Activist nominee to head Bureau of Land Management meets GOP skepticism
An environmental activist nominated by President Biden to head the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) responded to criticisms at a hearing June 8 by telling senators she would work to be a consensus builder on federal land policies. Republicans appeared to have the strongest of doubts.
Tracy Stone-Manning, a senior adviser to the National Wildlife Federation, said she believes in the multiple-use mandate that requires BLM to apportion federal lands for various uses, including oil and gas production, cattle grazing, recreation, and other purposes. She also said she wanted to make the BLM’s regulatory work transparent and efficient.
Her past words and actions, however, weighed heavily on the minds of Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), noted that while she was on the board of the group Montana Conservation Voters, the group’s number one priority was to block the proposed Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.
When Biden killed the project, it cost Montana a lot of jobs and revenues, Daines said.
Stone-Manning, a Montanan, would not say whether she still opposed the pipeline. She avoided giving clear specific answers to many questions from Republicans about her policy preferences, including questions on pipeline regulations, federal land management policies in Alaska, and regulations governing sage grouse, a bird found in many areas in which oil and gas drilling occurs.
In addition to her work for environmental groups, she spent about 5 years on the political staff for Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), and about 2 years after that as director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Tester told the committee she would bring people together and had done so effectively in the past.
Harsh words cited
Republican expressed clear doubts that she would honor the multiple-use mandate not only for oil and gas production and pipelines but for other purposes often opposed by environmental activists. They also suggested she might be overly political.
“Perhaps most troubling is Ms. Stone-Manning’s unvarnished political partisanship,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), top minority member on the committee.
“In a tweet from February, she summarily dismissed concerns expressed by me and my Republican colleagues about then-Congresswoman Haaland’s nomination to be secretary of the Interior as nothing more than ‘a dog-whistle reserved for a candidate of Haaland’s tribal status—and gender,’” Barrasso said.
Deb Haaland, now Interior secretary, is a member of a Native American tribe in New Mexico. Republicans worried that her past strong activism made her a questionable choice for Interior.
“Last year, for political gain, she smeared a champion of commonsense conservation and member of this committee,” Barrasso said, referring to Daines. Stone-Manning had been advocating for Montana’s former Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, to win Daines’ senate seat.
Asked about her criticisms of Daines, she said elections are tough.
If all Republicans on the committee vote against her nomination and all Democrats vote in favor, it will be a tie vote, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will have the option of calling her nomination up for a vote by the full Senate. A tie in the full Senate can be broken by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Advocates higher costs
Stone-Manning testified in March to a subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee that was considering legislation to raise costs for oil and gas work on federal lands.
She endorsed a full array of cost increases: higher oil and gas royalties, rents, minimum bid amounts, bonding, inspection fees, and penalties. She advocated an end to non-competitive leasing, which occurs when only one bid is offered on a lease tract, and she argued for imposing royalties on all methane, including methane leaked, flared, or vented.
“These reforms are overdue and address an industry that has an outsized influence on our public lands, often at the expense of wildlife, the environment, and taxpayers,” she testified March 9.
She defended Biden’s moratorium on oil and gas leasing and generally urged less leasing. The current leasing system “puts vastly more land under lease than necessary,” she said.