Department of Interior

The Interior Department is close to completing a permanent water supply contract for a water district once represented by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as a lobbyist, despite concerns that doing so would imperil aquatic species including endangered salmon. 

Conservation groups say the deal between the Interior Department and the Westlands Water District, which serves and is run by farmers in California’s Central Valley, promises to permanently divert more federally managed water to the district just as climate change threatens to make the state hotter and more prone to extreme drought.

The Interior Department and the House are moving in different directions on Arctic drilling.

Hours after the House voted 225-193 to block oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the agency said it was moving to open a portion of the area to drilling.

The Bureau of Land Management acknowledged Friday it plans to open a large portion of land in Utah — which the federal government until recently considered a national monument — to future oil, gas and mining projects.

At the urging of local and state officials as well as industry groups, President Donald Trump in 2017 shrank the size of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to 1 million acres from the 1.9 million acres it was when President Bill Clinton established it.

Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL and trained geologist, has been offered the post of Interior secretary by President-elect Donald Trump, according to a person familiar with the offer.

The 55-year-old Montana Republican was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He has targeted energy and minerals policy as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee. Representing the eighth-largest coal-producing state, Zinke has been critical of EPA regulations compelling coal-fired power plants to either cut their emissions further or shut down completely. He also has criticized the Obama administration’s rules on royalties for fossil fuels extracted on public lands.

For its 100th birthday, the National Park Service gave a long-awaited gift to many Italian-Americans and all unsung artists: Italian immigrant Luigi Del Bianco was finally recognized as the chief carver of Mount Rushmore.  

The park service acknowledged on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Facebook page on May 4 that Gutzon Borglum, the designer and chief engineer of the project, had appointed Del Bianco as the monument's chief carver in 1935.  

The Interior Department on Thursday finalized a rule it says will make drilling in the Arctic safer and more environmentally sustainable by requiring oil and gas companies to set in place systems to prevent and contain oil spills in the region's difficult weather conditions.  

The rule, first proposed in February 2015, requires drillers on the Arctic Outer Continental Shelf to have access to a separate rig ready to drill a relief well in case they lose control of an existing well.