President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday will mark the end of Deb Haaland’s tenure as secretary of the interior, and with it, four years of federal bureaucrats exploiting every regulatory tool of the administrative state to obstruct American development in the name of passive preservation.
“The American people have clearly placed their confidence in President Trump to achieve energy dominance,” former Republican North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s choice for interior secretary, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Thursday. “Today, America produces energy cleaner, smarter, and safer than anywhere in the world.”
But “when energy production is restricted in America, it doesn’t reduce demand,” Burgum added, “It just shifts productions to countries like Russia and Iran, whose autocratic leaders not only don’t care about the environment, but they use their revenues from energy sales to fund wars against us and our allies.”
Now that Americans can look to a new horizon under Burgum, it’s worth examining what Americans voted to put behind them.
Forfeiture Of American Energy Dominance
If Americans were worried a Biden presidency would be bad for American energy, the administration turned out worse. As the nation’s public land chief, Haaland’s top priority at the Interior Department seemed to be closing opportunities for U.S. energy development. Haaland signed twin decrees within weeks of her Senate confirmation that revoked a dozen secretarial orders by Republican predecessors which were designed to unleash American power production. Orders included the Trump administration’s repeal of a moratorium on coal, a Trump-ordered review of burdensome regulations interfering with energy development, plans to enhance offshore energy exploration, and efforts to leverage Alaska’s vast natural resources.
“From day one, President Biden was clear that we must take a whole-of-government approach to tackle the climate crisis, strengthen the economy, and address environmental justice,” Haaland said in April 2021. “At the Department of the Interior, I believe we have a unique opportunity to make our communities more resilient to climate change and to help lead the transition to a clean energy economy. These steps will align the Interior Department with the President’s priorities and better position the team to be a part of the climate solution.”
Haaland’s early orders were a preview of what was to come under a secretary whose tenure would be defined by the kind of environmental zealotry popular among the left and antagonistic toward the taxpayer. The Biden administration promptly ordered an illegal moratorium on new oil and gas leases upon inauguration, only to be overturned by a federal judge in the summer of 2021. The Interior Department still didn’t hold new lease sales for another year, until 18 months into the administration, and even then, the government issued fewer oil permits than under President Trump while raising the price to drill with a cascade of new taxes and regulations placed on producers. The Biden administration issued oil and gas leases on fewer acres than every president through his first two years since Harry Truman, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Free Beacon reported last summer the “administration has approved more than 1,000 fewer oil permits in its first three years than the Trump administration did in the same timeframe.”
[RELATED: Biden Lauches Largest Attack Yet On American Coal With New Lease Ban In Powder River Basin]
The end result of “progressives’” agenda was the regression of the United States to a stagnated energy powerhouse. Had U.S. power production been allowed the take off with the trajectory put in motion under the Trump administration, Power the Future Founder Daniel Turner told The Federalist, the U.S. diplomatic posture to deal with overseas adversaries would have been revolutionary.
“Iran would have probably gone bankrupt, there would have been a revolution, and a new government installed, and we would’ve lifted sanctions,” Turner said. “Then Venezuela would have done the same thing. In both countries, Biden reversed punitive measures, allowing them to flourish.”
Sabotage Of Trump’s Energy Agenda
Biden’s recent use of a 72-year-old law to unilaterally remove 625 million acres of American waters from availability for oil and gas exploration presents President Trump with another obstacle to unleash U.S. energy. The area covers the entire east and west coasts of the lower 48, in addition to the Gulf of Mexico and the Bering Sea.
According to Bloomberg News, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953 “included a provision giving presidents wide discretion to permanently protect waters from leasing, but it didn’t explicitly grant them the authority to undo those designations.”
“Though presidents have modified decisions from their predecessors to exempt areas from oil leasing, courts have never validated a complete reversal — and until Trump, no president had even attempted one,” Bloomberg reported. In 2019, a federal district court judge rejected Trump’s attempt to undo protections implemented under the law by President Barack Obama. Those protections covered more than 125 million acres of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit and was dismissed once Biden took office, leaving the question open whether Trump will be able to repeal the latest protections himself or will require legislative action. The Biden administration has already been responsible for the worst five-year offshore leasing plan in history. Secretary Haaland celebrated Biden’s closing act to obstruct oil and gas development with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act in a press release.
“President Biden’s actions today are part of our work across this Administration to make bold and enduring changes that recognize the impact of oil and gas drilling on our nation’s coastlines,” said Haaland. “Today, the President is taking action that reflects what states, Tribes and local communities have shared with us – a strong and overwhelming need to support resilient oceans and coastlines by protecting them from unnecessary oil and gas development.”
Residents and tribes in Alaska feel differently.
Alaska As America’s Attic
The Biden administration’s treatment of Alaska as a national park to preserve for elites who might like to visit one day over a state with residents eager to harvest their own resources has been so egregious the abuse warrants its own section.
Within Biden’s first year, D.C. Democrats obstructed logging operations in Alaska’s southeast Tongass National Forest, stalled progress on a life-saving road for remote residents to reach an all-weather airport in Cold Bay, and suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), all while new drilling activity was still suspended in a state where more than 60 percent of the land is federally owned.
While the Interior Department finally relented on isolated residents in King Cove building a life-saving road after Trump’s re-election, few other parts of the state received such capitulation. Alaska’s wide stretches of federally managed frontier have made the state an easy target for the Biden administration’s aggressive plans to close off 30 percent of the nation’s land and waterways by 2030, known as the “30 by 30” initiative.
“If we were able to do what we wanted to do, we’d be one of the richest states by far,” Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy told The Federalist in August 2021.
Instead, Haaland banned oil exploration in 13 million acres in the western Arctic last year and declined permits for a 211-mile road the state wanted to build to a copper deposit worth an estimated $7.5 billion. Another 13 million acres within the National Petroleum Reserve were stripped from the potential for new oil and gas leases in addition to nearly 3 million acres across the Beaufort Sea removed in 2023. The Biden administration also cancelled the remaining leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in September 2023, closing off a 1.6-million-acre patch along the state’s north coast Trump has pledged to re-open for development.
No state has perhaps suffered more meddling from Washington bureaucrats than Alaska.
Aggressive Land Grabs
As the Biden administration roped off millions of Alaskan acres from resource development under its “30 for 30” program, states across the lower 48 are similarly grappling with federal land grabs through the unilateral creation of quasi-national parks and the establishment of “conservation leases.”
Utah state leaders filed a lawsuit last summer requesting the Supreme Court review the federal government’s authority to hold unappropriated lands indefinitely, a practice that has frustrated western communities in areas hamstrung from development by burdensome restrictions. While unappropriated lands are supposed to be made available under the Bureau of Land Management’s multiple use mandate, Gov. Spencer Cox complained the agency “has increasingly failed to keep these lands accessible and appears to be pursuing a course of active closure and restriction.”
The Supreme Court, however, refused to hear the state’s challenge on Monday, while the BLM under Haaland’s Interior Department has only escalated the government’s effort to shut down development. Last year, the BLM finalized the administration’s Public Lands Rule to allow for “conservation leases” authorizing third parties to hold property for dormant preservation.
The Public Lands Rule coincided with Democrats exploiting the Antiquities Act of 1906 to unilaterally establish and expand several national monuments to rival the size of some of the nation’s largest national parks. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee who presided over Burgum’s confirmation hearing, opened the question period with admonishment of the Democrats’ abuse of the law to circumvent congressional approval for additional land protections. Under Haaland’s tenure, Biden reinstated Obama-era protections for a pair of cultural sites in Utah, Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, to cover 3 million acres, an area larger than nearby national parks in the administration’s first year.
“This is the size of two Delawares inside my state,” Lee said, making the first question in Burgum’s hearing about a commitment to re-examining the monuments’ boundaries, to which the potential new interior secretary agreed.
In May, President Biden also expanded two national monuments in California by more than 120,000 acres, an area larger than that of the state’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. The protections were delivered just after the administration established the one-million-acre Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona the prior summer. The Grand Canyon National Park itself is just more than 1.2 million acres.
In a Jan. 7 fact sheet published by the White House after designating two new national monuments covering a combined 848,000 acres, the administration said, “President Biden has now conserved more lands and waters than any President in history and has created the largest corridor of protected lands in the lower 48.” Biden established a total of ten new national monuments and implemented new protections over 674 million acres eliminated from the possibility of development, including the 625 million acres of coastal waterways restricted in the 11th-hour executive order using the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
Wasteful Offshore Wind Development
Haaland’s Interior Department approved the administration’s 11th offshore wind project in December after spending four years leveraging every regulatory tool at the agency’s disposal to eliminate American oil and gas operations.
“When we walked in the door of this Administration, there were zero approved, commercial-scale offshore wind projects in federal waters,” Haaland said in a department press release. “Today, I am proud to celebrate our 11th approval, a testament to the commitment and enduring progress made by the hardworking public servants at the Department of the Interior.”
Ocean turbine farms have been a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s energy agenda, opening nearly the entire U.S. coastline to wind power developers in the president’s first year. Offshore wind companies, however, have antagonized coastal residents, concerned fisheries, and harmed marine life in the process after onshore wind operations slaughtered hundreds of thousands of birds, including rare species that are federally protected. The electricity output of expensive turbines also remains highly variable, with low wind speeds in 2023 reducing generation for the first time in roughly 30 years despite increased capacity.
Haaland Hyper Focused on Indian Rights
Haaland was always deferential to Indian tribes as the first American Indian to serve as secretary of the interior. In the first year of the new administration, Haaland reconvened the White House Tribal Nations summits, which first began under President Bill Clinton and were discontinued under Trump to center the department’s focus on land management.
“Early on in my tenure as secretary – when this building was unfamiliar and the road ahead packed full – I knew one thing for sure: that while my role as secretary was new, my intentions for Indian Country were not,” Haaland said at the fourth summit in December. “Over the past four years, our Administration has made co-stewardship of our lands and waters a top priority. While the concept is not new, the Biden-Harris administration is the first to make it a strategic priority for the health of our ecosystems and the durability of Tribal sovereignty.”
And to protect “Tribal sovereignty,” Haaland celebrated the 400 co-stewardship agreements the administration signed to guarantee tribes greater access to lands and waterways “pursuant to ratified treaties and other long-standing legal agreements with the United States.” Haaland made sure to implement the vague metric of analysis called “indigenous knowledge” into her department’s decision making.
Turning ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Into Scientific Analysis
In December 2023, the nation’s preeminent public land agency published a press release announcing new steps to “incorporate indigenous knowledge into the Department’s work.”
“Since time immemorial, the Earth’s lands and waters have been central to the social, cultural, spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. It is essential that we do everything we can to ensure that Indigenous Knowledge helps guide our ongoing work as stewards of public lands and waters,” said Secretary Haaland. “By acknowledging and empowering Tribes as partners in co-stewardship of our country’s lands and waters, every American will benefit from strengthened management of our federal land and resources.”
The decision to formally rely on “indigenous knowledge” became the subject of a complaint from an independent non-profit watchdog group submitted to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The complaint, filed by the group Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), argued the Interior Department’s commitment to rely on “indigenous knowledge” violated the federal government’s rules on scientific integrity.
PPT cited at least one major decision from the Interior Department when the secretary cited “indigenous knowledge.” In September 2023, Haaland said her decision to cancel seven oil and gas leases in the Arctic was “in recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of this area.” Haaland said she relied on “indigenous knowledge” to terminate leases despite the tribe closest to drilling sites within at least one location, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Arctic Refuge), petitioning for years to develop the north slope.
[RELATED: How The Left Is Exploiting Tribal Hypocrisy On Oil Leases In The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge]
“Interior also identified a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Proposed Rule, which incorporated OSTP’s Guidance on indigenous knowledge,” read the complaint from PPT. “If adopted, BLM’s Proposed Rule would require ‘BLM to rely on the best available information, including Indigenous Knowledge’ in future management of the area in Alaska where the leases are located.”
“‘Dances With Wolves’ was a fine movie, but it makes a terrible foundational text of scientific philosophy,” PPT Director Michael Chamberlain told The Federalist. “The express direction from the Biden administration is that agencies do not need to validate or even evaluate indigenous knowledge before assigning it unspecified weight in federal decision making. The consequence of this is indigenous knowledge is just a ‘black box’ into which any subjective belief could be introduced — provided it supports the government’s preferred outcome.”
“This is one final insult to science from the administration that urged Americans to ‘trust the science,’ and made a great show of promising scientific integrity,” Chamberlain added.
The Washington Free Beacon reported in December the White House issued a lame-duck order to the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requiring the agency expand use of “indigenous knowledge.”
Ethical Nightmare
Secretary Haaland became the focus of a congressional ethics investigation from the House Natural Resources Committee in the summer of 2023 related to a drilling moratorium in New Mexico’s Chaco Cultural National Historical Park. The ethics probe, which lawmakers re-upped last summer, centered on Haaland’s decision to implement a 20-year ban on oil and gas exploration within a 10-mile radius on the site despite pleas from the local Navajo Nation to harvest their own resources.
Haaland’s daughter, Somah, prominently lobbied against the Navajo Nation’s access to oil and gas development as a member of an activist group called the Pueblo Action Alliance (PAA) that featured the secretary in an opposition documentary prior to her tenure at the department. The secretary’s husband, Skip Sayre, is also the chief of sales and marketing for the Laguna Development Corporation, the “business arm” of Haaland’s tribe that has long opposed drilling in the region.
[RELATED: Who Is Somah Haaland, The Activist Daughter Of Biden’s Interior Secretary?]
In their June 2023 letter, House Republicans wrote they were “concerned with Secretary Haaland’s compliance with ethical obligations and potential conflicts of interest given PAA’s opposition to oil and gas production on federal lands, Secretary Haaland’s involvement with PAA, Somah’s work with PAA to limit domestic energy production, and the work of Secretary Haaland’s husband.”
Documents obtained by PPT through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal Secretary Haaland unilaterally waived ethics concerns over the decision. The group filed its own ethics complaint with the Interior Department inspector general in August 2023.
The secretary’s moratorium on drilling in New Mexico was far from the only potential ethics violation she engaged in. In 2022, PPT filed separate complaints related to financial disclosures and documents related to disclosures at her wedding.
Personnel Is Policy, And The Personnel Was Poor
Congressional Republicans are eager to reverse a ruling last week from the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) which denied petitions from a pair of western states to delist the grizzly bear as endangered. Despite the bears surpassing recovery goals, the FWS said the bears would remain protected, with the decision handed down under a director whom dozens of scientists and environmental groups demanded be dismissed over her background in philosophy rather than science.
Haaland, meanwhile, is also not the only member of the Interior Department who appeared to violate government ethics rules while managing the nation’s public lands. The inspector general for the agency delivered an October report that found former Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau in violation of ethics guidelines over a 2023 meeting on offshore safety rules while he held roughly $10,000 in conflicted stock. Beaudreau left the administration in the fall of that year.
In September 2022, Laura Daniel-Davis, who moved up from principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management to acting deputy secretary a year later, also became the subject of a PPT ethics complaint over improper influence related to pulling oil and gas leases in the Arctic.
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.”
Another former staffer for the National Wildlife Federation who made her way to the top of the Interior Department is Biden’s director for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Tracy Stone-Manning, whose Senate confirmation was controversial over her past as an ecoterrorist. One of Stone-Manning’s chief deputies within the BLM, Nada Culver, was found in violation of ethics rules by the inspector general for the Interior Department over meeting with a former employer in an official capacity. Documents shared with The Federalist by PPT, the non-profit which filed the ethics complaint against Culver, show she also met with demonstrators who rioted at the Interior Department’s Washington D.C. headquarters in 2021, whom officials knew might turn violent.
Haaland’s own testimony last spring raised questions over who might have been in charge this entire time. In May, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri asked Haaland about dark money groups meeting with senior officials at the department. The Daily Signal chronicled how groups, including the National Wildlife Foundation and the Pueblo Action Alliance (PAA), have “wielded influence” to “undermine oil and gas production and advance less reliable wind energy.”
“Left-wing groups, spurred on by the Left’s dark money network, have made broad inroads at Interior under Biden, steering land policy away from oil and gas,” reported the Daily Signal.
“Is it common practice at your department to meet with dark-money groups off the books and conceal it from the public?” Hawley asked Secretary Haaland in a hearing last year.
When the secretary tried to evade the question, Hawley asked who was in charge of the department. Haaland said her deputies were merely colleagues over subordinates in the administration.
“They work with me,” Haaland said.
“So you’re not in charge of the department?” Hawley said. “I thought that’s why you were here.”
“I provide the vision, I provide the overall direction,” Haaland said following the criticism.
That vision will finally be retired at noon on Monday.
Jesus Christ is King
