Deb Haaland’s Legacy
By 
I have a piece in The American Propsect‘s election issue about the Interior Department. There are two main parts to it. First, Deb Haaland has been amazing and has reoriented this traditionally racist agency into being an outright ally on Native issues. Second, Congress hasn’t funded Interior properly for decades, leading to mass employee discontent, especially in the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Democrats have to take their share of the blame too–no Democrat has really prioritized the agency since Carter and Congressional Democrats don’t either. The kind of big players who used to ensure massive funding in Congress don’t serve on those committees anymore.
Biden pledged to preserve record amounts of land, and while he might not quite get there in one term, he and Haaland worked closely together to achieve this goal through co-stewardship agreements, perhaps the most important transformation of the agency’s relationship with the Tribes. The BLM alone manages 10 percent of the nation’s land, much of it in the arid American West, where dozens of Tribes consider these lands sacred. The Tribes have convinced the Biden administration to fulfill its conservation goals by co-managing these arid lands, now redefined as national monuments.
For example, Biden created a 506,000-acre preserve at the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada, ensuring traditional indigenous use of land that at least 14 Tribes consider critical to their history and culture. The Navajo and Havasupai in Arizona lobbied Biden to create a nearly one-million-acre preserve at the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument, a decision that has infuriated mining interests and the state’s Republicans.
There will likely be additional national monuments created in this manner before the end of Biden’s term, including Sáttítla in Northern California, where the Pit River and Modoc Tribes have urged action; and Kw’tsán, near the Mexican border, where the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe has supported protections. For the first time, Tribes have an active advocate in a leading government role.
But Haaland has done much more than just protect land. During her time in office, the Biden administration restarted the Tribal Nations Summit, an annual gathering to bring Tribal concerns to the highest pinnacles of power, which Donald Trump predictably had ended. She created the Missing and Murdered Unit in the BIA to help with the enormous wave of crimes against Native Americans, many of which go unsolved. She has also demanded a reorienting of our public history in the National Park Service, telling stories of Native history and starting a theme study of Native history in the 1930s and 1950s, often the first step toward new National Historic Sites. She also has tasked the agency with taking responsibility for the tragic history of Indian schools, and making remembering that part of its mission.
As Adam Sowards, a leading historian of the nation’s public lands and professor emeritus of history at the University of Idaho, told me, “Interior has often been a place where Tribal issues have been neglected and where land exploitation has been facilitated. Haaland has ensured that’s not the case during her tenure. There is more work to do to solidify and extend gains … but the ways Secretary Haaland has reoriented the department have been unmistakable and impressive.”
But…….
Both positions have added to the general gridlock over the role of the federal government in leading a widely underfunded agency. In the more bipartisan postwar decades, the most powerful members of Congress from the American West made sure they controlled key committees on public lands. Whether Colorado’s Wayne Aspinall or Idaho’s Frank Church, powerful Western politicians created their legacy over public land management. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) presently chairs the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. He’s a good senator, but hardly a dominant force in the body. The House Natural Resources Committee, Aspinall’s power base, isn’t even led by a Westerner, but rather Arkansas’s Bruce Westerman, although Arizona’s excellent Raúl Grijalva would retake the chair if Democrats can win the House.
Regardless of who leads the committees, in today’s hyper-politicized environment, few of the nation’s most powerful members of Congress use their clout to push federal resources to DOI programs. As with the rest of the regulatory agencies, Republicans want to privatize or eliminate them, while Democrats often seek to overcome gridlock by turning services over to public-private “partnerships,” subcontracting, and outsourcing.
Morale in most of the DOI remains extremely low. In a recent government-administered survey, only 45 percent of employees at the National Park Service, long suffering with frustrating leadership and charges of mismanagement, believe that “senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity,” while a full 32 percent of employees answered no to a question about whether they “can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal.” National parks face billions in maintenance deficits, and not even environmentally minded presidents like Obama or Biden have prioritized the agency in federal budgets.
Attitudes at the Bureau of Land Management are generally better than at NPS, partly because of the work BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning has done to reform the agency under Haaland. But it will take decades to rebuild the funding, staffing, and work culture to make the DOI a functional agency again. For as superb as Haaland has been, she has not convinced Congress to fund Interior’s missions properly or create better leadership cultures at many DOI-administered agencies.
In fact, the Biden administration’s work with the Tribes in creating the new national monuments has some roots in the devolution impacting so much of government in the last half-century. Co-managing these resources with the Tribes has a strong moral component, and doing so protects these largely desert lands for traditional uses, while limiting or eliminating uranium mining, gas drilling, and other devastating extractive industry. What it also does is reduce administrative costs for the agency, and reinforce the idea that the federal government does not need to take the lead in regulating public goods.
In short, you elect Democrats, you get better but not universally great policies. Elect Republicans and you throw out every gain we’ve made and the ability to make more.