National Park Skeleton Crews, Missed Court Dates As Environmental Agencies' Work Grinds To A Halt

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Despite roughly 29,000 Interior Department employees on furlough since Oct. 1, the department has barreled ahead with Trump priorities, including energy development. That has included reopening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and issuing more than 600 drilling permits across public lands. But elsewhere the shutdown has frozen normal business. Interior has missed court appearances and is losing an estimated $1 million a day in revenue that national parks usually collect during the busy fall season.

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Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has continued to work on big-ticket items, such as a suite of policy directives opening hundreds of thousands of acres in Alaska to drilling, as well as smaller-scale moves like planned oil and gas lease sales, timber harvests, and mining permits. Burgum announced last month that he was signing an order to reopen the coastal plain of ANWR to drilling, reversing the Biden administration’s halt on development. He also announced that the agency is advancing construction of the 211-mile-long Ambler mining road to provide access to a remote mining district in northwestern Alaska.

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While oil, gas and mineral permitting barrels forward, agencies including the Fish and Wildlife Service have missed court-set or statutory deadlines for action. Environmental groups, for instance, have been pressing the Trump administration on allegations that officials ignored the National Environmental Policy Act when the state of Florida constructed an immigrant detention facility near the Everglades National Park. Citing the shutdown, government attorneys convinced the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to extend an important brief-filing deadline originally set for late October. “The Department of Justice does not know when such funding will be restored by Congress,” DOJ attorneys advised the appellate court.

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EPA has managed to stay open during the shutdown, but its operations are slowly grinding to a halt. Tapping carryover funds, the agency has adopted an unusual “phased” approach to furloughs. Consequently, employees working on Trump administration priorities, such as drafting rule rollbacks and approving permits, remain on the job while others have been sent home. That has spiked anxiety among staffers who don’t know if they will receive a paycheck or furlough notice during the funding lapse, according to EPA employees granted anonymity because they fear retaliation. One agency staffer said managers have been unable to answer questions about who will be sent home and when. “Headquarters is basically flying by the seat of their pants, but we all knew that already,” they said.

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https://www.eenews.net/articles/record-smashing-shutdown-hits-energy-enviro-work/