-
2 weeks 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.
-
3 weeks 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...
-
3 weeks 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.
-
3 weeks 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.
-
3 weeks 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.
-
3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Roque Planas |Chris D'Angelo
As the House Committee on Natural Resources debated its draft of an unprecedented budget reconciliation bill that would mandate a slew of new leasing for energy projects last week, Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) rattled off the record profits oil and gas giants raked in over recent years. Then, she detailed some of Chairman Bruce Westerman’s recent stock buys — including shares in British Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell.
-
3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Jimmy Tobias |Roque Planas |Chris D'Angelo
Dear Public Domain readers, This publication is now officially one month old. We had no idea what to expect when the three of us teamed up to produce investigative reporting on public lands, wildlife and resources. But we knew that the stakes have never been higher for those who care about the future of our public heritage. We're astounded at the warm welcome we've enjoyed. Our back-of-the-napkin math showed the project would become financially viable if we reached 3,000 paid subscribers.
-
3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas
House Republicans appeared poised Tuesday to advance an unprecedented dismantling of public land protections that would vastly increase energy and timber production while weakening conservation measures, rescinding already-allocated agency funding and blunting critics’ ability to challenge faster-moving lease sales in court.
-
3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Chris D'Angelo |Roque Planas
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum either doesn’t know or is purposefully rewriting the history of the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to . At Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Friday, Burgum repeated his previous claim about how the original intent of the Antiquities Act, which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law, was to protect small, “Indiana Jones-type” archeological sites.
-
3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Roque Planas
Rightwing rocker Ted Nugent has defied Texas rules to contain chronic wasting disease, a contagious neurological disorder in deer, since his property outside Waco was flagged for exposure in the midst of a widespread outbreak in the state's deer breeding pens, Public Domain has learned.
