Owl in America || December 3, 2024

Notes from an American environmentalist

“Owl in America” is a series of letters chronicling the next four years from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. Practicing conservation and public-lands law during the first Trump administration was an exercise in hope and dogged persistence amidst the ever more effective demolition issuing forth from Washington, D.C. Much ground was lost, only some of which was regained during Biden’s four-year term. This time around, I’m taking notes.

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Measuring the diameter of an old-growth cedar during a field visit to a federal forest managed by the Bureau of Land Management in western Oregon; author photo

Hi all~

I hope everyone had a restful weekend, and for the Americans among you, that you enjoyed the holiday and connected with loved ones.

I suppose it was too much to hope that the Trump circus would take a few days off. More political appointments have come down the pike, along with added pronouncements and analysis regarding plans for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

After several days of speculation, Trump did indeed nominate Russell Vought to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as budget director. Vought was one author of Project 2025 and has made it an explicit goal to defund and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A few weeks ago, The Guardian reported on Vought’s plans for the beleaguered and hardworking Americans who serve us at the EPA:

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

“We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

OMB is one of those bodies that doesn’t make many headlines but wields great power in how the federal government is administered. Vought headed the OMB during Trump’s first term, and with Project 2025’s “180 Day Playbook” transition plan, wants to hit the ground running on efforts to defund and declaw agencies he says place “burdensome” requirements on businesses—“burdens” like not poisoning America’s air, waters, lands, wildlife, and human residents.

Among those efforts will be attempts to reduce staffing by career civil service employees. These are the folks who retain institutional knowledge and carry on the work of regulation and environmental protection regardless of who is president. Removing these people—most of whom hew more closely to the agency’s mission than to party loyalism—requires removing civil service protections so that long-term employees may be more easily fired and loyalists installed. The first Trump administration’s attempt at this was an executive order referred to as “Schedule F”; Biden rescinded it, but Trump has said he’ll reinstate it “on day one.”

Roll Call notes that under Vought’s plan:

in the first year of implementation, nearly every domestic agency would see double-digit appropriations cuts: a 54 percent reduction at the National Science Foundation, 45 percent to the State Department and foreign assistance, 43 percent at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 40 percent to the Labor Department and more.

Vought also plans to work closely with the advisory council (Musk and Ramaswamy) at DOGE to implement proven strategies to force career employees to leave on their own. Musk has of course field-tested some of this after taking over Twitter, with reports that staff attrition there has reached over 60% since he acquired the company. He also said he would force employees to show up for in-person work (despite increases in employee satisfaction and productivity under a hybrid in-person/remote schedule) and moved the company’s offices from San Francisco to Texas, in the knowledge that many employees would refuse and quit or be fired.

It’s reminiscent of Trump’s first term, when he moved the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, during Biden’s term, relocated the HQ back to Washington, but not before agency leadership was hollowed out. Only around one tenth of affected staff moved to Colorado under Trump, and the agency still has not fully recovered.

The BLM manages almost half of all federal public lands, which is equivalent to 10% of all land in the U.S.; it also administers about 30% of the nations “minerals”—including oil and gas. Conveniently, the Trump BLM’s new Colorado headquarters were sited within a leased floor of offices in a building which also, according to Colorado Public Radio, “house[d] a corporate office for Chevron, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, as well as a company in the natural gas exploration business.”

William Perry Pendley, who illegally headed the BLM during Trump I and oversaw the relocation, is a self-described “sagebrush rebel” who believes public lands should be turned over to states or sold off; he authored the public-lands chapter of Project 2025.

His contribution to Project 2025 includes plans to return the BLM leadership to Colorado. He also wants to reverse Biden’s commitment to preserving 30% of America’s lands and waters by 2030, and remove land protections that prevent drilling and mining in ecologically sensitive areas. Michelle Nijhuis has a recent piece in High Country News that is well worth reading for a deeper dive into the implications.

Fossil-fuel ally billionaire Doug Burgum has been tapped to lead the Interior Department, which oversees the BLM. I have not seen a proposed nomination for BLM head yet. The Senate never confirmed William Perry Pendley for BLM leadership during Trump’s first term. He illegally ran the agency for over a year before a federal judge threw him out in 2020. Presumably, he’d be confirmed this time around, should Trump nominate him again.

Project 2025 also suggests moving the Environmental Protection Agency out of D.C., with a similar attrition of career staff almost certain to follow. This, combined with a Vought-controlled Office of Management and Budget that will be working hard to defund the agency, is sure to lead to a reduction in regulatory and enforcement actions that are sorely needed in our current climate, biodiversity, and pollution polycrisis.

A quick glance through my legal updates from the last two weeks gives a snapshot of the kinds of things EPA is working on at any given time:

• EPA proposes a partial ban on a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, that has been proven—even at the low levels found in residues on foods—to damage babies’ and children’s brains and nervous systems.

• EPA proposes new limits on formaldehyde, a widely used chemical that, among air pollutants, is by far the most likely to cause cancer, particularly myeloid leukemia.

• EPA proposes new stormwater pollution limits for three Boston-area watersheds.

• EPA releases national strategy to prevent plastic pollution with the stated goal of ending plastic pollution of the U.S. environment by 2040.

• EPA announces the availability of thousands of records on its review of pesticide research to be available in a public portal with access for anyone.

• EPA finds a common chemical used in tire manufacture, 1,3-butadiene, poses an unreasonable risk to human health and must be regulated.

• EPA has also opened the regulatory process for a chemical called 6PPD, also used in tire manufacture, that is toxic to aquatic life, particularly critically endangered coho salmon.

That’s a tiny sliver of the work the agency is doing for America’s people, lands, and wildlife. While environmentalists rarely think the EPA has done enough to protect us and our world, I don’t want to live in a nation in which these functions are not carried out at all due to targeted political attacks, strategic agency relocation, and a hollowed-out institutional memory.

In the context of the historical through-line, Heather Cox Richardson says it best (my emphasis added):

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.

[…]

Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.

Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.

To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.

This framework is what the Trump administration and Project 2025 want to dismantle.

Talk to you soon,
Rebecca

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Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/11/environmental-protection-agency-staff-react-trump-second-term

https://protectdemocracy.org/work/trumps-schedule-f-plan-explained/

https://rollcall.com/2024/12/02/the-man-with-a-plan-to-upend-government-and-what-it-entails/

https://seo.ai/blog/how-many-people-work-at-x

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-chops-twitter-down-1000-employees-2023-5

https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/05/timeline-elon-musk-twitter-ownership/

https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/secretary-haaland-outlines-next-steps-rebuild-bureau-land-management

https://www.blm.gov/about/what-we-manage/national

https://www.cpr.org/2019/09/24/blms-grand-junction-headquarters-to-be-shared-with-chevron/

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/politics/william-perry-pendley-ousted-federal-judge/index.html

https://www.hcn.org/articles/how-another-donald-trump-term-could-dismantle-federal-agencies/

https://www.hcn.org/articles/project-2025s-extreme-vision-for-the-west

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-30-2024

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*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.

You can reach me at fearlessgreen@substack.com