Follow-Up: Environmental Law Leak

A Law Not to Be Trifled With

A few posts ago I cited the leaking of proposed, secret, changes to the environmental policies offered by the Bush gang. Well, it's worse than we thought. It was not only a leak that would have helped Big Business, but the legal changes to regulations were secretly being designed to help business. It is yet another "secret squirrel operation" designed by the Bush administration to go undetected until it was too late to do anything about it. The changes in rules and regulations would deny public hearings on proposed changes to mining, foresting and recreational uses of public lands, including our precious national parks (Yellowstone, Grand Canyone, Teton, etc.). All of the changes proposed would specifically aid the big interests in mining, forestry and seasonal businesses dealing with snowmobiling, four-wheeling, etc.

But this one got caught and there is yet another scandal for Bush to deal with... I wonder if Karl Rove has his fingers in this one? (c.f. The Rovian Era)

Dirk Kempthorne must have wondered last week why he ever accepted President Bush’s offer to become secretary of the interior. Seven former directors of the National Park Service lambasted a proposal that would allow more than 700 snowmobiles a day in Yellowstone National Park. A former senior auditor provided further evidence that the Minerals Management Service, another part of Mr. Kempthorne’s empire, had for years failed to collect royalties from big oil companies. And Democrats in the House jumped all over one of his assistant secretaries in the wake of a report that the department was secretly rewriting important regulations governing the Endangered Species Act with an eye to weakening it.

All these matters deserve scrutiny by the Democrats. But the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act, leaked to an environmental group, deserve special attention. One reason is that this administration has long wanted to narrow the scope of the act, which for years has been a target of property-rights groups, timber interests and developers, mostly in the West. Another is that this is a dangerous moment in any administration, when incumbents running out of time try to achieve administratively what they have failed to win legislatively. A bill containing some of these same changes failed in Congress last year.

In addition, while some of the changes seem harmless, and others might well simplify an admittedly cumbersome law, several of them go to the very heart of the law — weakening federal oversight, undercutting the authority of agency scientists, making it more difficult to remove obstacles like dams and roads that threaten a species’ recovery and restricting the department’s ability to classify a species as threatened or endangered.

As Representative Tom Udall of New Mexico observed, it’s perfectly permissible for an executive agency to “tinker around on small things.” But only Congress should be in the business of making fundamental changes to a law that Congress itself designed. If anybody should know this, it is Mr. Kempthorne. During his one term in the Senate, during the 1990s, he and the interior secretary at that time, Bruce Babbitt, worked together to improve the Endangered Species Act. The effort eventually foundered, but the approach was right.