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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.
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2 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Jimmy Tobias
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3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Jimmy Tobias
For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has helped scores of species — from whooping cranes to red wolves to California condors — claw their way back from the edge of extinction. Its success has made it supremely popular with the American public — far more popular, for instance, than Congress. But now, like all those species it helps protect, the law itself is in grave peril.
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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...
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3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Jimmy Tobias
A new DOGE-linked political appointee has taken up residence at the Interior Department — and though he doesn’t appear to have any special expertise on environmental matters, he does have important connections. His name is Matt Luby and he’s Vivek Ramaswamy’s best friend from high school. A graduate of The Ohio State University, Luby worked for Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign before becoming involved with DOGE. Now, he is at the Interior Department, or DOI.
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3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Jimmy Tobias
Elon Musk is reportedly preparing to step back from his hyper-active role in the Trump administration, but operators tied to his Department of Government Efficiency continue to burrow into the federal bureaucracy. A recent example can be found at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, an agency responsible for protecting marine wildlife, managing America’s marine fisheries, operating a network of crucial satellites, and overseeing the National Weather Service.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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3 weeks ago | 
publicdomain.media | Jimmy Tobias
As the Trump administration purges non–partisan civil servants from federal bureaucracies across Washington, it is simultaneously filling those agencies with MAGA loyalists, revolving-door lobbyists and industry insiders. At least that’s the story at the Interior Department, the massive federal agency that oversees our national parks and historic battlefields, manages the Endangered Species Act, administers vast energy resources and more.