As the Trump shutdown lumbers on, The Washington Post reports:
On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management changed its plan to allow for 19 percent of its 9,260-person workforce to continue on the job during the shutdown.
According to BLM officials, employees who are back on the job are working on activities including law enforcement, grazing activities and preparing for March lease sales that will take place in several Western states.
Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, for its part, has also brought back employees to avert any delays in its March auction for offshore oil and gas drilling.
(click here to continue reading State Dept. employees ordered back to work as Trump nixes Pelosi trip and Davos delegation, citing shutdown – The Washington Post.)
Priorities. The most important thing to accomplish for the GOP is selling off the public’s land and drill, baby, drill. Jerks.
But some Democrats and environmental groups attacked the decision as political and dangerous.
On Wednesday, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) led a group of House Democrats in calling the assistance to the oil and gas industry “an outrageous step,” with a “farcical” justification in a letter to acting Interior secretary David Bernhardt.
“One of the most striking features” of the shutdown, the lawmakers wrote, “is the way the administration has bent over backwards to ensure that the pain of the shutdown falls only on ordinary Americans and the environment, and not on the oil and gas industry.”