As the Department of the Interior develops a plan to “restore American prosperity” by exploiting Western natural resources, a Wyoming attorney who has steeled rural communities against federal policies is atop the hierarchy that will marshal the effort.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum last month appointed Karen Budd-Falen as temporary deputy secretary and his senior advisor. As the department fleshes out a four-year strategic plan to use natural resources across 19.9 million acres of national parks and Bureau of Land Management property in Wyoming, Budd-Falen will be in the Interior’s second-highest position.
A draft of the four-year Interior plan leaked to Public Domain outlines department objectives for prosperity, security and recreation. Conservationists have decried elements they say would dismantle environmental safeguards, turn over federal property, promote energy development and favor rural communities over nationwide interests.
The Interior Department last week blasted the leak and called its publication “irresponsible.”
“It is beyond unacceptable that an internal document in the draft/deliberative process is being shared with the media before a decision point has been made,” Interior’s press office wrote WyoFile on Thursday. “Not only is this unacceptable behavior, it is irresponsible for a media outlet to publish a draft document.
“We will take this leak of an internal, pre-decisional document very seriously and find out who is responsible,” the statement reads.
The draft plan, which the agency said is “not final nor ready for release,” sets four goals and several objectives to accomplish them. Interior’s drafted goals are to restore American prosperity, ensure national security through infrastructure and innovation, and allow sustainable enjoyment of natural resources. It would do all that through the fourth goal — collaboration with states, tribes and local governments.
The draft plan to restore American prosperity would use American energy to “lower… costs and increases affordability.” But it includes elements that worry conservationists who fear damage to Interior agencies including the National Park Service, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The plan would “deregulate” to increase “clean coal” production and oil and gas drilling. It would streamline the National Environmental Policy Act, a law designed to safeguard the environment. And it would reduce the cost of grazing, which critics say is already too low.
The draft would “release federal holdings” — divest Americans of their public property — to allow states and communities to reduce housing costs. Interior would support agriculture and increase revenues from logging, non-energy mining, and grazing. The draft treats natural resources as assets, viewing federal holdings for the economic value that can be derived from them.
The leaked document “reads like an industry wish list,” the Center for Western Priorities said in a statement. It includes “a thinly veiled reference to the seizure and sale of public lands,” according to the conservation group.
The draft treats the West’s natural resources “as nothing more than numbers on a balance sheet,” Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala said in a statement. In the plan, those resources are “products to be sold off and exploited to help pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and Trump’s fellow billionaires,” she said.
“It resembles a business plan from a desperate CEO, not a framework to steward public lands for the benefit of all Americans,” Rokala’s statement reads.
To her post, Budd-Falen brings years of experience fighting for ranchers and other public land users and developers. The federal government has been a frequent adversary, but so has Western Watersheds Project, another conservation group that focuses on public land grazing.
She represented a group of ranchers who sued Western Watersheds for trespassing when a field worker collected water to test for pollution caused by grazing. She advised rural counties to adopt land use plans they could leverage when contesting federal programs on public land in their areas. She also represented stock growers who sided against four Missouri hunters who corner crossed to hunt public land on Elk Mountain in Carbon County. She represented the Cliven Bundy family and others as they fought grazing reductions imposed after Las Vegas developers were permitted to occupy desert tortoise habitat. That family later became infamous for armed standoffs with federal officials over use of public land.
