America’s park and forest rangers are being fired, and oil and gas bosses are now in charge

  Billionaires Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are purging park rangers, scientists, and other public land experts while putting oil and gas industry executives and their close allies in charge of America’s public lands. As a result, visitors and communities are already feeling the impacts on their parks, and land protections are being gutted to clear a path for pollution and corporate exploitation.

The Bernhardt Doctrine: Dismissing rules and dodging oversight

  U.S. Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt is hard to put a finger on. Attempts to understand what he’s doing or who he’s meeting with through Freedom of Information Act requests have yielded surprisingly few documents and sparse calendars. Bernhardt has granted relatively few—or brief, if at all—on-the-record interviews with reporters. He has also largely avoided testifying in front of Congress before May of this year.

  Despite this opaqueness, a picture of Bernhardt’s approach to governance is starting to emerge—one of a former oil and gas lobbyist pushing a destructive anti-conservation agenda with a flagrant disregard for the coequal branches of U.S. government. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bernhardt era—his time as deputy secretary and now secretary—is marked by actions that consistently ignore Congress and the rule of law. While the courts have begun to provide a check on Bernhardt’s approach, he continues to both circumvent public input and accountability and undermine Congress’ oversight role.

Trump’s pick to run Interior looms large behind ocean sell-off

  On March 20, 2019, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) opened all planning areas in the Gulf of Mexico for the fourth-straight offshore oil and gas lease sale since President Donald Trump took office. Throughout the past 35 years, the DOI has typically auctioned leases in 1 of 3 Gulf sections at a time. But ever since David Bernhardt, the current acting secretary, was sworn in as deputy interior secretary in August of 2017, the whole Gulf has essentially been up for grabs. These Gulfwide auctions are likely watering down the competition, allowing the oil and gas industry to buy up America’s taxpayer-owned mineral resources at fire sale prices—and Bernhardt’s former industry clients are among those who benefit.

David Bernhardt is President Trump’s most conflicted Cabinet nominee

  On the whole, President Donald Trump’s Cabinet has not demonstrated integrity, honesty, or accountability to the American public. Four top Trump administration officials have resigned under a cloud of corruption after wasting taxpayer dollars or abusing their position for personal gain: U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt; U.S. Secretary of Veteran Affairs David Shulkin; and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke.

  Rather than cleaning house in the wake of these controversies and resignations, President Trump is doubling down on nominating conflicted individuals to his Cabinet. In February, the U.S. Senate confirmed former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as Pruitt’s replacement at the EPA, the federal agency that enforces air and water protections. And this month, Trump nominated David Bernhardt to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior. Currently serving as the acting interior secretary since Zinke’s departure, Bernhardt is a former oil and gas lobbyist—and has so many conflicts of interest that he must carry around a list of former clients to remember them.