Buried under the news of the Trump administration’s incompetence on the coronavirus crisis and the stock market falling without a parachute, was some good news on national parks and public lands. We need any distraction we can get right now and here we have one.
Trump has hired ideological extremists and oil industry lobbyists to run our federal land agencies and he has pushed Congress to make drastic budget cuts for everything environmental. He has made life difficult for scientists and conservationists in our agencies to the point where many have quit. Yet it seems those policies have not sold well to the public out West.
Despite the sell-off-the-public-lands rhetoric of the Trump team, the public in western states is deeply attached to our public lands and want no part of Trump’s ongoing attack on the agencies that run them and the laws that protect them. A Colorado College poll shows that 70% of westerners strongly support federal land management and want our public lands protected.
For the years of the Trump administration, his budgets have called for deep cuts to all of the public land agencies. Every year he has asked for cuts in the 14% range for all the public land agencies and after Congress voted to make the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanent, Trump asked for a 97% cut to its outlays. The US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service are all existing and minimal, flat budgets and Trump’s proposed cuts would have caused debilitating damage to the agencies, possibly destroying their ability to function beyond the most minimal service.
The National Parks are now famous for their “maintenance backlog” currently around $12 billion in infrastructure repairs. The National Parks are increasingly popular, and they are major economic drivers for the regions where they exist. Yet the Donald Trump administration’s 2020 budget calls for only $1 million toward the maintenance backlog, or .008% of the total according to Outside magazine. Trump calls for a $581 million cut to the NPS budget which would result in reduced staff and more neglected facilities and lawless parks as visitors find few if any rangers, no education programs and vandalism.
Fortunately for America, Congress refused to go along with these budget cuts and kept the agency budgets stable, though inadequate for the last 3 years. This has not stopped Trump’s people from disbanding the Bureau of Land Management headquarters and leasing every possible acre to the oil industry with few if any environmental constraints. We own the land; they make it unusable for anything but oil and off-roading.
Trump himself has proven over the years that he has little knowledge of, or interest in science or the people who use science in their work to protect Americans and their lands. As a businessman, he ran afoul of government regulators and law enforcement repeatedly and took it personally (narcissism). Now he has a chance to exercise his anti-government emotions and there are all too many people on the far right of the conservative movement who are happy to help him. He has filled his administration with government haters.
The Trump crowd may believe that Americans were ready to be led by Trump into a new era of anarchy, where public land agencies are reduced to a few compliant do-nothings in the local office and the off-roaders, the miners, the ranchers, the loggers, and the oil drillers could do whatever they wanted on our lands with little if any law enforcement. Perhaps Trump’s group thought we were all waiting for the urban democrats to let us loose to kill wolves, graze the land to dust, cut down the last big trees with taxpayer subsidies, and have tourism corporations run our national parks so we could get WIFI in our privatized national parks. They call this freedom.
Seems the public isn’t so easily misled and now with election looming, Trump is being begged by western republicans to reverse course before they have to face angry voters.
Totally Unexpected Tweet
On March 3, 2020 Donald Trump tweeted that he wanted Congress to send him a bill that would provide full and permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the National Park Service. This tweet came after Donald met with Senator Cory Gardner(R) Colorado, and Steve Danes(R) Montana. Obviously, they told Donald they were going to lose their seats if the radical anti-environmental nonsense from his administration continued.
The National Park funding he is talking about is the Restore Our Parks Act which would provide dedicated funding for maintenance at the national parks with funds from on and offshore oil drilling revenues. (Nothing like damaging the environment in one place to pay for protecting it in another.)
Likely Donald Trump probably didn’t know anything about any of his team’s work to damage the public land agencies and sell off the resources to the oil and ranching industries. Donald is a New York City guy whose idea of the environment is his golf courses and the people who rake them for him. The fact that he turned environmental policy over to far-right rebels is consistent with how he runs all of his agencies; with appointees who oppose the very existence of the agency.
Needless to say, Democrats in Congress are skeptical of Donald’s new-found interest in funding for public lands and national parks after years of the opposite. And Democrats know that by passing these bills they may shore-up Republicans who have joined Donald in tearing apart our public lands for 3 years. So, it is a tough decision for Democrats. Should they support this about-face or wait for President Biden to reform the whole mess. Will any of this even reach the floor in Congress given the virus chaos?
The good news is that environmentalists are winning in the court of public opinion and the Republicans know it. They know their agenda is vastly unpopular with the public and in the past, they have been safe with anti-environmental views because few voters made the environment a top issue in the voting booth. That has changed with the climate change emergency that has everyone scared and impatient with Donald’s intransigence.
The coronavirus is throwing everything into chaos and flux. How all of this will play out with Washington in chaos is unknown but at least we have Trump on the defensive about his extremist policies on our sacred lands, way out West.
- Tom Ribe
