What else would Trump do with a national treasure but plunder it?
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The Trumpian onslaught is so overwhelming that major developments which at one time would have provoked tremendous outrage now pass almost unnoticed.
Like this: The entity that oversees our national parks has increasingly been taken over by a DOGE associate from the oil industry.
Like this: An internal draft plan from the National Park Service’s parent Interior Department reveals its top priority is not to protect our natural heritage but to “restore American prosperity.” What does that mean, practically speaking?
It means Interior Secretary Doug Burgum gradually ceding control of this powerful entity and its sacred mission to a little-known oil guy from Elon Musk’s camp. It means two lead boots on the delicate scale that has long balanced the often competing goals of economic growth and environmental conservation.
Just in time for Earth Day!
Interior is a department entrusted with overseeing more than 500 million acres of federal land, national parks, monuments, natural resources, and wildlife refuges. It also conserves the environment, protects endangered species, conducts relations with Native American tribes and their lands, and is even involved in our cultural heritage. How will these guys make this department more “efficient”?
By reducing spending to protect the public’s lands and by leveraging what they call “assets.”
That means opening up additional lands to drilling and other forms of resource extraction, doing away with environmental regulations, and, where possible, selling off federal land to profit-seeking enterprises. Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, and all you millions of campers, hikers, and nature-loving tree-huggers out there — eat your heart out.
As explained by the online environmental outfit Public Domain, which obtained a copy of the draft plan:
The document calls specifically to “open Alaska and other Federal lands for mineral extraction,” while mapping out all Interior-held lands for energy and minerals and quantifying their value. It envisions a reduction in federal public land holdings, calling for the “release” of federal lands to state and local communities for housing development and returning “heritage lands and sites to the states.”
Additionally, the department lists “assess and right-size monuments” as a key strategy — all but confirming its intent to dismantle the boundaries of already protected national monuments — and generally putting federal lands “to use.”
Burgum, a once-competitor with Trump for the GOP nomination, has gone way beyond most fellow Cabinet members — some of whom notably have resisted — in handing power to Musk’s buddy boys. A former governor of North Dakota, with its heavy connections to the oil industry, Burgum seems to be ceding much of his department to a previously unknown fellow from the oil industry by the name of Tyler Hassen.
In an April 17 order, Burgum — using the bland bureaucratic language that often hides the horrible and the grotesque — put Hassen in charge of a purported efficiency redo of parts of the Interior Department.
Hassen first came to Interior as a DOGE representative.
In January, he traveled to California as part of a delegation to promote pumping of water from Northern California to the south of the state to benefit agriculture interests.
While there, Hassen created the illusion that DOGE was responsible for “more than doubling” the amount of water being pumped to the south.
First, you should know that several pumps involved in delivering the water had been out of service — simply because the local electric company had to do maintenance on transmission lines.
Hassen knew this and wrote to find out when the pumps would be working again. January 28, he was told. On that day, he and his team showed up, took a tour of the plant, and posed for a photo op. DOGE had nothing to do with reactivating the pumps, yet he sent out a tweet to X that implied the opposite:
Congratulations to the Administration and DOI’s Bureau of Reclamation for more than doubling the Federally pumped water flowing toward Southern California in < 72 hours. Was an honor for the DOGE team to work with you. Great job!
DOGE’s mass firings of Interior Department employees pose a threat to the entire California Great Basin region, which manages the pumping station, and more.
Some people are fighting back.
The Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates and Japanese American Citizens League filed a joint lawsuit over the “unjustified mass firings of federal workers.”
Athan Manuel, director of lands protection for the Club, told the Los Angeles Times,
They’re going to be told by [presidential advisor] Stephen Miller or some other ideologue in the White House to just cut, cut, cut, without an understanding of what the consequences are going to be on the ground.
You’re running the Department of Interior — you’re in charge of Yosemite [National Park], Sequoia [National Park], the Statue of Liberty. To treat them the way they’re treating them is really insulting to the country, and the citizens.
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Overall, Hassen has been authorized to “create significant efficiencies” and eliminate “redundant efforts” across the department.
It’s hard to know what exactly Hassen has authority to do, but it sounds like a lot. His title is Assistant Secretary — Policy, Management and Budget. He is empowered to take all necessary actions to carry out “consolidation, unification and optimization” at the department and its bureaus. Among other things, he will be issuing policy, directives, and guidance; making appropriate funding decisions; and overseeing the transfer of funds, programs, records, and property, as well as taking required personnel actions.
Sounds almost like everything but day-to-day operations of the parks.
Hassen seems very much in the mold of the kinds of people Musk likes: He follows raunchy right-wing social media accounts like “Libs of TikTok” and “catturd.”
In normal times, we’d just assume that the national parks are sacrosanct, and that they really couldn’t be touched. But now we know: You have to start imagining the worst these people could do, because that is what they want to do — and nothing now is unimaginable.
Selling out the national parks is not a new idea. All of this will ring a bell for history buffs. In the 1920s, President Warren Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, leased, to private oil companies, the Teapot Dome reserve and other federal reserves — in exchange for bribes
Many people have compared Trump to Harding — who, some say, was the worst president that ever lived. Like Trump, he surrounded himself with incompetent cronies; he avoided work, liked golf, had extramarital affairs; he persuaded Congress to give the rich large tax cuts; he pushed for much higher tariffs; he greatly reduced the flow of immigrants; he championed “America First”; he opposed entry into the League of Nations. (For details go here, here, and here.)
It’s no coincidence that Trump seems intent on taking the country back to Harding, and from there back to the 1890s, an era about which he fantasizes a lot — but doesn’t understand any more than the present.
From Attacking High Peaks to Attacking Higher Education
Not content to ruin Yosemite, Glacier National Park, the Alaskan wilderness, and other American treasures, Trump continues his demolition of higher education. In another development that has not garnered sufficient attention, he has called for the end of accreditation of universities.
Fed up and deeply worried about all this, none less than Yale professor Jason Stanley, who studies authoritarianism, is fleeing to Canada. And Harvard, getting a lot of credit for standing up to Trump, was actually pushed to do so by one of its faculty, Steven Levitsky, coauthor of How Democracies Die and Competitive Authoritarianism.
Not that the news is all bad. Resistance continues to stir in every quarter. Trump’s numbers in a new poll show support for his immigration policies declining, while his overall approval rating has fallen to 42 percent
And despite a slow start, the Democrats are showing some moxie and initiative. One example: Democratic House members are going into Republican-held districts where the GOP rep refuses to hold town meetings — and holding their own.
This kind of innovation and verve must become the norm. Being on the back foot is never a good idea, especially at a time when oligarchy and plunder of public resources are on the rise — and it must never happen again.
