The Trump Interior Department sought to keep its discussions about drilling, mining, and harvesting timber out of the public eye in building a case for rolling back national monument expansions under the previous administration, a mass of documents revealed on Monday.
The Washington Post obtained the documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, showing how top agency officials rejected proposals that favored keeping protections in place at national monuments, while redacting any mention of energy or natural resource development in official emails.
The thousands of pages of documents and email correspondence by Interior officials showed that the deliberations were kept out of the public eye as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke conducted his four-month review of national monument determinations last year.
The newspaper reported that officials wanted to keep certain references out of public view or risk “revealing [the] strategy” behind Zinke’s review process, which appeared to favor energy production and other industrial activities as reason to reverse monument decisions.
An email sent last July by a Bureau of Land Management official discussed five draft economic reports on a number of sites under scrutiny, noting that there was a paragraph within each one on “our ability to estimate the value of energy and/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.” But that reference was redacted on the grounds it could “reveal strategy about the [national monument] review process,” according to the documents.
Other correspondence on timber potential was also redacted to keep the review process of looking to buttress certain industries out of site.
The monuments in question, which were expanded under the previous administration, were targeted by President Trump in an executive order calling on Zinke to review former President Barack Obama’s authority in expanding the national protected areas, and if there is a need to reverse that process. The review went as far back as the Clinton administration in its assessment of monument expansions.
Trump has already reduced significantly two of Utah’s largest national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and has not ruled out rolling back others.
Already on Monday, some Democrats used the report to justify concerns they had during the review process that Zinke was not taking seriously the hundreds of billions of dollars that come each year from the recreation economy that the monuments support.
“This ‘drill at all costs’ approach is wrong for our economy and wrong for the environment,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the top Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“The fact that the Trump administration places no value on the booming recreation economy that generates over $887 billion annually is no surprise to those of us who have been watching their shameful record of exploiting our public lands over the last two years,” Cantwell explained.
