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Trump Reportedly To Name Drilling, Mining Enthusiast Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers for Interior Secretary [1]
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Date: 2023-02
If there was any question as to how Donald Trump would try to shape the nation’s policies on energy and the environment, and the stewardship of public lands and wildlife, that question has now been settled.
Just two days after picking a climate change denier and fossil fuel champion to head the EPA, Trump is expected to nominate established mining and drilling advocate Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) for interior secretary, according to early reports by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. McMorris Rodgers currently serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee and is the highest-ranking woman in the GOP. If she were to be nominated and ultimately confirmed as interior secretary, it would hand over the nation’s federally protected lands and natural resources to someone with a long-term record of trying to weaken U.S. environmental protections laws, and open up public lands to fossil fuel extraction.
“It’s an astonishing appointment, in the sense that the person who would be in charge of protecting America’s environment is an anti-environmentalist,” Drew Caputo, the vice president of litigation for lands, oceans, and wildlife at Earthjustice, told Sierra in reaction to the news.
“Rep. McMorris Rodgers has a clearly anti-parks record,” Alex Taurel, deputy legislative director for the League of Conservation Voters, told Sierra. “She’s consistently prioritized drilling on public lands, and even supports selling off our public lands to the highest bidder. I don’t think that has a lot of support among the American people.”
The Interior Department is a huge federal agency with 70,000 employees and an annual budget of $13 billion. It is comprised of multiple bureaus that exert broad authority and oversight over 500 million acres of public land and 1.7 billion acres offshore. As secretary of the interior, McMorris Rodgers would oversee everything from the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This past June, current Interior Secretary Sally Jewell released a report finding that the department’s portfolio of public lands, including national parks and wildlife refuges, had more than 440 million recreational visits in 2015.
With news that McMorris Rodgers is a frontrunner to take over at interior, Trump has signaled his intention to roll back the current administration’s environmental agenda and instead prioritize private profit over public interest when it comes to the United States’ lands and waters.
McMorris Rodgers started her political career as a member of the Washington State legislature, representing the 7th Legislative District from 1994 to 2004. During her tenure, she regularly defended timber and mining interests, and was known for opposing same sex marriage. She successfully ran for United States Congress in 2005 and has been a member of the House of Representatives since then.
McMorris Rodgers’s voting record over the last 12 years leaves little doubt about how she would manage the nation’s natural resources. She supports expanding offshore drilling, including off the Atlantic Coast, the Pacific Coast, and in the Arctic Ocean, and has supported drilling in the most sensitive public lands, like the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
This past year, she voted to restrict the president’s authority to designate and protect national monuments under the Antiquities Act, an important tool for protecting public lands that are vulnerable to development. She has voted against fracking protections on public lands and to block efforts to raise royalty rates on oil and gas produced on public lands. She also supported an effort to prevent the EPA from issuing updated ozone protection standards and to prevent the Interior Department from protecting rivers and streams from mining waste. In 2011, she voted to open the Outer Continental Shelf to oil drilling.
“The job of the secretary of the interior is to manage the United States’ public lands,” said Taurel. “Unfortunately, Rep. McMorris Rodgers supports selling off some of those lands. I think the American people would be very surprised to learn that what they consider to be their birthright, their national heritage, could be at risk if she’s confirmed. This is very consistent with Donald Trump’s promises to inflict big oil on American’s public lands and waters.”
McMorris Rodgers’s support for the fossil fuel industry should come as no surprise given the financial support she has received as a public official. Over the course of her career, she has accepted over $355,340 from the oil and gas industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The League of Conservation Voters gives her a lifetime environmental voting score of just 4 percent.
The news that Trump will pick McMorris Rodgers comes just two days after the announcement that Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a prominent climate change denier, will be his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt sued the EPA in 2015 to block the Clean Power Plan, the nation’s first-ever set of federal rules limiting carbon emissions from existing coal- and gas-fired power plants, and is a prominent ally of the fossil fuel industry.
“It signals Trump is absolutely determined to turn over environmental protection to politicians allied with big polluters,” said Taurel. “We are going to fight with everything we’ve got to stop them from implementing that agenda. The amazing progress that President Obama has achieved on climate change, on conservation, and on a whole range of environmental issues, is at risk. We’re going to be counting on our allies in Congress to stand with us, and on the American people, in the fight ahead for clean air, for clean water, and for preserving our majestic public lands.”
Drew Caputo says that what’s striking about these appointments is that they are consistent with a completely extreme, anti-environment agenda that in some ways is unprecedented.
“If you think back to other administrations of presidents who had bad environmental agendas, for example the first and second Bush administrations, they at least had one cabinet level appointment of somebody who had a record of caring about the environment,” Caputo said. “The first President Bush appointed Bill Reilly as EPA administrator, and he was an environmentalist. Even the second President Bush appointed Christine Todd Whitman as EPA administrator, and she had a decent environmental record when she was governor of New Jersey. So there’s been at least some attempt at something other than a hard-right environmental agenda.”
To date, Donald Trump has made no effort to install an environmental advocate in his administration, preferring private interest champions whose records make clear they intend to roll back the environmental gains achieved over the last eight years.
According to Caputo, the developments this week are a wake-up call.
“The majority of Americans who care about protecting the environment are going to need to speak up on how their elected representatives, especially in the Senate, stop this agenda from going forward,” Caputo said. “And what we’re going to do is what we do best: If Ms. McMorris Rodgers pursues the same anti-environmental agenda as interior secretary that she pursued as a member of Congress, we will see her in court. We will challenge those decisions as violating America’s environmental laws. We will go to court and uphold the principle that no one is above the law, including the secretary of the interior and the president of the United States.”
Editor's Note: On December 13, Trump transition officials indicated to news outlets that first-term Republican U.S. Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana is now the frontrunner for interior secretary.
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[1] Url:
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/trump-reportedly-name-drilling-mining-enthusiast-rep-cathy-mcmorris-rodgers-for
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