If Trump Wins the Election, U.S. Parks and Wildlife Face a New Age of Mining

This article was produced in partnership with the Guardian, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.

Imagine, for a moment, oil and gas infrastructure carving up Alaska’s far northern tundra, a refuge for migrating caribou and polar bears. Copper-nickel mines on the doorstep of one of the largest wilderness areas east of the Rockies, a nearly 1.1 million acre expanse of pristine lakes and forests full of loons, wolves, and moose. Or uranium and coal exploration in once-protected landscapes, including areas bordering the Grand Canyon.

If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, these projects will likely be on the table as part of an energy dominance agenda focused on resource extraction. “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in July, as he officially accepted the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in Milwaukee. 

Indeed, early plans suggest that Trump aims to radically remake the Department of the Interior, which oversees more than 500 million acres of public lands, manages the country’s national parks and wildlife refuges, and is responsible for protecting endangered species. Whereas President Joe Biden made safeguarding public lands and the transition to green energy a centerpiece of his time in office, Trump and his allies would reverse many of Biden’s policies, remake the civil service, and implement a new agenda focused on slashing regulations, weakening environmental protections, and expanding oil and gas development across the American West.

One of the figures involved in crafting this vision is Daniel Jorjani, who served as the top solicitor at Interior during Trump’s first term, according to two sources who have spoken with Jorjani recently. A lawyer who formerly worked for the organizations affiliated with the conservative mega-donors Charles and David Koch, Jorjani currently serves as chief operating officer and principal deputy general counsel for the far-right advocacy group Citizens United, whose president, David Bossie, was Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016. 

Lynn Scarlett, who served as deputy secretary of the Interior under President George W. Bush, said Jorjani, who was her chief of staff, is “working on Interior policy issues as part of the Trump team.”

In a recent post on his LinkedIn profile, Jorjani said he was part of the “Trump Campaign Legal Team” at the convention, where he was involved in advancing the Republican party’s platform, which promised to “unleash American Energy.” (He later clarified that his work at the convention was done “in a personal capacity.”) He was also recently appointed to the state Air Pollution Control Board in Virginia, and one of the sources speculated that he could be tapped for a top position at the Environmental Protection Agency or the White House Council on Environmental Quality in a future Trump administration.

Jorjani did not respond to requests for comment, including questions about his relationship with the Trump campaign and his potential roles if Trump retakes the White House.

What exactly do Jorjani and other Trump supporters hope to do if Trump retakes the White House? Trump’s official campaign platform, known as Agenda 47, is vague. But conservative allies have drafted detailed plans to abolish or dismantle scientific research divisions within multiple federal agencies, hobble decades-old environmental laws, and repeal the federal Antiquities Act, which has been used by presidents since Theodore Roosevelt to designate large swaths of public land as national monuments, protecting them from development.

Going forward, sensitive wild lands — such as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, Chaco Culture Historic National Park in New Mexico, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which was opened to oil and gas leasing during Trump’s first term — will also be under renewed threat from mining or oil and gas development. Meanwhile, imperiled species like grizzly bears and sage grouse will likely see their protections diminished or stripped away entirely. 

“The playbook is basically rinse and repeat,” said David Hayes, who served as deputy secretary at Interior under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. “It is a completely backward-looking agenda.”

‘It’s scary how well-organized they are.’

Jorjani is part of a larger constellation of conservative groups and political operatives angling for power and influence in a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has put together Project 2025, a policy blueprint designed to help the Trump administration hit the ground running in a second term. The document includes a chapter on the Interior department written by William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management under Trump and was a protégé of James Watt, the controversial Interior secretary during the early years of the Reagan administration. Though his tenure was brief, Watt became known for leasing public lands at artificially low prices and attempting to sell federal land to reduce the national debt. 

Though Trump has recently tried to distance his campaign from the Heritage Foundation’s work, many of the Project 2025 proposals align with his own positions, especially when it comes to resource extraction. The document, parts of which were written by oil and gas industry representatives, calls for reinstating Trump’s energy dominance agenda, reducing national monument designations, and weakening protections for endangered species. 

David Bernhardt, who served as Trump’s Interior secretary from 2019 to 2021, has been a central figure in the new network of policy organizations aligned with the Trump agenda. Bernhardt is currently chair of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former Trump staffers Linda McMahon, Brooke Rollins, and Larry Kudlow in 2021. (McMahon is now leading the campaign’s transition team.) Last year he published a book, You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State, which offers a detailed account of his plans to assert control over the federal bureaucracy during a future conservative administration.

Central to this project is the creation of a new category of federal employment, known as Schedule F, that would allow Trump to fire thousands of civil servants involved in policy making and replace them with allies — a scheme Trump implemented during the final months of his first term but which the Biden administration quickly repealed. Employees in this category, according to Bernhardt, “would have the same removal appeal rights as political appointees, which is to say they would not have any.”  

Installing political appointees — many of them former lobbyists, industry officials, or conservative activists — in key positions could lead to another four years of ethics scandals, which hovered over Trump’s Interior department during the entire length of his first term, often serving as a distraction from putting in place a conservative agenda. The most high-profile imbroglios involved former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke — who resigned in late 2018 amid probes by the agency’s inspector general into whether he had used his office for personal gain. But Interior department political appointees lower in the hierarchy also repeatedly ran afoul of federal ethics rules that are meant to prevent conflicts of interest. 

“There is no reason to believe that [another Trump] administration would be more ethical,” said Kedric Payne, the vice president at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan organization that advocates for ethics in government.

This time, however, preparations for a second Trump administration have taken on a greater degree of professionalism. Policy ideas — and the personnel to implement them — are being mapped out well in advance.

“It is scary how well-organized they are,” said a former Interior department employee who has communicated with Jorjani.

Bernhardt did not respond to requests for comment.

Scarlett, who went on to work for the Nature Conservancy before retiring in 2021, described Jorjani as a “very dedicated conservative Republican,” who is well-positioned to implement the policies the Heritage Foundation and others have laid out. She also said the chaos and incompetence of the first Trump administration is unlikely to repeat itself.

“This is a different situation,” Scarlett said. “They’re going to go in with people who have experience and knowledge. … And really get the agenda moving from day one.”

‘Vast stores of liquid gold’

Trump has already made clear his desire to court the oil and gas industry. In April, according to the Washington Post, Trump met with oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort and promised to reverse many of Biden’s environmental policies in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations. Oil and gas production under Biden has reached record highs and his administration approved the massive Willow project in Alaska, but Trump is seen as a figure who would impose few if any limits on the industry. 

At another fundraiser organized by Continental Resources’s Harold Hamm and other industry executives, Trump said he’d open more federal land to drilling on and offshore, and referred to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a 19-million acre preserve on Alaska’s North Slope — as the “biggest oil farm.” Through his personal connections, Hamm has already helped to raise millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry to support Trump’s campaign.  

The refuge’s coastal plain was an early target of the Trump administration and a centerpiece of his energy dominance agenda. The first ever lease sale in the refuge took place on January 6, 2021, the same day rioters stormed the U.S. capitol. Though major industry players had expressed little interest in drilling in this corner of Alaska, Trump and his allies prioritized opening it up to exploration and development.  

The Biden administration canceled the leases and is finalizing a supplemental environmental impact statement that is expected to dramatically reduce the amount of land open to oil and gas exploration and development. Biden also raised royalty rates for oil, gas, and coal production on federal land, issued new rules designed to curb the venting and flaring of natural gas, and took measures to account for the long-term climate impacts of fossil fuel production.

A second Trump administration would likely pick up where the first left off, however, reinstating quarterly lease sales wherever possible — as outlined by Project 2025 — and opening up the “vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land,” according to the campaign’s website.

“The main themes of this playbook are to drill and pollute everywhere without regard for communities and wildlife, while erasing public parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges from the map,” said Nicole Gentile, senior director for conservation at the Center for American Progress.

Attacks on climate science

Trump’s embrace of fossil fuels has also been coupled with — and in many ways depends on — a rejection of climate science. During Trump’s first term, political appointees sidelined climate scientists across government agencies. The Interior department’s strategic plan was scrubbed of any mention of climate change. Trump officials discredited the work of its top climate scientists and dismissed the 2,000-page federal review of the risks of global warming known as the National Climate Assessment, released in 2018, as “not based on facts.” (The next climate assessment is due to be published in 2027, which means it will be heavily influenced by the next administration.) 

At the U.S. Geological Survey, political appointees tried to derail climate research by focusing only on a narrow 10-year time horizon — an unprecedented attack on the scientific process that outraged career employees. But if Trump is granted the power to fire thousands of civil servants, he would have little trouble  pushing through his agenda in a second term.

Recent judicial decisions will also help. The Supreme Court has limited the EPA’s ability to address climate change through the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and overturned the Chevron doctrine, which for decades gave federal agencies the authority to interpret legal statutes. Now, a second Trump administration will have more leeway to advance their own policy priorities, and career civil servants, who have years of knowledge and expertise, will have less power to stand in the way.

“There’s much more infrastructure in place for a second Trump term to move forward very quickly with their agenda,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center.

Landmark environmental laws under threat

Major laws which have formed the bedrock of environmental preservation in the United States will also likely come under legal and administrative attack during a second Trump presidency. 

Veterans of Trump’s Interior department have made known their desire to shrink national monuments and eviscerate the Antiquities Act. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the repeal of the law, which has helped protect such national treasures as the Grand Canyon. Conservative activists and lawyers have also long viewed other major national monuments like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah as targets for coal, oil, and uranium development.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts, in a 2021 statement, all but invited conservative lawyers to challenge the law through litigation, and a Trump administration is unlikely to defend it if such legal action proceeds. The nearly 120-year-old law may not survive another four years of Trump. 

The Endangered Species Act, which is broadly popular with the American public, will also likely face attacks. During Trump’s first term, the Interior department focused on watering down the law’s strongest provisions, delisting species, and pushing development in sensitive wildlife habitat. These will likely be priorities again.

“They haven’t been particularly shy about their agenda, it is all spelled out,” said Brett Hartl, the chief political strategist at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a wildlife conservation advocacy group. “It is not going to be better than the first time through.”