South Dakotans began preparing for the worst when President Biden headed to the White House after his inauguration. They knew what one of his first executive orders would be: pulling the plug on the Keystone XL pipeline, which had brought tens of thousands of jobs to the state during the Trump administration.
“I had a real gut-sinking feeling and was watching little snips of the news and Facebook to see what was going to happen after the inauguration,” Laurie Cox told the Washington Examiner.
Sure enough, Biden revoked the pipeline’s permit within the first three hours of his presidency, leaving thousands unemployed and entire communities in limbo. Peter Bardeson, the business manager of the Laborers Local 620 union in Sioux Falls, estimated that Biden’s decisions cost his members more than 60,000 hours and $1.6 million in lost wages. Business owners in towns along the pipeline fear that all the economic growth they’ve experienced over the past year will vanish.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Cox, who regularly interacts with the welders, carpenters, and union laborers who are a part of the pipeline project, said. “I was in shock for three days.”
The pipeline project, which would connect the Texas Gulf Coast to Canada and make it easier and cleaner to transport oil, has been a game of tug-of-war for Washington’s politicians for nearly a decade. But what the district’s politicos don’t seem to understand is that people like Cox always end up in the middle — and they’re the ones who get hurt.
“It’s all bullshit in Washington,” said Gaylord Lincoln, a semi-retired mechanic in South Dakota. “They are playing with our lives. You took our chance to have a decent life with a stroke of the pen.”
Bardeson’s union plans to fight back. He said they will appeal to Biden directly, and if that doesn’t work, they might even take the administration to court.
“We can’t just let the president sign something and kill it,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We can’t roll over and play dead. We need to at least let him see what he’s killing.”
But many South Dakotans are tired of being treated like pawns. One way or the other, they want a decision: Either the pipeline stays or it goes. And this time, that decision needs to be final.
“[This has been] dragged out for several years,” said Michael Vetter, the mayor of a small town near the pipeline. “Each time, beginning and stopping on the whims of individual presidents or judges. And each time, thousands of American jobs hang in the balance.”
