The Interior Department under former Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, the Interior secretary, has decided to take a second look at seven decisions on endangered species, including the size of the critical habitat for the endangered Canada Lynx, which roams Idaho’s backcountry. These are decisions made by officials under his predecessor Gale Norton.
The agency’s inspector general continues to reveal more of the political meddling carried out in the Bush Administration to overrule the professional and scientific judgments of the people who are supposed to protect our natural resources. The agency’s action’s Wednesday focused again on former California engineer Julie McDonald.
The agency was redoing the endangered species decisions it decided it could not defend because McDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, had either rewritten decisions or the documents they were based on despite no formal scientific training. One in particular was the decision to remove the Sacramento splittail, a small fish, from the threatened species list.
It just so happened that McDonald owned a farm within the habitat of the fish. She made, the inspector general said, more than 500 changes to the supporting documents of the decision. The inspector general said she should have recused herself but he was not recommending she be prosecuted, the Sacramento Bee reported .
Last summer the Kempthorne folks called for the review of the sage grouse listing after Congress raised questions about McDonald’s political interference. She rewrote the decision document in 2004, adding scientific references to studies the agencies' biologists did not include and removed references to research done by other biologists, including Idaho Department of Fish and Game sage grouse expert Jack Connelly of Pocatello.
In my book “Saving All the Parts” I wrote about similar political meddling in the Reagan administration as it tried to avoid listing of the Northern Spotted Owl. But it was no where near as pervasive or as obvious as McDonald’s widespread efforts.
This can’t be easy for Kempthorne. He answers to the same guy Norton did.
Vice President Dick Cheney himself meddled into the decisions about water and salmon made in the Klamath River Basin. President Bush either gave Kempthorne a wide berth to clean up the mess at Interior or the White House is signing off on all of these decisions.
Either way it’s a reversal of the policies that Norton and her now convicted assistant Steve Griles carried out in the name of President Bush.
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Meddling is bad,
but is meddling bad only when it comes from political appointees who are more politically conservative and less environmentally-oriented than the career federal and state employees? I recall the Clinton Administration had its fair share of political appointees who also meddled, and it was usually at the behest of an environmental group when the group did not like the results of a decision that came from the professionals.
Thanks bernard
your comments are right on. RB would never write a "book" about the meddling of the Clinton admin bc in his mind, and in the minds of his enviro friends, "meddling" is OK if enviros are the ones doing it.
If anyone would ever take the time to right the book on the meddling of the Clinton admins EPA, Forest Service, and many other agencies and show the incest between the agencies and the enviro groups it would make Chenney and Haliburton look like an 8th grade glee club meeting. Actually there is some really good info on the incest that you can find on the Minority side of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee web-site done by OK Senator Inhofe. A report about enviro foundations getting grants from govt agencies and the one handing out the grants are former enviros themsleves appointed by Clinton.
The biased media will not report it though.
I do agree with Barker
that McDonald's meddling was more obvious, widespread, hell chronic for that matter. The Reagan guys were handed a tough situation with the old growth logging in Oregon and Washington because so many jobs and people's lives were affected, and really all they could do was stall the issue and leave it to fester on HW's watch. Remember, there were no Democrats in the Pacific Northwest who wanted that train wreck either so both parties shared in that meddling. Go a few years later and Jack Ward Thomas has a book with a few anecdotes about meddling, both from the Republican controlled Congress as well as the Clinton Administration.
The most personally disappointing example of meddling during the Clinton Administration was how they kept a lid on the salmon issue and essentially preserved the status quo operation of the BPA hydropower system despite recommendations from NMFS scientists in Portland. Instead the burden was shifted to Idaho and a focus on habitat. And it was largely because of the Democratic politicians in the state of Washington.