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2 weeks ago | 
hcn.org | Chris D’Angelo |Jimmy Tobias |Roque Planas |Gretchen King
This story was originally published by Public Domain and is republished here by permission. A legal official at the Department of Justice has concluded that President Donald Trump has the authority to not only shrink but completely abolish areas protected as national monuments. The memo provides the legal framework for a broad reduction of federal land protections that Trump officials have alluded to for months.
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2 weeks ago | 
buff.ly | Chris D’Angelo |Jimmy Tobias |Roque Planas |Gretchen King
This story was originally published by Public Domain and is republished here by permission. A legal official at the Department of Justice has concluded that President Donald Trump has the authority to not only shrink but completely abolish areas protected as national monuments. The memo provides the legal framework for a broad reduction of federal land protections that Trump officials have alluded to for months.
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2 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most radically anti-federal land lawmakers to ever walk the halls of Congress, moved late Wednesday to force the sale of as much as 3.2 million acres of public land in 11 western states. The proposal, part of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s contribution to the GOP’s massive budget bill, is all but guaranteed to ignite a firestorm among public land advocates across the West.
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2 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Jimmy Tobias |Roque Planas
A legal official at the Department of Justice has concluded that President Donald Trump has the authority to not only shrink but completely abolish areas protected as national monuments. The memo provides the legal framework for a broad reduction of federal land protections that Trump officials have alluded to for months.
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2 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas
The Interior Department has released a draft strategic plan that omits contentious goals contained in an internal version leaked two months ago. The internal document, first published by Public Domain in April, called for vastly expanding energy development on federal lands, while reducing federal land holdings, shrinking national monuments, dismantling environmental protections and systematically delisting endangered species.
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1 month ago | 
publicdomain.media | Roque Planas |Chris D'Angelo
House Republicans voted Thursday morning to approve the budget reconciliation bill, after removing provisions for a major public land sell off that had created a broad uproar. But the bill, passed without a single Democratic vote, still contains several unprecedented measures to roll back public land protections, boost the pace of leasing for energy development, and sidestep key laws.
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1 month ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas |Jimmy Tobias
More than 125 public land, climate and environmental advocacy groups signed on to a letter Monday urging senators to oppose President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the federal government's largest land management agency, citing “inherent conflicts of interest.” In February, Trump tapped Kathleen Sgamma, a longtime leader of Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade association, to serve as director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that manages 246 million acres of public land...
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1 month ago | 
publicdomain.media | Roque Planas
On March 9 of last year, Game Warden Coty Castro watched a white F-350 with a trailer pass by in the East Texas town of Willis. He pulled the truck over for an expired registration, but had received a tip that the men inside planned to traffic live whitetail deer, according to court records obtained by Public Domain. Castro asked the two men in the car what was in the trailer.
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1 month ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas
At an all-hands meeting of Interior Department employees last week, Secretary Doug Burgum stressed that managing and protecting federal public lands “must be held in balance.”“It says in the mission statement the job of Interior is to ‘manage and protect,’” he said. “It doesn’t just say ‘protect,’ it says ‘manage and protect.’”Better balance on public lands was precisely what the Biden administration was after with a rule it finalized last year.
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1 month ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas
The Senate voted early Saturday to advance a budget framework for slashing federal spending and permanently extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, but rejected an amendment seeking to block federal lands from being sold off to reduce the federal deficit. Some Republicans, including Rep.
