President Bush signs the Healthy Forests Initiative. Photo courtesy U.S. Department of the Interior
I spent thousands of hours in 2003-2004 researching and writing Bush Versus the Environment, a book about the Bush administration’s environmental performance during the president’s first four years. I found abundant evidence that the administration had worked relentlessly to weaken environmental protections. Did the White House reform during Bush’s second term? To find out, I revisited some of the issues I pursued four years earlier.
I first sought examples of positive action. I asked a variety of sources, including the Council on Environmental Quality—the president’s main advisory body on the environment. They sent me a handout, “Fact Sheet: Earth Day 2008. Protecting Our Environment, Achieving Results.” But perhaps “fact” isn’t exactly the right word, as the list of supposed environmental accomplishments is riddled with errors of commission and omission. One second-term item on the sheet—the establishment of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument—is universally regarded as a significant achievement. Many others fall into a gray area of half-truths, such as the claim that the administration has boosted funding for national parks. The administration does deserve credit for increasing support for park operations, but it has cut money for land acquisition and has not eliminated the Park Service’s enormous maintenance backlog, which Bush promised to erase by 2005 during the 2000 campaign. Instead, the backlog has ballooned from $5 billion to $8 billion.
Other statements on the “fact” sheet may be technically correct while being misleading, such as the assertion that “The Administration is leading the way toward an international agreement to slow, stop, and reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.” First, this ignores the fact that the administration has repeatedly undermined progress on addressing climate change. Second, the sheet neglects to mention that the agreement the administration seeks is widely viewed as woefully inadequate and that a majority of the world community is moving toward a different, much stronger agreement. While the Bush administration proposes to slow the growth in America’s greenhouse gas emissions until the growth rate reaches zero in 2025 (which means the United States will be emitting far more in 2025 than it is now), most industrialized countries are committed to reducing emissions 25-40 percent by 2020.
I found a handful of positive actions not mentioned in the document, such as support for the National Landscape Conservation System (the Bureau of Land Management’s crown jewels), but the list of pro-environment activities during the administration’s second term mirrors the first term—few and far between.
Next I turned to negative actions, using the approach I adopted for the book. Rather than piling up examples of what the administration has done, I explored how the administration has pursued its environmental agenda to see if it had continued with the methods it had employed during the first term.
Almost all of Bush’s first-term appointees were hostile to the environment, and the president continued in that vein in his current term. Susan Dudley is an example of Bush’s second-term appointments to positions with significant influence over environmental matters. Bush used a recess appointment to put Dudley in charge of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an obscure but powerful office that exerts control over all federal regulations. Dudley has indeed worked on regulatory affairs for many years, but as a fierce opponent to anything that hampers industry. Prior to her nomination, she served as the director of the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center, an anti-regulation think tank funded by General Motors, ExxonMobil, Pfizer and other major corporations.
Dudley is not an anomaly. Consider Bush’s judicial appointments, such as his nomination of Steve Matthews to serve on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. At the time of his nomination, Matthews served on the board of directors of the anti-environment Landmark Legal Foundation, which championed Rush Limbaugh as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. Or look to the top: Bush’s latest appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, Samuel Alito, is known for his extreme views of the Constitution’s commerce clause, the basis for much federal environmental regulation. Even Senator Tom Coburn, the conservative Republican from Oklahoma, called Alito’s take on the commerce clause “wrong” and “legislating” from the bench. Then there’s the recent controversy over the politicization of hiring attorneys at the Department of Justice. The department’s inspector general discovered that applicants to the honors program were rejected if their resumes showed work on environmental justice issues or membership in certain organizations, such as Greenpeace. These litmus tests violate the department’s policy and probably civil service law.
The administration also has continued politicizing science, a tactic it employed frequently during its first term. Bush’s political appointees suppressed information, altered reports and tried to muzzle federal agency scientists. In 2005, the Union of Concerned Scientists conducted a survey of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists. Forty-four percent of respondents working on endangered species issues reported that they “have been directed, for non-scientific reasons, to refrain from making jeopardy or other findings that are protective of species.” Two years later, the union surveyed Environmental Protection Agency scientists; 60 percent of respondents said they had encountered political interference during the previous five years. Due to methodological constraints, these percentages could be somewhat lower or higher, but the fact that hundreds of agency scientists complained of political meddling plus the existence of abundant corroborating evidence make it plain that the administration has seriously compromised the credibility of federal environmental science.
The administration’s machinations so outraged the scientific community that in 2004 several dozen Nobel laureates, university presidents, former federal agency directors and other leading scientists issued a statement deploring the administration’s behavior and calling for a return to scientific integrity. Since then nearly 15,000 scientists have signed the statement. They know that the politicization of science does on-the-ground harm, as in the case of the southwestern bald eagle.
Though the bald eagle was taken off the endangered species list, evidence showed that the population in the Southwest remained imperiled. However, phone call and meeting notes obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Fish and Wildlife managers and appointees manipulated the science so they could get the southwestern population delisted, though Fish and Wildlife officials contend that the notes were taken out of context. (In 2008 a U.S. district judge ordered the administration to re-designate the southwestern bald eagle as “threatened.”) The highest-ranked individual involved in the decision, Julie MacDonald—then deputy assistant secretary for the Department of the Interior’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks—resigned in 2007 following a report by the department’s inspector general revealing that she had twisted the science to favor development interests in many endangered species cases.
During its second term, the administration again favored budgets as a means to its ends. It continued cutting overall BLM funding until it was half of what it had been at the start of Bush’s presidency, yet the administration doubled the amount of BLM dollars going to oil and gas development. A Wilderness Society analysis estimates that, if this budget emphasis and the rules promulgated by this administration persist, about 120,000 new wells will be permitted during the next twenty years, more than tripling the number of wells already on public lands.
Even as it expanded its energy operations, BLM budget cuts reduced the number of staffers who monitor oil and gas development. The title of a Government Accountability Office report sums up the resulting problem: “Oil and Gas Development: Increased Permitting Activity Has Lessened BLM’s Ability to Meet Its Environmental Protection Responsibilities.” Budget cuts have weakened the agency’s ability to monitor other activities, such as recreational vehicle use and the looting of Native American archaeological sites.
Despite the president’s efforts to remake the federal judiciary, the courts blunted a number of the administration’s environmental goals. A 2008 Sacramento Bee analysis found that the Bush administration lost an unusually high percentage of environmental cases, especially those involving wildlife. According to a study compiled for the Bee article by the Center for Biological Diversity, the administration lost seventy-seven of seventy-eight endangered species cases. Legal experts consulted by the newspaper expressed even greater surprise at the exceptional number of judges who upbraided the administration, exemplified by Judge Thelton E. Henderson’s remarks while denying the administration’s unsupportable finding that purse seine nets were not harming dolphins. “This Court has never, in its twenty-four years, reviewed a record of agency action that contained such a compelling portrait of political meddling.”
I’d need many additional pages to tally up all of the Bush administration’s second-term transgressions against the environment. In many cases, such as oil and gas development on public lands, they set the stage in the first term with legal maneuvers and rule changes and then used those new conditions to carry out development in the second term. It’s important to note that these conditions and some of the lower-profile Bush appointees will not automatically vanish with the arrival of the next president. It’s also important to note that Bush is no lame duck when it comes to the environment; the administration has directed its appointees to accomplish as much of the Bush environmental agenda as possible before January 20, 2009.