“You need to move this back to DC and build it back,” said Joel Clement, a former Interior Department expert on climate change policy who resigned from the agency in protest against the Trump administration’s policies. “The team, the budget – all those people who were supposed to work with Congress on these policies have been expelled from the West, or have left,” he said. “They are extremely demoralized.”
Ms. Haaland must also review the Trump administration’s reversal of habitat protections under the Endangered Species Act. Under Trump’s rules, it became easier to remove a species from the list of endangered species, and for the first time, regulators were allowed to conduct economic assessments – for example, estimating lost revenue from a logging ban on a critical habitat – when deciding whether a species provides protection.
Those rules have led to an exodus of employees, mainly from the Fisheries and Wildlife Service, said Clement.
“There is a reconstruction that needs to happen there,” he said.
The Department of the Interior is also expected to present a new detailed plan by June 2022, which establishes how the federal government will manage the vast external continental shelf off the American coast, an area rich in marine life and underwater oil and gas resources.
Given Biden’s promise to ban new drilling, the new offshore management plan is likely to reimpose Obama-era policies that forbade oil exploration across the east and west coast of the United States – although possibly going further, limiting drilling in the Alaskan coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. But writing legal, economic and scientific justifications will be difficult.
“They need to get started and really get to work,” said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president of Oceana, an environmental group.
As the department moves against offshore drilling, it is expected to help increase offshore wind farms. Last week, the agency took a big step towards approving the country’s first large-scale offshore wind farm, near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, a project that has been under construction for years.