Senior Interior Officials Unilaterally Take Over Idaho Land Appeals Cases In 11th-Hour Power Grab
President Joe Biden’s acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, Laura Daniel-Davis, sent a memo to the agency’s Office of Hearings and Appeals this week appearing to assume sole authority over dozens of pending grazing cases in Idaho.
“I am assuming jurisdiction of the [attached] cases,” Davis wrote in the memo, citing federal code. “Please immediately provide my office access to the relevant filings and associated materials.”
Davis sent the memo addressed to the director of the Office of Hearings and Appeals on Monday — the same day President-elect Donald Trump’s November election was certified and with just two weeks left in the incumbent administration. The document, however, says nothing about who will decide the cases pulled from the agency appeals boards, or why they were pulled by the acting deputy Interior secretary.
Former Alaska Attorney General Gregg Renkes, who served as an administrative judge on the Interior Board of Land Appeals between January and November 2021 according to LinkedIn, called the move “unprecedented” in an interview with The Federalist.
“I’ve never seen a case pulled back,” Renkes said, and characterized the memo as “odd.”
Normally, as Renkes explained, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) makes a decision, members of the public can appeal to the Office of Hearings and Appeals. If an appellant fails there, they have the right to plea their case before the Interior Board of Land Appeals. The process takes time, and members of the public can take their case to a federal district court if the agency refuses to reverse the BLM’s initial decision.
“Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis has assumed jurisdiction of 50 administrative appeals of final decisions on 28 livestock grazing allotments in Idaho,” Interior Spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz told The Federalist. “These appeals have been pending with the Office of Hearing and Appeals for more than 10 years. The Department will now determine next steps for the appeals process.”
The Interior Board of Land Appeals is supposed to operate as an independent arbiter of agency review but exercises authority from the secretary. Renkes told The Federalist that while the board has faced criticism as a “rubber stamp of the agency,” the panel still offers citizens the chance to present evidence.
“I don’t know why you would upset that process,” Renkes said. The fact the acting deputy secretary authored Monday’s memo circumventing the board, and not the principal cabinet secretary who is Senate confirmed, gives the “appearance of something other than an impartial review,” he said.
Davis, who has been acting deputy secretary since October 2023, had previously been accused of crossing ethical lines to set agency policy as principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management. In September 2022, Davis became the subject of a complaint from the transparency nonprofit Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) over improper influence related to pulling oil and gas leases in the Arctic, as The Federalist previously reported. The complaint centered on Davis’ tenure as chief of policy at the National Wildlife Federation, which had sued the federal government over the leases under President Donald Trump.
“Within six months at Interior, Ms. Daniel-Davis had exercised her official authority to achieve practically all of the legal remedies sought by her former employer in court,” PPT said at the time. “Even worse, the legal arguments she relied on to do so were strikingly similar to those developed for and included in her former employer’s legal filings.”
“The Biden-Harris administration came into office promising to restore traditional norms,” PPT Director Michael Chamberlain told The Federalist. “But their behavior over the last four years has shown them to be focused on advancing anything but.”
The agency’s latest move to circumvent appeals boards, Chamberlain added, “could put the political leadership of the Department of the Interior in the position to be able to reward their ideological allies, at the expense of everyday Americans.”
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