloppiness of the work left the review legally vulnerable, the release of these memos suggests this was more than just a slipshod rush-job; it suggests there was an intentional effort to hide scientific findings/concerns that may have slowed down the administration’s rush to drill.

In some ways this is not surprising—the agency is now led by Acting Secretary David Bernhardt, a walking conflict of interest and former oil and gas lobbyist whose micromanaging has bottlenecked everything from science grants to National Park restoration projects. According to one lawsuit already underway, his former clients “began receiving sudden and dramatic windfalls only months since his swearing-in.” Doesn’t sound like a by-the-book guy, but this latest gaffe indicates an even more cynical attitude toward the laws of the land.

Despite the Trump Administration’s numerous depredations of science and the environment, Americans—and Congress—still expect public servants to actually serve the public rather than provide handouts to industry and former clients. Bernhardt and his political staff must explain why they buried important scientific information and then denied its very existence, and face the legal consequences for doing so. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust, and certainly disqualifies Bernhardt from his current role as a public servant.

A bipartisan commission, convened by President Obama in the aftermath of the accident, found that the cause was twofold—lax federal inspection and inadequate safety practices on the part of offshore operators. The Republican Congress approved additional funds to beef up inspections, while the Obama administration implemented the necessary offshore safety requirements in 2016. Everyone hoped that such a disaster would never be repeated.

Enter the Trump administration, and a series of actions intended to weaken these protections on behalf of the oil industry.

Attacks on science and offshore drilling safety

First, they went after the science. In December 2017, the Trump administration halted a National Academy of Sciences study looking at how the Interior Department’s offshore regulating body, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), could improve its offshore inspection practices. BSEE itself had requested the study after the Government Accountability Office criticized BSEE in 2016 for outdated inspection practices. The Interior Department provided no reasoning for cancelling the study, an action that seemed counter to BSEE’s safety-focused mission.

Then in September 2018, at the behest of oil producers, the Interior Department released its proposal for rolling back the offshore drilling safety rules put in place following the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Given the oft-cited struggles of the offshore oil production industry to ensure safe operations, and the Deepwater Horizon as an extremely prominent case study in failure, observers and lawmakers were understandably stunned that the administration would consider such a handout to the oil and gas industry.

A secretive ploy to get around existing safety rules

What observers did not know, however, was that the administration was not waiting for the public comment and review process that is required before the rollback can go into force. Instead, the Interior Department had already been quietly granting hundreds of waivers to the offshore safety rules—with a particular focus on sidestepping the rules regarding blowout preventers, widely understood to be the culprit behind the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

There are no records showing why Interior granted these 1,679 waivers, and the agency hid the existence of the waivers from public view until a Freedom of Information Act request brought them to light. This lack of transparency and disregard for public process has been a hallmark of the Trump administration, and the Interior Department in particular, but the disdain for American health and safety in the wake of the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon disaster takes this neglect to a whole new level.

A disgrace to public service

In a recent report, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented two years of non-stop Trump administration attacks on science and evidence-based policy, demonstrating how agencies are ignoring urgent concerns about climate change and are instead promoting an industry-first agenda.

In stifling the science and then using a secretive ploy to get around existing regulations, the administration is showing its hand once again. They will stoop to anything to serve their industry masters, even if it means putting American workers at risk, compromising the marine and fishing economies, and hastening the dramatic impacts of climate change.

Do you remember the Deepwater Horizon disaster? The fishermen of the Gulf of Mexico remember; the scientists who studied the spill’s impacts on birds and animals remember; the beach towns along the coast remember.

The families of the 11 men killed in the explosion remember.

For trying to get us to forget, for muzzling science, and for secretly undermining safety protections, this administration is a disgrace to public service.

As one of the senior executives he targeted for a purge early on in his tenure, I admit that the headlines about his demise have been a lift for me. As a climate policy advisor in particular, I want to see him gone.

There’s this little problem, however.

This isn’t about Ryan Zinke

Sure, he was the figurehead at Interior, the face of the Trump administration, and yes, he truly struggled with ethics issues. His old-boy, I-can-do-no-wrong attitude only carried weight among his old-boy brethren, but it was grating to the rest of us nonetheless.

He was thoughtless and dismissive of both the rules of the road and the career staff that served under him. He oversaw relentless attacks on science, as we documented earlier this month in the report Science under Siege at the Department of the Interior. His unique combination of arrogance and ignorance of the mission of the agency left a bipartisan host of observers rolling their eyes and scanning their calendars, betting on how long he’d last. He was a classic “all hat, no cattle” cowboy with false swagger.

But when it came to policy and practice, Zinke was just reading the script that was handed to him. His ignorance of the mission actually served him well by preventing him from getting crosswise with the fossil-fuel-industry authors of his workday script.

It’s not a complicated script; any actor can memorize the lines. It demands that the Interior Department reverse the policies of the previous administration and hand the keys to our public lands over to fossil fuel interests. It demands that the agency marginalize scientists and experts and demote the role of science and evidence in policy decisions. It demands ignorant, jingoistic replies to questions about the rapid climate change that is affecting every facet of the mission of the Interior Department. It demands the shrinking and hollowing out of the agency workforce and reducing public trust in the agency’s crucial efforts to fairly balance the use of our public lands for the public good.

Under Secretary Zinke, the  Interior Department marginalized scientists and experts and demoted the role of science and evidence in policy decisions. Photo: Department of Interior

The script remains the same

Zinke is headed for the exit, stage right, but the script is not going to change. The man who is most likely to slip into the lead role next is Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, a backroom operator and former oil and gas lobbyist who is no stranger to scandal, controversy, and conflicts of interest himself. He’s not a showboat like Zinke, and is careful to avoid putting anything in writing, qualities that will make him more effective and less of a lightning rod than his former boss or his new one.

In other words, Congress and the courts must not let their guard down as Zinke slips away in a cloud of scandal. Absolutely nothing of substance will change once he’s gone.

The good news, of course, is that the new Democratic majority in the House will be bringing oversight to the agency for the first time in this administration, and the courts are already wise to the Trump administration’s clumsy efforts at deregulation.

It’s time for some real leaders

Deregulation is just one element of the script, however. Far more pernicious and long-lasting are the efforts to hollow out the workforce. It will take years to replace the institutional knowledge and capacity that is being liquidated as this administration uses reassignments, buyouts, intimidation, and retaliation to shrink the workforce.

It will take years for the department to get back to effectively enforcing laws and policies that protect wildlife and habitat, that address the well-being of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and that support our legendary national parks. It will take years to re-boot a science enterprise that has been cowed and marginalized by political appointees who don’t know cheatgrass from palm trees. And of course it will take years to re-institutionalize the capacity for the agency to address a rapidly changing climate—in the meantime putting American health and safety at risk.

The Interior Department does very important work that affects us all. Rather than treating the agency as a political football and putting people out of work, it’s past time for some real leaders to inspire the agency to adapt quickly to a changing stage. This can’t be done if the actors keep reading the same script.

Fin.

This is a tough time to be a federal scientist—or any civil servant in the federal government. The Trump administration is clamping down on science, denying dangerous climate change and hollowing out the workforces of the agencies charged with protecting American health, safety and natural resources.

At the Department of the Interior (DOI), with its mission to conserve and manage America’s natural and cultural resources, the Trump administration’s political appointees are stumbling over one another to earn accolades for disabling agency operations. I should know; I was one of dozens of senior executives targeted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for reassignment in a staff purge just six months into the new administration.

From that day onward, Zinke and his political staff have consistently sidelined scientists and experts while handing the agency’s keys over to oil, gas and mining interests. The only saving grace is that Zinke and his colleagues are not very good at it, and in many cases the courts are stopping them in their tracks. The effects on science, scientists and the federal workforce, however, will be long-lasting.

A damning report

In a new report, Science Under Siege at the Department of the Interior, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has documented some of the most egregious and anti-science policies and practices at the DOI under Secretary Zinke. The report describes suppression of science, denial of climate change, the silencing and intimidation of agency staff, and attacks on science-based laws that help protect our nation’s world-class wildlife and habitats.

It is a damning report and required reading for anyone who values public lands, wildlife, cultural heritage, and health and safety.

It would be impossible to cover everything this clumsy political wrecking crew is up to, but the report provides details on the most prominent actions that deserve greater scrutiny, such as: the largest reduction in public lands protection in our nation’s history; a systematic failure to acknowledge or act on climate change; unprecedented constraints on the funding and communication of science; and a blatant disregard for public health and safety.

Why is this administration so scared of science? Why cancel a study into the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining so soon after lifting a moratorium on coal leasing on public lands? Why keep scientists from speaking with the press? Because, while science provides the best evidence we have for making policy decisions that serve the broader public, Ryan Zinke has been very clear that he is in office to serve the oil, gas and mining industries, not the general public.

The attacks on science never stop

It is challenging to keep up with the relentless attacks on science coming from Secretary Zinke and his team of political appointees. Since the finalization of UCS’s report, we have seen Secretary Zinke blame “radical environmental groups” as the cause of wildfires, with no mention of climate change, which scientists know is creating the conditions for bigger, hotter, more ferocious fires. Like President Trump, he continues to suggest that poor forest management is the real reason for the deadly fires, regardless of whether they occur in suburbs or shrublands, far from federally managed forests. His ignorance of science is perhaps only surpassed by that of his boss.

It has also recently come to light that DOI has taken steps to roll back protections for individuals impacted the most by the agency’s anti-science actions. In November, it was reported that DOI rescinded two environmental justice policy memos that were put in place over 20 years ago to reverse decades of environmental racism and the marginalization of low-income communities. This is an affront to Native American communities suffering from the ongoing impacts of fossil fuel development.

Zinke’s disdain for science was on display again the day after Thanksgiving, when the Trump administration quietly released two groundbreaking climate reports that featured the work of DOI scientists: the 2018 National Climate Assessment (NCA) and a report on the greenhouse-gas emissions produced from fossil fuel development on federal lands. The NCA describes a stark future for the United States if climate change is left unchecked: destructive sea-level rise, long-lasting droughts, infectious disease outbreaks and crippling economic costs. The federal lands emissions report pointed out that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels produced on federal lands represent nearly 24% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. These are vitally important reports sounding a clarion call that climate action on federal lands is essential to the safety and well-being of the American public.

How did Zinke respond? With the standard anti-science lies being trotted out by Trump and others in the administration. Like his colleagues, Zinke claimed that the NCA was based only on extreme scenarios, when in fact it considered a broad range of emissions scenarios; he also claimed that the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) at DOI had “concerns” with the NCA when in fact dozens of USGS staff, as well as scientists from other DOI bureaus, were co-authors and contributors to the report. Apparently he didn’t have time to get to the other administration talking point about how climate scientists are just trying to get rich off of their work—a laughable assertion for anyone familiar with the compensation afforded to scientists who volunteer to contribute to such reports. He had nothing at all to say about the federal lands emissions report that was produced entirely within DOI.

A desecration of public service

It is a desecration of the concept of public service for Zinke to ignore science aimed to protect the public’s best interest, and an insult to the taxpayers who pay his salary and those of his political colleagues. Zinke won’t be around forever, but he has filled the ranks of political appointees at DOI with like-minded industry lobbyists and climate deniers, so things are not likely to change at Interior anytime soon unless Congress, with a vocal public behind it, insists on transparency, scientific integrity and immediate climate action.

America’s public lands, and the natural and cultural resources they contain, belong to all of us. It is astounding that a small group of ideologues thinks they can hand these resources, and the agencies that manage them, over to industries eager to carve them up for private profit. To do so with blithe disregard for the impact upon our planet’s operating system is careless and dangerous, and we must demand better.

In addition to the comprehensive new report, UCS is providing resources and support for Americans eager to fight for science in our democracy while supporting federal scientists under siege. A new Congress will soon be asking harder questions and holding DOI leadership accountable for its actions. We can make it much harder for Zinke and his colleagues to run roughshod over the agency at the expense of our health, our safety, our heritage and our shared public lands.

But the NCA4 was not the only report the administration tried to release without fanfare that day.

Secretary Ryan Zinke’s Department of the Interior also released a groundbreaking new report from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) titled “Federal Lands Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sequestration in the United States: Estimates for 2005-2014.”

The title is innocuous, but the report is not. Despite decades of conflict over how our public lands should be used, never before had federal scientists been asked to generate estimates of the role these lands play in global warming.

Now we have our answer, and it’s shocking.

Coal mining in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Photo: James St. John/Flickr

24% of US carbon dioxide emissions come from public lands

Employing a transparent and rigorous methodology, federal scientists used federal data to answer two important questions. First, how much of our total national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are coming off of federal lands and offshore areas? Second, how much carbon do those same federal lands store in their ecosystems?

The answer to the first question is that on average, 24 percent of our national carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions came from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels that originate on public lands and offshore areas. In other words, the coal and oil and natural gas that is extracted from public lands, regardless of where it is used or burned, was responsible for nearly a quarter of our national CO₂ emissions. The percentage for methane, an even more potent GHG, was over 7%.

All we have to do is look around the world to see how significant these numbers are. If the 2014 CO₂ emissions total from America’s public lands was inserted into a list ranking overall CO₂ emissions by country for 2015, it would be fifth on the list—higher than Japan and only slightly lower than Russia!

Fossil fuel-associated emissions of greenhouse gases from federal lands. Credit: USGS

The report didn’t stop there however. It also broke down the emissions by state. Of course some states have far more federal land than others, but it is still shocking to see that Wyoming generates some 57 percent of all GHG emissions from federal lands—a reminder of just how much pollution is generated by the coal that comes out of the Powder River Basin and elsewhere in Wyoming.

The second part of the study reported on the carbon that is stored in federal land ecosystems. Public lands are important carbon storage “sinks,” as carbon is sequestered in forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems. The study indicated some of the “hotspots” of carbon storage, such as the peat soils of North Carolina and the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, and demonstrated the importance of natural systems as carbon storehouses. A recent study showed that our forests and wetlands have immense potential to store additional carbon if managed carefully, and we now have a means to track our progress on that front.

Science under siege at the Department of the Interior

This new report provides USGS and land managers with the evidence they need to measure how policies can help reduce our emissions and increase carbon sequestration in forests and soils and other natural systems. By regularly updating these data, federal scientists can continue to guide and evaluate policies that reduce risk to public lands and the ecosystems we depend upon.

The information in this report is essential for developing smart climate policies as we reel from the grim news contained in the NCA4–and its findings are made even more urgent by the recent news that global carbon emissions continued to increase—dramatically—in 2018.

Unfortunately, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and the Trump administration are instead dismissing the evidence and making it easier, not harder, to drill for oil and gas on public lands. This fits a pattern of ignoring and attacking science when it does not suit their industry agenda, and will have the inevitable effect of ramping up global warming emissions from public lands and pushing us down a dangerous path toward increasingly catastrophic climate impacts.

The numbers and trends disclosed by this report will be essential to measuring and guiding our way to better health and safety in the decades ahead. But until we have responsible leadership in the executive branch, we must demand that Zinke and his colleagues do the job they were hired to do—use the best available information to effectively steward our shared public lands. Anything less is an insult to the notion of public service.

For more, see our new report, Science Under Siege at the Department of the Interior: Our Health, Parks, and Wildlife at Risk.  

The US Geological Survey (USGS), the lead science agency within the US Department of the Interior, published a report in April with an ominous headline: “Many Low-Lying Atoll Islands Will Be Uninhabitable by Mid-21st Century.” The study concluded that due to rising sea levels, flooding, and salt-water intrusion into aquifers there will be no potable water on thousands of islands in the Pacific “no later than the middle of the 21st century,” rendering those islands uninhabitable. Thirty to forty years from today, entire island cultures may have to leave their homelands for good because we have burned too much fossil fuel.

In the meantime, they urgently need assistance to adapt to rising seas, build resilience, and develop the infrastructure that could save lives and livelihoods before and during relocation. Ironically, the Interior Department, the agency that released this study, stands in the way of the assistance these islands so desperately need.

The USGS study, a collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of Hawaii, and other partners, was funded by the Department of Defense, an agency that has become increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change upon national security. The research took place on an atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a country that was tragically irradiated by American nuclear weapons testing in the 1940s and 50s. A series of international agreements since those years have attempted to provide adequate restitution for the people of the Marshall Islands, with little success. The current agreement is a “Compact of Free Association” that was enacted into law by Congress in 1986 and has been periodically updated.

Under this Compact, the United States agreed to provide the Marshall Islands with security and defense as well as financial assistance. The Interior Department is the agency charged with overseeing the grant assistance and aid to meet a variety of needs, including health, education, infrastructure, and disaster preparedness.

This recent study from the Interior Department has dramatically raised the stakes for those badly-needed resources, particularly for addressing resilience and disaster preparedness. Until now, the Marshallese thought they had until the end of this century before their homeland could be uninhabitable. This report shows that they may have far less time to adapt, and they urgently need the American assistance that has been promised.

Unfortunately, Secretary Ryan Zinke’s agency has eliminated all climate change language from Interior’s strategic plan, censored press releases and deleted references to climate change on agency websites, promoted amateurish climate denial literature, and advanced an aggressive fossil fuel agenda despite its role in accelerating climate change. To make matters worse, the Assistant Secretary for Insular Affairs, the person responsible for overseeing the Interior Department’s assistance to the Marshall Islands, is a protégé of Charles and David Koch, the oil billionaires best known for funding misinformation campaigns to undercut efforts to address climate change.

The political leaders at the agency have staked out a position contrary to established scientific evidence and in denial of the problem the Marshall Islanders face with every high tide.

The implications of this study go well beyond the Marshall Islands. While there are over a thousand low-lying islands in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, there are thousands more elsewhere in the Pacific and Indian oceans. As the report states, “These findings have relevance not only to populated atoll islands in the Marshall Islands, but also to those in the Caroline Islands, Cook Islands, Gilbert Islands, Line Islands, Society Islands, Spratly Islands, Maldives, Seychelles, and Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.”

Climate change poses the very same threat to Alaska Native villages as permafrost melts beneath their feet and waves devour meters of land each year. For this reason, Alaska Natives and Marshall Islanders have frequently participated together on climate change panels—including one that I organized during the climate negotiations in Paris in 2015. In my view, bearing witness to their stories and the risks they face in these places is essential to understanding the true threat of climate change.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen firsthand that Secretary Zinke and the Trump Administration have chosen to turn a blind eye to these dangers. How much suffering and loss of life and property will snap these ideologues out of their fossil fuel fever dream?  At what point along the arc of disaster will they wake up to their responsibilities as public servants?

At least the scientists at Interior are on the job. The USGS paper released in April was an important addition to the scientific literature describing the real risks of climate change. “Such information is key to assess multiple hazards and prioritize efforts to reduce risk and increase the resiliency of atoll islands’ communities around the globe,” said lead author Curt Storlazzi of the USGS.

This is exactly what Interior must now do—assess risk and prioritize urgent resilience investments. To do so Secretary Ryan Zinke and his team must acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real, it’s dangerous, and it’s human-caused.  As the head of the U.S. delegation at the Pacific Islands Forum, Zinke must respect the lives and livelihoods of Pacific Islanders by promising to address climate change and its consequences head-on.

Survey says: Nope.

Today the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released the results from their periodic survey of scientific professionals at federal agencies, and the results from the Department of Interior (DOI) are damning. Not only do the responses indicate plummeting morale, job satisfaction, and agency effectiveness, but politics is now being felt significantly at the US Geological Survey, a non-regulatory scientific bureau at DOI that has historically operated without substantial political interference. In all, concerns about political interference, censorship of politically contentious issues, and workforce reductions at DOI are higher than most other agencies.

The comments from the survey read like an organizational leadership seminar’s list of fatal flaws: Hostile workplace, check; fear of retaliation and discrimination, check; self-censorship, check; poor leadership, check; chronic understaffing, check. To make matters worse, the political leadership at Interior, led by Secretary Ryan Zinke, has a deserved reputation for barring career staff from decision-making processes.

In addition to the undue influence of political staff, the top concern from DOI scientific staff was lack of capacity. One respondent commented: “Many key positions remain unfulfilled, divisions are understaffed, and process has slowed to a crawl.”

As a former career civil servant at Interior I can attest to the plummeting morale at the agency—even before I resigned in October 2017 there was a pall over every office and bureau and career staff were feeling completely ignored by Trump administration officials. This led to some very bad decisions from Zinke, but that has not led to greater inclusion—in fact, team Zinke has continued to alienate career staff and seems to be betting that they will remain silent.

Some good investigative journalism and a lot of Freedom of Information Act disclosures have shown that only industry representatives get meetings with the top brass, decisions are made without input from career staff, censorship (especially of climate change related science) is on the upswing, science is routinely ignored or questioned, and expert advisory boards are being ignored, suspended, or disbanded.

All of this adds up to an agency that is being intentionally hollowed out, with consequences for American health and safety and for our nation’s treasured lands and wildlife. Americans are clamoring for more information on how their businesses, lands, and communities can address the climate impacts they see all year round—but DOI scientists responding to the survey pointed to how Zinke is slowly shutting down the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC) that deliver that information. Congress provided Zinke with the money to keep growing the LCC’s, but he continues to let them wither on the vine just as they are providing important and timely support for communities in need.

As the Federal Trustee for American Indians and Alaska Natives, Interior should be expected to support tribes and villages in need of resources and capacity for relocating or addressing dramatic climate change impacts, but Zinke is leaving them to fend for themselves despite a bipartisan call to get them out of harm’s way.

As the land manager for America’s most treasured landscapes, Interior is expected to be an effective steward of our National Parks and other areas dedicated to conservation, recreation, and the protection of wildlife habitat. Instead, Zinke ordered the largest reduction in conservation lands in our nation’s history when he shrunk Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument by nearly half. Scientists responding to the survey referred to these decisions as lacking scientific justification. Thanks to recently disclosed documents and emails, we now know that science was pushed aside and the real reason for shrinking the Monuments was to encourage oil and gas extraction in those locations, despite Zinke’s emphatic statements to the contrary. The most damning evidence? The new maps for these shrunken Monuments match the maps that industry lobbyists provided for him. This is yet another insult to the American Indians for whom this area is sacred.

While this is consistent with the Administration’s goal of hobbling federal agencies and opening the door for industry donors, it is not consistent with the use of taxpayer dollars to protect national assets and address health and safety needs, and it is not consistent with the role of public servant. The UCS survey results are a damning indication of the depth of dysfunction that Ryan Zinke has fostered at Interior, and it is essential that Congress implement its important oversight role to prevent the rot from spreading still further.

Secretary Zinke does not like what they found.  

The report painted a picture of incompetence, discrimination, and political retaliation. It described how the board that made the reassignment decisions was politicized, how they covered their tracks by keeping no records, and how they failed to “remember” anything about their instructions or motivations. The report described a sham of a process that was clearly intended as a purge. 

As if intent on demonstrating just how Zinke would be leading the agency, his team checked every box for poor workplace management. It was so damning that House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Raul Grijalva, immediately smelled a rat and has requested that Chairman Rob Bishop hold a hearing immediately “on the disturbing findings.” This story is not yet over. 

As one of the reassigned executives, I had a front row seat to this debacle last summer. Now, to be clear, every new administration moves a few senior executives around for various reasons when they take over, but no agency from any administration has come in and reassigned dozens of career senior executives at one time, and certainly not with such apparent intent to dislodge us from the civil service entirely.  

To do this they moved people into jobs unrelated to their area of expertise, many were moved across the country, they were reassigned without any prior consultation, many of them were retirement age, most had families, and a very disproportionate number of them were American Indians.  

So for starters, this was just horrible workplace management.  

But then Secretary Ryan Zinke, the only Senate-confirmed employee at DOI at the time, testified to Congress the following week that he would use such reassignments, along with attrition and other means, to trim the DOI workforce by 4,000 people.  

As any thoughtful individual would surmise, reassignments only trim the workforce if they cause employees to quit, and while senior executives can certainly be moved, even involuntarily, it’s unlawful to use reassignments to get employees to quit. Zinke admitted his unlawful strategy directly to Congress that day. 

We work for the American people. We are not there to play politics for any president or cabinet member. Yet Secretary Zinke last year demanded loyalty to President Trump and effectively pledged to get rid of employees who wouldn’t play along.   

Knowing all that, I was still stunned by what the IG found. 

The Executive Resources Board (ERB), the body making the reassignment decisions, is meant to consist of an equal number of political appointees and civil servants. The IG found that the Zinke ERB consisted only of recent political appointees.  The board did not document any sort of plan or reasons for selecting executives to reassign; it did not review executive qualifications or gather other information necessary to make such decisions; and it did not communicate with either the executives or their managers before make the reassignments.

There was a complete absence of a paper trail for the reassignment actions – a remarkable and reckless approach to governing that can only suggest that they did not want their reasons known.  

The IG even caught them in a lie. ERB members claimed that they had three criteria for moving executives – moving people that had been in their jobs for a long time, moving people out of Washington DC, and moving people to new functional areas. The IG found no evidence at all to show that they evaluated the reassignments against those stated criteria, and the ERB members were unable to recall the criteria that they ultimately used instead. 

While the IG certainly found the ERB members to be incompetent and unable to remember even the broadest details of their efforts, it would be naïve to think that this was simply a matter of incompetence. If they had legitimate reasons for moving us around, you can bet they would have recorded them. Instead, these actions can only be interpreted as malicious, retaliatory, and discriminatory. 

But when the IG asked the executives themselves, the criteria became quite clear. Seventeen of us indicated that the reassignment was likely political retaliation or punishment, and 12 of us felt that that it was probably related to former work on issues such as climate change, energy, and conservation. This ERB was not even subtle about its objectives – they moved me, the climate policy advisor, to the office that collects and disperses oil and gas royalty income. 

Behind this keystone cops display lurks a dogged determination to reward supporters and purge the agency of senior executives who might not salute the Secretary’s flag. To accomplish this they assembled their ERB hit squad of six political appointees who could be relied upon to sign off on whatever the political leadership decided. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that would more clearly demonstrate a politicization of the civil service workforce. 

This is a long-established no-no; there are important reasons to keep the civil service partitioned from the political winds and whims of each new administration. The mission of the agency depends on operational consistency in administering programs and services. While every incoming administration would love to bend the career ranks to their every wish, they generally know better than to try, and there are laws and regulations to prevent it. 

The Trump Administration just doesn’t know better, and the consequences are serious.  

In addition to muzzling science and stifling important climate change efforts on behalf of Americans, this purge adds up to political retaliation, discrimination, wasted taxpayer dollars, and a callous disregard for the career staff at the agency. Thankfully, some good folks in Congress have taken notice and I hope to see a deeper examination of these issues in the near future. Each of the ERB members should be forced to testify, on the record, that they just don’t remember how or why they reassigned us. This precedent can’t stand. 

I’ve left federal service for now, but my thoughts go out to all of the career folks who still have to endure this type of work environment, keeping their heads down and wondering who’s next. I hope our institutions can stand up to these abuses of power so they can get back to work serving the American people. 

I should not have been surprised.

I was only one of the 33 senior executives Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reassigned that night last June, and recently-released internal DOI documents that I requested months ago (and had to sue the agency to obtain) have shown that nearly half of the reassigned senior executives were minorities, a disproportionate number of them were women, and a full third of them were American Indian, as recently reported in Talking Points Memo.

This is appalling for many reasons, and not least because Interior plays an important role as the federal trustee for American Indians and Alaska Natives, (who, incidentally, make up 10% of the Interior workforce). For this reason there are special rules that provide an Indian preference in hiring for some positions, government-to-government consultation policies that require special effort to seek out and incorporate input from Tribes and Alaska Natives, and a long list of programs and activities—including my work with the Alaska Natives facing climate impacts—dedicated to their well-being.

Secretary Zinke, notoriously ignorant of the DOI mission, was briefed on these issues. During his address to all employees on day one of his new job as Secretary he included “American Indian sovereignty” as one of his top three priorities. Several weeks later, however, he inexplicably dropped this item from his list of top priorities and from his talking points when he addressed us at Interior headquarters once more. The anti-Indian tilt in last June’s mass reassignment action was just another insult to the American Indians that work for him.

Zinke wasn’t done insulting American Indians yet, though. In December, 2017 he traveled to Utah with President Trump to tell Americans that they were going to enact the largest reduction of protected lands in American history by shrinking the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments. This announcement was a slap in the face to the leadership of the four primary tribes who had advocated for protecting Bears Ears, a sacred area with one of the highest concentrations of archeological sites in the world. Subsequent document disclosures have shown that Zinke lied when he said there was no connection between this action and the oil and gas industry’s ambitions in the region.

Zinke’s neglect of the agency’s responsibilities toward American Indians and Alaska Natives even extends to grant programs that are meant to directly serve struggling tribal communities. The Tribal Resilience Grant Program was one of the few programs intended to help tribal communities specifically address their own resilience in the face of a changing climate and other threats, and he has refused to disperse the dollars that Congress has appropriated for this program. In 2017 DOI declined to announce a request for proposals, and the dollars still languish at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It remains to be seen if Zinke will be held accountable for this illegal act—known as impoundment—and forced by Congress to disperse those dollars in 2018.

While he seems to have it out for Indians in particular, Zinke has made no effort to prioritize diversity more generally. He was recently quoted as saying “I don’t care about diversity” and a recent scan of the DOI website found that the pages on diversity training have been cut back and in some cases eliminated.

It’s no secret that the Federal Government is a perennial laggard on workplace diversity—79% of Federal senior executives are white, for example—but at the Interior Department, the numbers of employed minorities are staggeringly low. Black representation at DOI is 5.6%, the lowest of any cabinet agency. Every Administration in recent memory has made efforts, some better than others, to improve these abysmal numbers, until now. It was almost comical, in a sad way, when Zinke’s spokesperson boasted that Zinke clearly cared about diversity because he had appointed two women and an African American to senior positions. Interior has 70,000 employees.

With his statements and actions, Secretary Zinke is stoking concerns that this administration is actively rejecting minorities and discriminating against American Indians and Alaska Natives, and that the 30% of his employees who belong to a minority will be singled out. Congressional staff have even speculated about which employees Zinke was referring to when he stated that 30% of DOI’s career staff are not “loyal to the flag” and one member of Congress has suggested that Zinke seeks to create a “lily-white Department”.

Until now, the media and public discourse has focused on Zinke’s efforts to stifle science, break down the agency, and hand public lands over to his oil and gas cronies. Certainly these actions will have direct consequences for American health and safety and the protection of our natural legacy. Compounding the mission failure, however, these recent revelations about Zinke’s discriminatory actions and lack of support for diversity in the workplace will have direct and tragic consequences for how one of America’s biggest federal agencies serves its employees, American Indians, and the American people.

It’s impossible to know what Zinke’s intentions are, but it’s clear that his actions are having a deleterious effect on the agency’s diversity, morale, and effectiveness. Rather than dismissing diversity and demeaning American Indians, Secretary Zinke should step up efforts to increase diversity and show that he is proud to serve and support the people who were making America great for millennia before the white man arrived.