Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website Jonathan P. Thompson :. Since , Sgamma has been president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group that works to open up more public land to drilling.
That role has often included butting heads with the BLM and suing the Department of Interior on behalf of the industry. Energy companies β i. Green groups, by contrast, did not reap any kind of monetary gain when Stone-Manning implemented policies that protected the land. In fact, green groups tend to bring in more donations when the administration is hostile towards the environment.
Now if Biden would have chosen a former solar or wind power executive or trade group employee, that would represent the same sort of conflict of interest. And it is valid to argue that someone with a career in federal land management β not an outsider, regardless of their political tendencies β should lead the agency that oversees federal lands. In this case it may not really matter.
Elon Musk and his sidekick President Trump have been busy eviscerating the federal government, laying off thousands of employees, withholding billions of dollars of funding for state and local governments, and generally wreaking chaos β purportedly in the name of efficiency. The Western U. The U. The administration also froze hiring for many agencies, which includes seasonal National Park Service workers. That has raised the specter of chaos at busy, understaffed parks this summer.
Many of those jobs are potentially on the chopping block. The administration has also been withholding funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction laws passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in and Trump froze the funds, then unfroze them, then refroze them, leaving the program, which was about to launch, in limbo. Other states have gone through a similar herky-jerkiness, with an emphasis on the jerk part.
