Widgetized Section
Go to Admin » Appearance » Widgets » and move Gabfire Widget: Social into that MastheadOverlay zone
Bennet braces for battle over public lands, oil and gas drilling, mining, DOGE cuts of workers
Colorado’s senior U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, says he’s “selecting his battles” when weighing Republican President Donald Trump’s cabinet picks – voting in favor of nearly half his picks as of mid-February, including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for Interior Secretary. But Bennet adds there are certain lines in the sand he won’t cross when it comes to public lands.
Bennet admitted recently he’s very concerned about the direction of the Trump administration as it looks to capitalize on federally owned lands for industrial purposes — from hard-rock mining to oil and gas drilling – as outlined in the Project 2025 conservative blueprint that calls for the increased use of national forests and BLM lands for heavy industrial purposes.
“I’m really worried about it because there are people like [Republican Sen.] Mike Lee from Utah and other senators who have an ideological objection to public lands, whose ideology is that there shouldn’t be public lands, who fought us on things like the CORE Act, who fought us even on something like Amache, but we’ve been able to overcome them over the years and we’ve continued to fight,” Bennet told reporters on a recent conference call.
Just four days after Bennet voted to approve Burgum as Secretary of the Interior the former software company CEO with deep ties to the oil and gas industry issued a directive on Feb. 3 called Secretarial Order 3418. Entitled “Unleashing America’s Energy”, the order directs all
assistant secretaries to consider opening to mining and drilling all national monuments and to weigh opening up landscapes previously protected by mineral withdrawals.
“I hope that we are not going to find ourselves in the position of the new administration following the lead of people that are anti-public lands, but we certainly are going to fight it if they are, every single step of the way,” Bennet said. “That is a fight that we will win because the American people are with us.”
In Colorado, Burgum’s order puts the drilling and mining crosshairs squarely on previously protected Colorado monuments such as Browns Canyon; Camp Hale-Continental Divide; Canyons of the Ancients; Chimney Rock; Dinosaur; and Hovenweep; and Interior Department mineral withdrawals such as the Thompson Divide and the Upper Colorado River Special Recreation Management Area. That 12,000-acre withdrawal prohibits new hard-rock mining on BLM lands along the Colorado River from upstream of State Bridge downriver to Dotsero.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) owns and manages more than 8 million acres of land in Colorado, including approximately 250,000 acres in and around the sensitive headwaters of the Colorado River in Eagle County.
Trump has chosen Colorado oil and gas lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma to helm the BLM and Katharine MacGregor for Deputy Secretary of Interior – both of whom would be charged with carrying out Burgum’s new directive. Bennet was asked recently, as the Senate considers both nominees, if it’s disqualifying should they agreed to enact Burgum’s directive aimed at opening up of previously exempt public lands to oil and gas drilling.
“I mean, that would be obvious,” Bennet replied. “That would be disqualifying from my perspective. I had a long conversation with Burgum about a bunch of things when he came into my office, but the thing I talked to him most about was actually Thompson Divide. And what I said to him was that there are places in Colorado and in the country that we have worked very hard to protect that the American people support.”
The Thompson Divide near Carbondale is made up of 225,000 acres of federally owned land that has long been a battleground over oil and gas drilling until it was finally administratively withdrawn last year.
“While there might be places that are appropriate for energy extraction, a place like the Thompson Divide is not one of those, and the coalition that we put together of Republican and Democratic ranchers and others to achieve that needs to be paid attention to,” Bennet said. “So part of what I was saying to Doug Burgum was local voices really matter. And he said, ‘Well, there are local voices that have different points of view than this in my state.’ And I said, ‘That may be true, but you’re going to have to make sure that you take in the voices of people and communities of people throughout the Rocky Mountains.’”
Again, Bennet, who said blanket opposition to Trump’s cabinet nominees don’t make sense because Democrats simply don’t have the votes to block them, went ahead and approved Burgum. Sgamma is credited with contributing to former Trump BLM pick William Perry Pendley’s Project 2025 section on the Department of the Interior.
A spokesman for Sgamma’s Western Energy Alliance declined to comment on her nomination, referring inquiries to the White House, which did not respond to an email request for comment.
Oil and gas backer Lauren Boebert, the far-right Republican Colorado congresswoman who used to represent most of the state’s Western Slope before moving to the Front Range to improve her reelection odds, recently offered this statement on Sgamma’s nomination to helm BLM:
“President Trump has made a fantastic selection of Kathleen Sgamma as the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, as she knows our public lands and their untapped resources as well as anyone. I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with her on several efforts to responsibly manage our lands while also allowing our oil and gas industry to thrive and bring back American energy dominance.”
The United States last year set a new world record for crude oil production under former President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
Asked if Sgamma and MacGregor should be disqualified if they agree to enact Elon Musk’s legally questionable slashing of Department of Interior funding for everything from wildland firefighters to the National Parks, Bennet replied, “That would be disqualifying to me. Yes.”
Some of those National Park Service jobs were restored on Friday.
Eagle County Commissioner Jeanne McQueeney said the county is carefully watching these moves by the Trump administration given that more than 80% of the county is publicly owned by the federal government. She said Coloradans largely disapprove of efforts like the unsuccessful Utah bid to take over federal lands in the neighboring Republican state.
“We have very different feelings in Colorado about our public lands than they do in Utah,” McQueeney said. “And so we’re opposed to making our public lands private and we have very big investments in the recreational industry and we really want to keep these open spaces open to the public.”
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a phone interview that Sgamma’s nomination is“a concern for anyone who cares about the multiple-use mandate that Congress has set for our public lands. [Her] entire worldview has been set out for the world to see for the last decade, and she believes that oil and gas extraction is the highest and best use of America’s public lands and everything else should take a backseat to it.”
Colorado College on Wednesday released its 15th annual Conservation in the West Poll, finding “Westerners recognized the importance of public lands for recreational opportunities, mental health benefits, and providing habitat for wildlife.”
“We know from more than 15 years of public polling across the West, especially through Colorado College, we know that the Trump administration’s goals and priorities for public lands are diametrically opposite from what Western voters say they want,” Weiss said. “And that carries across party lines. They support limited energy development in responsible ways in places where it’s appropriate, but that’s not what [Sgamma] has spent her career arguing for.”
Weiss went on to argue that tech billionaire Elon Musk – the unelected and unappointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that was not legally established by Congress – is working with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to gut Interior funding. Weiss says that means anyone working with DOGE should be disqualified from DOI.
In his view, it would be complicit to vote for MacGregor if she plans to “actually implement any orders that come down from the DOGE bags, as I call them,” Weiss said. “She’s the one who would actually pull the funding that Congress has appropriated … President Trump and Emperor Musk believe there are no checks and balances. When it comes to national monuments and mineral withdrawals, are they just going to try and get rid of everything and claim they have authority to do whatever the heck they want because laws don’t matter anymore?”
On the Senate floor Wednesday, Bennet railed against the DOGE termination of 3,400 U.S. Forest Service employees, including at least 90 in Colorado. As a result, firefighters across the country say the West in particular will be compromised and in grave danger during the upcoming wildfire season.
“The Forest Service employees throughout the West are fundamental to our economy and to our communities in Colorado,” Bennet said in a release. “The fact that they’ve been hard to hire has compromised our communities in really fundamental ways, and we ought to double down on the Forest Service’s mission, investing in wildfire resilience, watershed health, recreation management, rooting out waste, and cutting red tape to make the agency a better partner for rural communities across the country. That’s what we need to be doing. “Instead, President Trump and Musk’s actions to eviscerate the federal workforce takes a torch to that approach and tear at the fabric of our community. It’s an insult to Colorado and all Americans.”
David O. Williams
Latest posts by David O. Williams (see all)
- Bennet braces for battle over public lands, oil and gas drilling, mining, DOGE cuts of workers - February 23, 2025
- The O. Zone: Snow slams Vail, Shiffrin misses mark at Worlds, airline update - February 15, 2025
- The O. Zone: Locals get gouged again as ‘low-fare’ airlines target school breaks - February 13, 2025
