MAGA Report Cards — Environment

Tom Tiffany Says Wisconsin Has 'Successfully Managed Wildlife for Generations.' The Last Time It Managed Wolves, Hunters Killed 218 in Under Three Days Against a Quota of 119.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:01:36 +0000

On September 4, 2026, President Trump ordered the Interior Department to decide within 90 days whether gray wolves should lose their protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin, put out a statement the same day:

"The gray wolf has recovered, and the impacts are being felt across rural communities in Wisconsin. Farmers are dealing with livestock depredations, families are losing pets, and wolves are showing up closer to homes. Wisconsin has successfully managed wildlife for generations. It is time to get out-of-state judges and bureaucrats out of the way and let Wisconsin responsibly manage its wolf population."

We know what Wisconsin managing its wolf population looks like, because it happened five years ago.

February 2021

Gray wolves were briefly delisted at the end of the Trump administration's first term. A hunting season opened in Wisconsin in February 2021.

The state set a quota of 119 wolves for licensed hunters, made 2,380 harvest authorizations available and sold 1,547 tags — roughly 13 for every wolf in the quota.

Hunters and trappers killed 218.

They did it in under three days. The Department of Natural Resources shut the season down early and still couldn't stop it in time, because the closure of a zone did not take effect until 24 hours after the DNR posted notice of it — so the killing continued while the notice ran.

That is what the management system Tiffany is describing produced the one time it was switched on: nearly double the state's own limit, in a weekend, with the agency legally unable to hit the brakes.

What it did to the population

Wisconsin's DNR said the population dropped 14% after the hunt.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison — Adrian Treves, Francisco Santiago-Ávila and Karann Putrevu — put the real figure much higher: between 27% and 33% of the state's wolves were lost between April 2020 and April 2021, a total of 313 to 323 animals.

About a third of that loss wasn't the licensed hunt at all. It was hidden deaths — a majority of them, the researchers estimated, illegal killing that spikes when protections are relaxed. Santiago-Ávila described the pattern this way: "Those wolves disappear and you never find them again."

The finding is that the delisting itself killed wolves beyond the hunt, because it told people the animals were no longer valued.

This is Tiffany's signature issue

Tiffany is not a bystander cheering an executive order. He has been trying to do the same thing permanently by law. In January 2021 he introduced the Managing Predators Act, which would have stripped gray wolves in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Wyoming of federal protection outright; it died in subcommittee. He is now the lead original cosponsor of the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, Lauren Boebert's bill ordering Interior to reissue the 2020 delisting rule, which passed the House 211–204 in December 2025 and is waiting on the Senate. His office says he authored it.

So the order is Trump doing administratively what Tiffany has been trying to legislate.

What the conservation groups say

Wolf delisting arrived bundled with a set of Trump orders aimed at beef and ranching, and the groups that work on this responded to the package together.

Western Watersheds Project made the point most directly about the economics Tiffany is invoking:

"The impact of wolves on the livestock industry [pales] in comparison to the impacts of recent trade agreements and the reality of ranching in the arid West under changing climate conditions."

Humane World for Animals said "the war on wolves needs to end, not escalate," and that the decisions should be "based on science, not political favors."

Food & Water Watch said the orders "will do nothing to reverse the last two years of Trump's disastrous food policy," pointing out that "consumer beef prices are at record highs, and ranchers can't make ends meet."

None of that says wolves never take livestock. They do. It says the wolf is being offered as the explanation for a squeeze that has other causes — and that Tiffany, running for governor, is happy to let it be.

The pattern on Wisconsin's natural resources

This is the same candidate who wants to break up the Department of Natural Resources "for sportsmen," when the state's own audit found 90% of that money already goes to them.

What the record shows

Tom Tiffany cheered Trump's order to strip gray wolves of federal protection and said Wisconsin has "successfully managed wildlife for generations." The last time Wisconsin managed wolves, in February 2021, hunters killed 218 against a state quota of 119 in under three days, and the DNR could not legally stop them. University of Wisconsin researchers estimated the state lost 27% to 33% of its wolves that year, roughly a third of it to hidden deaths, mostly illegal killing, that rose when protections came off. Tiffany wrote a bill to delist the wolf in 2021 and is the lead original cosponsor of the one that passed the House in December.

Sources

Tiffany Applauds White House's Action to Delist Gray Wolves, Office of Rep. Tom Tiffany (September 4, 2026).
Trump signs order pushing to remove gray wolf protections, Northern News Now (September 4, 2026).
Harvest Exceeded in 2021 Wisconsin Wolf Hunt, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
February Wolf Harvest Season Feb. 22-28, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (February 22, 2021).
February 2021 Wolf Hunting and Trapping Regulations, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Wisconsin's Wolf Quota Was 119. Hunters Killed Almost Twice as Many., Backpacker.
DNR: Wisconsin wolf population dropped 14 percent after controversial wolf hunt last year, Wisconsin Public Radio (September 30, 2022).
Hunting and hidden deaths led to estimated 30% reduction in Wisconsin's wolf population, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Critics Warn Trump Beef Orders 'Won't Help Consumers or Ranchers' and Could Kill Protected Wolves, Common Dreams (September 4, 2026).

Stacy Garrity's Company Cut Its Towanda Workforce From About 950 to 500. She Was Helping Run Its Czech Plant at the Time.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:41:36 +0000

Stacy Garrity has built her campaign for Pennsylvania governor on one story: she is not a career politician, she is a businesswoman. Her campaign website walks voters through her climb from accountant at Global Tungsten & Powders to becoming one of the first women ever made vice president there.

It is a good story. It leaves out what happened to the people who worked in the plant.

About 950 jobs in 2012. About 500 in 2019.

Spotlight PA reported in August that while Garrity was a director at Global Tungsten & Powders, the company "cut the workforce at its Towanda plant from around 950 employees in 2012 to roughly 500 in 2019 through multiple rounds of layoffs."

That is roughly half the jobs at one of the biggest employers in Bradford County, gone in seven years.

By 2010, Garrity was named director of sales and marketing. Spotlight PA reports that she "also helped run the company's facility in Bruntál, Czech Republic, though she did not live there," and that the job had her traveling around the world frequently, as recently as 2019.

So the years when Towanda was losing half its jobs are the same years she was helping run the operation overseas. American Journal News reported that the company was expanding its foreign workforce over that period, including at the Czech plant, and that it bought a Finnish facility in 2015 that Garrity says she helped negotiate.

Nobody has produced a document showing Garrity personally ordered a layoff. That is not the point. She is the one telling voters her record at this company qualifies her to run Pennsylvania's economy. If the years count as experience, they count as a record.

The lobbying she did without registering as a lobbyist

Garrity's last title at the company was vice president of government affairs. That job was lobbying, and she was good at it.

WHYY reported in April that she managed hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying for the company. She pushed for a 25% tariff on Chinese tungsten. She helped win a provision in the 2019 defense bill that barred the Pentagon from buying tungsten from China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. In 2020 the company landed a $4.2 million Defense Department grant. The company also had a registered lobbyist on contract at $10,000 a month starting in 2012.

Garrity never registered as a lobbyist herself. Her campaign spokesman, Matt Beynon, told WHYY she "never crossed the requisite threshold to register as lobbyist on behalf of the company."

Spotlight PA put the incentive plainly: Garrity has downplayed her role in the policy win — arguably her biggest private-sector accomplishment — "to avert the potential negative perception that she did not formally register as a lobbyist."

That is the shape of it. She wants credit for the work when she is describing her résumé and distance from it when someone asks why she never filed the paperwork.

The plant's environmental record

The company Garrity spent 34 years at has an enforcement file.

In 2020, the Towanda plant landed on a list of the country's top 100 "super polluters," a study by the Environmental Integrity Project and the United Church of Christ that ranked facilities by toxic air emissions in populated areas. It came in at number 96, on emissions reported for 2018.

Four years earlier, the EPA had gone after the plant for a chemical release. The federal consent agreement lays out what happened. At 4:30 in the morning on January 26, 2015, a pressure valve lifted and the plant vented an estimated 213 pounds of anhydrous ammonia into the air. Federal law requires a plant to tell the state emergency commission immediately when it releases more than 100 pounds of the stuff, because it is on the government's list of extremely hazardous substances.

The company never told the state. It called the federal hotline about four and a half hours later. EPA assessed a civil penalty of $22,281.

The rest of the pitch

Garrity's business-experience argument has been showing wear all year, and this is not the first crack in it:

The Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed her in 2024 and is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she would sign a right-to-work bill.
She spent two years arguing Pennsylvania should cut regulations to attract data centers, then called for a "pause" she won't put a length on.
Her Treasury office rejected a records request that would have shown whether she did a favor for donors.

She still holds a paid seat on the board of ECM, an insurance company — a position The Philadelphia Inquirer reported could pay her six figures on top of her salary as state treasurer.

What the record shows

Stacy Garrity is running for governor on 34 years at Global Tungsten & Powders. During her years as a director there, the company's Towanda plant went from about 950 workers to about 500 while she helped run its facility in the Czech Republic and the company expanded its foreign workforce. She spent years lobbying for the company without ever registering as a lobbyist. And the plant she rose through was fined $22,281 for failing to tell the state it had released 213 pounds of an extremely hazardous gas.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Garrity helped lead super polluter that offshored jobs", American Journal News, September 2, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Marc Levy, File.

Trump's EPA Approved a Likely Cancer-Causing 'Forever Chemical' to Be Sprayed on Corn, Wheat, Soybeans and Apples

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:16:30 +0000

On June 30, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency approved a weedkiller called trifludimoxazin for use on many crops, including corn, wheat, oats, soybeans, oranges, apples, peanuts and almonds.

Trifludimoxazin is a PFAS compound — one of the "forever chemicals," synthetic compounds whose carbon-fluorine bonds resist breaking down for years or decades. On August 28, 2026, three environmental organizations sued the administration in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, arguing the EPA approved it without fully assessing the risk.

What the studies found

In animal testing, trifludimoxazin produced thyroid tumors, liver damage and harm to the reproductive system at high doses.

Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety, one of the groups that filed the petition, described the chemical this way:

"Trifludimoxazin is a likely human carcinogen that belongs to a family of weedkillers that also causes reproductive harm, birth defects, and neurological deficits in animal studies."

Nathan Donley of the Center for Biological Diversity was blunter:

"It's unconscionable, immoral, and illegal."

The third plaintiff is the Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network North America.

This is not a narrow approval

Corn, wheat, soybeans and apples are not specialty products. They are staples — the corn and soy that run through most of the processed food supply, the wheat in bread, and a fruit that gets eaten raw, by children, often unpeeled.

And they are not the whole list. The residue limits the EPA set for trifludimoxazin are written by crop group, not by crop: all citrus, all pome fruit, all tree nuts, peanuts, every cereal grain except rice.

Approving a forever chemical across that much of the food supply is not a limited pilot. It is a decision to put a persistent, likely carcinogenic compound into the ordinary food supply and into the soil and groundwater of the farm belt.

"Forever" is the operative word. Trifludimoxazin "takes years to decades to break down," and what it breaks down into is more PFAS — "long-lived, PFAS byproducts," as the groups suing put it. Unlike a pesticide that is gone by the end of a season, this one is still there. The exposure does not end when the spraying stops.

The legal question, and the other one

The lawsuit's claim is that the EPA never finished the work. The agency "refused to conduct a cumulative risk assessment of trifludimoxazin and other PPO inhibitors as required by law," the groups say, and never assessed "the cancer risk to farmworkers who use the pesticide or to people exposed to trifludimoxazin-contaminated food or water." That is the legal question a court will decide. The broader one is why an agency whose job is to assess that risk approved a likely human carcinogen for most of the American food supply without finishing the work.

What the record shows

The EPA approved trifludimoxazin, a PFAS "forever chemical" that caused thyroid tumors, liver damage and reproductive harm in animal studies, for use on many crops including corn, wheat, oats, soybeans, oranges, apples, peanuts and almonds on June 30, 2026. Two months later, the Center for Food Safety, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network North America petitioned the 9th Circuit to overturn the approval, arguing the agency never fully assessed the risk. The compound takes years to decades to break down and leaves long-lived PFAS behind when it does, and the crops it was approved for are among the most widely grown and eaten in the country.

Sources

'Unconscionable, Immoral, and Illegal': Lawsuit Targets Trump Approval of Cancer-Causing Forever Chemical — Common Dreams, August 31, 2026.

Trump Administration Sued for Approving 'Forever Chemical' Pesticide Trifludimoxazin — Center for Biological Diversity, August 31, 2026.

Trifludimoxazin; Pesticide Tolerances — Federal Register, May 17, 2021.

The Trump Administration Has Exempted More Than 70 Chemical Plants From the Rule That Was Supposed to Cut Their Neighbors' Cancer Risk From Toxic Air by 96 Percent.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:52:47 +0000

In April 2024, Tish Taylor and her father Robert stood behind the head of the Environmental Protection Agency while he signed a rule they had spent years asking for. They live in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana — in the 85-mile stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that people call Cancer Alley. The parish has the highest risk of cancer from air pollution of anywhere in the country: nearly 50 times the national average.

The rule they were watching get signed was designed to fix exactly that. Two years later, most of it is being taken apart.

What the rule actually did

It's called the HON rule, and here is what it does.

The rule covered about 220 large petrochemical plants, which make the ingredients for plastics, paint, antifreeze, detergent and shampoo. In making them, those plants release six chemicals that Tracey Woodruff — a Stanford epidemiology professor who used to do toxic assessments for the EPA — calls "the classic bad guys": ethylene oxide, chloroprene, benzene, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride and 1,3-butadiene. They raise the risk of breast cancer, liver cancer, leukemia, lymphoma and reproductive problems. "We've known about their toxicity for decades," Woodruff said.

The rule made those plants do three things:

Upgrade their pollution controls to cut ethylene oxide and chloroprene emissions by almost 80 percent.
Put air monitors on the fence line so the people living next door could see what was actually coming over it — and fix leaks when readings went over the limit.
Stop dumping during startups and shutdowns. Plants had long been let off the emissions rules while powering down for maintenance or ahead of a storm. With storms getting worse, that loophole has "a massive impact on what is actually getting released," said Shiv Srivastava of the Houston group Fenceline Watch.

The EPA's own estimate was that the rule would prevent 6,200 tons of toxic air pollution a year and cut the cancer risk from air toxics in nearby communities by 96 percent.

Nearly 60 percent of the covered plants are in Texas and Louisiana. The rest are in Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and elsewhere.

How it is being undone

Weeks into Trump's second term, the EPA invited chemical companies to email the agency and ask to be let out.

Last year, Trump granted two-year exemptions to more than 50 petrochemical facilities. This July he issued 20 more. The EPA has said it will propose a rewrite of the rule this fall, and nobody expects the new version to be stronger.

The HON rule was one of nine air-toxics rules the Biden EPA issued, covering everything from steelmaking to copper smelting to tire manufacturing to coal plants. As Yale E360 reports, all nine have been or are now being rescinded, revised, or reconsidered.

To grant the exemptions, Trump used a provision of the Clean Air Act that environmental lawyers say has never been used before — one that lets a president waive a standard for two years if the technology to comply is not available and he determines that granting the exemption is "in the national security interests of the United States." His proclamations asserted that the rule "imposes substantial burdens on chemical manufacturers already operating under stringent regulations" and that "maintaining a robust domestic chemical industry is vital to safeguarding the supply chains that underpin our economy."

The orders offered no evidence for any of it. "That's not how this works," said Annie Fox, a staff attorney at the Clean Air Council. The law requires a president to lay out specifics behind each claim, "not just state it." She added: "These are supposed to be rare exceptions that are well-grounded in research and facts."

Last October, a coalition including the Taylors' group, Concerned Citizens of St. John, sued Trump and the EPA in federal court in Washington, arguing the national-security claim is a pretext to spare polluters while the administration dismantles the rule.

It is not only this rule

The EPA has also proposed undoing Biden-era strengthening of the Risk Management Program — the safety rule that let workers handling hazardous substances stop operations they believed were dangerous, required chemical plants to prepare for natural disasters, made them undergo independent audits after accidents, and required them to share information with the public.

There were 131 accidents involving reportable chemical releases nationally last year. For people living near the nearly 700 chemical plants around Houston, Srivastava said, "there are constant explosions, there are constant fires, there are constant black, dark plumes that linger over our communities." Easing the safety rules, he said, "makes us extremely, extremely vulnerable to having a massive, catastrophic disaster."

The administration also took down the online tool that let people near a petrochemical plant look up its accident history, its emergency response plan, and which chemicals it handles. Srivastava says that without it, neighbors cannot find out even the names and locations of the plants around them.

And in March, the EPA proposed weakening a separate 2024 rule limiting ethylene oxide at facilities that use it to sterilize medical equipment — arguing that the Clean Air Act gives regulators very little room to update rules when the science on health risks changes.

Who wanted this

The American Chemistry Council, the petrochemical industry's trade group, called the HON rule "overly stringent" and said it "exceeds the EPA's statutory authority." The exemptions, it said, "offer a pathway for relief for some sources from some of the unrealistic timelines" in the rule.

That trade group does not only write statements. In January, the House committee chaired by Kentucky's Brett Guthrie released a draft rewrite of the nation's toxic chemicals law and the American Chemistry Council cheered it; in May, the ACC filed an $80,276 independent expenditure for TV ads running in Guthrie's district. Kentucky is one of the states where HON-covered plants sit.

The EPA's own answer, in a statement, was that its air-toxics proposals aim to "protect American industry and supply chains, while still minimizing Americans' unnecessary exposure to hazardous air pollutants."

Woodruff, who watched the agency from the inside, reads the record differently. Former fossil fuel and petrochemical industry representatives now hold top jobs across the EPA, she noted, and the message to industry has been that "whatever the industry wants to do, that's what we want to do." The policy changes, she said, "will lead to people getting sicker and dying."

Who is living with it

A disproportionate share of the people breathing the highest concentrations of these chemicals in Cancer Alley are Black. Hillcrest, the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, is ringed by petrochemical plants — one of which was granted a two-year exemption from the rule.

Sharon Lavigne, who founded RISE St. James Louisiana, still has the pen the EPA administrator handed her after he signed the rule in 2024. Her group is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She said she thinks the president's disregard for the rule reflects a belief that "we are nothing."

Tish Taylor put it more simply. Everything the Biden administration did to protect her community, she said in July, was "pretty much just thrown in the garbage" and replaced with "a death sentence."

What the record shows

The EPA finalized a rule in April 2024 requiring about 220 petrochemical plants to cut emissions of six cancer-causing chemicals, monitor their fence lines, and stop venting during shutdowns — protections the agency estimated would prevent 6,200 tons of toxic pollution a year and cut nearby communities' air-toxics cancer risk by 96 percent. The Trump administration has since exempted more than 70 of those plants, using a Clean Air Act provision lawyers say has never been invoked before and offering no supporting evidence, and has said it will propose a rewrite this fall that is all but certain to scale the rule back. All nine of the Biden EPA's air-toxics rules have been or are now being rescinded, revised, or reconsidered. The parish the Taylors live in has the highest air-pollution cancer risk in the country, nearly 50 times the national average.

Source

Trump Is Unraveling a Hard-Won Rule to Reduce Toxic Pollution From Chemical Plants — Beth Gardiner, originally published by Yale E360 and reproduced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration, August 2026. Photo: petrochemical plants in Ascension Parish, Louisiana (Gerald Herbert/AP).

Trump's EPA Wants to Scrap the Rule That Tells You a Data Center Applied to Pollute Your Air

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:14:35 +0000

Right now, if a company applies for a permit to put an air-polluting facility near your house, there is a federal rule that says the state has to tell you about it and give you a chance to say something.

The Environmental Protection Agency, run by Lee Zeldin, is planning to get rid of that rule.

Talking Points Memo's Nicole LaFond walked through the proposal, based on New York Times reporting. It covers a category of industrial facility that includes the thing communities all over the country are currently fighting: AI data centers, and the gas-fired power plants built to run them.

What the rule does now, and what happens without it

Today, when a company files an air-pollution permit application for one of these facilities, the state has to publicly announce it and take public input. That announcement is the entire reason ordinary people ever find out in time. It's what lets somebody show up at a county board meeting, ask what the thing is, and say no.

Take the requirement away and the notice becomes optional. As TPM puts it, residents may not learn the facility is coming until after the permit is approved — or after construction has already started.

An EPA spokesperson told the Times the change would "provide the state and local agencies most familiar with local issues the discretion to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation."

Read that carefully. "Whether" is doing all the work in that sentence. The other two words are about scheduling. "Whether" means a state can decide to tell you nothing at all.

It isn't the only thing they're doing

Per the Times reporting TPM cites, the EPA has also:

Proposed letting developers start building data centers before their permits are approved.
Exempted the gas plants that fuel many data centers from limits on the pollutants that cause acid rain.

So: build before you're approved, pollute past the acid rain caps, and don't necessarily tell the neighbors you applied.

About the words "minor source"

The proposal applies to facilities the EPA classifies as a "minor source" of air pollution. That category lumps together car repair shops, laundromats, landfills, steel mills — and data centers.

Environmental groups point out that "minor" is doing a lot of work too. A facility in that category can emit up to 250 tons of hazardous pollutants a year and still be a "minor source."

Two hundred and fifty tons. Every year. Minor.

Why data centers specifically

The EPA under Zeldin has recast its mission around making, in its own words, the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world. That is a striking assignment for an agency whose job has historically been public health and the environment.

And it is happening at the exact moment the public turned on data centers — which is not a partisan thing. It is one of the few issues in 2026 uniting Americans across the political spectrum. The facilities drain local water supplies, they drive up electricity bills in the middle of an affordability crisis, and people don't like being told a hyperscale computing plant is going in next door after the fact.

We've written about what that looks like on the ground. Utility bills are already climbing hard in the states that welcomed these projects — Tampa Electric's rates up 86%, Ohio's bills up 53%. Three out of four Americans oppose an AI data center in their area, and eight Republicans took the industry's money before discovering their concerns. When towns actually organized against the projects, seven Republicans floated the idea that the opposition might be working for China.

This proposal is the next step in that sequence. When people find out, they object. So make it harder to find out.

Who is pushing back

A coalition of more than 200 environmental groups has filed objections, according to Common Dreams, which reported that the rule first surfaced at an EPA meeting in July. Lawyers from the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity have all criticized it publicly.

This is also the second time this month we've written about this EPA and this industry. In August it approved two semiconductor chemicals whose identities are a trade secret, its own order recording that there are "currently insufficient data to assess these compounds."

What this costs you

Public notice is not a technicality. It is the only part of the permitting process built for people who don't have a lobbyist.

A tech company applying to build a gas plant knows the rules. It has lawyers who track dockets and engineers who write permit applications for a living. The family three roads over has none of that. What they have is a legal requirement that somebody tell them.

The EPA is proposing to take that away, on behalf of the one industry the public is currently most organized against.

What the record shows

The EPA plans to eliminate the federal rule requiring states to publicly announce industrial air-pollution permit applications and take public comment on them — a category that includes AI data centers and the gas plants that power them. The agency's own explanation is that states should decide "whether" to provide public participation at all. It has separately proposed letting developers begin construction before permits are approved, and exempted the gas plants that run data centers from acid rain pollution limits. Facilities in the affected "minor source" category can legally emit up to 250 tons of hazardous pollutants a year. More than 200 environmental groups have filed objections.

Source

Trump's EPA Clamps Down on Public Outrage Over Data Centers — the One Issue Sparking Bipartisan Revolt — Nicole LaFond, Talking Points Memo, August 25, 2026, reporting on The New York Times.

The Trump Administration Wants to Open 336,400 Protected Acres Beside Chaco Canyon to Drilling and Uranium Mining.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:01:49 +0000

There is a place in northwestern New Mexico where you can stand in the ruins of a thousand-year-old city and look up at a sky as dark as the people who built it saw.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is 53 square miles of ancestral Puebloan ruins — great houses, roads, and settlements built by Indigenous Pueblo peoples who were serious astronomers. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Astronomers recognize it internationally as a dark-sky area, ideal for viewing the stars.

In 2023, the Interior Department drew a 10-mile buffer zone around it. Inside that ring: no new oil and gas drilling, no uranium mining.

The Trump administration's Bureau of Land Management now wants to erase it. That would open 336,400 acres right next to Chaco to drilling and mining.

The comment period was 14 days. 100,000 comments came in anyway.

Before a change like this takes effect, the BLM opens a window for the public to comment on it.

The window it opened here was 14 days — unusually short, and it closed in July.

Roughly 100,000 comments came in anyway, and they were mostly hostile. Tribal leaders, archaeologists, and conservation groups lined up against it.

Fourteen days is not how you handle a decision about a World Heritage Site. It is how you handle a decision you have already made.

The United Nations is now asking questions

UNESCO confirmed it has received information about the plan and is waiting on a response from the federal government about what it would do to Chaco.

Its position is not ambiguous.

"The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status," a UNESCO spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that projects proposed outside a World Heritage property "should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value" — the specific qualities that got the site listed in the first place — and should get proper impact assessments before anyone decides anything.

The United States has 27 World Heritage Sites, including Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty. One of them, the Everglades, is already on UNESCO's "in danger" list because of development and pollution. Others can be added if what's happening next door is judged harmful enough.

That is the actual risk here. Not a fine, not a lawsuit — an internationally recognized American landmark getting formally listed as endangered because of a decision made in Washington.

What drilling next door actually does to it

Opponents laid out the specifics, and they are not abstract.

Air pollution — a haze over a park people travel across the world to see, which would cut visitor numbers.
Water — fracking activity near a place where, as one Navajo community leader put it, the aquifers are currently pristine.
Light and flaring — bright industrial lighting and burning gas, in a night sky astronomers recognize internationally. The Pueblo people who built Chaco tracked the stars from it. So do stargazers now.

Daniel Tso, who served as a Navajo Nation council delegate, holds land allotments inside the buffer.

"I have allotments inside the buffer zone where the land is untouched, the aquifers are pristine," he said. "If the oil and gas companies go in there the sacredness of that land is gone."

Then he described what the outside of the line already looks like: "Outside this zone, some of these oil and gas wells are within 100 feet of Navajo people's homes, causing tremendous health impacts."

Within 100 feet of people's homes. That is what Tso fears is coming for the 336,400 acres inside the line.

The argument for doing it doesn't hold up

The pitch is urgency — America needs the energy, and it needs it from here.

Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, pointed out the hole in that.

"Almost all of the federal land around places like Chaco and Carlsbad is already leased for oil and gas drilling, so the idea there's an urgent new demand for this is an illusion."

The industry is already there. It has already been given nearly everything around the park. The buffer is the exception, not the obstacle.

Deb Haaland, the former Interior Secretary who oversaw the buffer zone's creation, said removing it would cause "irreversible damage." Of Trump and BLM director Steve Pearce, she said: "Their attempt to profit off this sacred place shows a clear lack of consideration and disrespect for the lives that New Mexicans live."

Chaco is not the only one

Chaco is where the threat is largest, but it isn't isolated.

Some Republicans have been lobbying the president to lift the ban on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, also a World Heritage Site. And the administration has already leased thousands of acres for oil and gas drilling near Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, above a fragile underground cave system.

It fits a pattern this site has been tracking all year. The administration cut Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments by nearly 3 million acres — about 90%. It has moved to scrap the Roadless Rule protecting untouched national forest, after 99% of the Americans who commented said not to. It erased the rule that made it illegal to destroy the habitat endangered animals live in.

Dinan said the run of decisions has changed how she reads this one.

"It makes me wonder where the line in the sand is; it feels that no matter how valuable or sacred a place is, the administration is willing to trade it all in."

The Interior Department and the National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment.

What it adds up to

The Bureau of Land Management wants to open 336,400 acres beside a UNESCO World Heritage Site to oil, gas and uranium extraction. It gave the public 14 days to object, got about 100,000 mostly hostile comments, and is moving ahead — while UNESCO waits on an answer the federal government has not given, and the industry's own leases already cover nearly all the land around the park.

Source

Oliver Milman, "Trump's Plan to Allow Drilling Near New Mexico Heritage Site Sets off Global Alarm", originally published by The Guardian and reproduced by Mother Jones through the Climate Desk collaboration, August 2026. Photo: Jon G. Fuller / AP.

Greg Abbott Ordered a Data Center Audit to Answer Texans' Questions. The Answers Arrive 37 Days After They Vote.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:45 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, 2026, Texas regulators quietly settled the only question about Greg Abbott's data center crackdown that actually matters.

Not what the audit will find. When.

The state's grid operator told the Public Utility Commission it aims to hand in its report on the roughly 300 data center projects lined up to plug into the Texas grid by December 10. The commission signed off on that schedule.

Election Day in Texas is November 3.

So Texans will vote on whether to give Greg Abbott a fourth term 37 days before the state tells them what it learned about the industry he spent eleven years bringing here.

What He Said He Was Doing

On August 3, Abbott sent a letter to the two agencies that run the Texas grid and told them to stop approving new data center hookups until the state audited how much power and water these things use, what tax breaks they're getting, and who actually owns them.

We laid out his record the next day: he branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," stood next to Google's CEO to announce a $40 billion buildout, and presided over a sales tax break for data centers that started out costing the state an estimated $5.4 million in 2014 and, by this year, was letting $1.3 billion a year go uncollected.

Then, in August of an election year, he announced he was the one protecting us from all of it.

This week he described that as a virtue.

"Texans appreciate the level-headed approach that I've brought to the data center equation."

The Reason He Gave for the Pause Is the Reason to Doubt It

Abbott's own explanation for why the audit was necessary is that the data center companies won't tell the state anything.

"We got less than a 10% response, so that would be like giving you a 100-piece puzzle and saying solve it using only nine pieces of the puzzle," he said this week. "That's the situation ERCOT was in, and it was untenable for them to move forward with such lack of information."

He's describing something real. It also did not start this month, and he has known about it for a while.

Texas already has a law on the books requiring data centers to report their water use. The Texas Water Development Board found 341 data centers in the state and surveyed all of them last year. About 17% wrote back. Two years earlier the board had counted 22 data centers in Texas. By last year it was 341 — and five out of six of them ignored a survey they are legally required to answer.

Republican lawmakers found out in June and were furious about it. Rep. Brad Buckley, at a House hearing:

"So we're building a state water plan off of a 17% response rate. Is that an overstatement? I mean, that is a terrible response rate."

Rep. Trent Ashby, at the same hearing, called the state's reliance on those numbers a "broken system":

"When you're talking about massive water usage, especially groundwater, and the state can't calculate how much water is being [used], I think we can all understand why Texans are rightfully concerned about making sure that we have enough water ... to meet our future demand."

Rep. Cody Harris said the industry's habit of refusing to answer anybody is exactly why people are angry:

"When new developers like Diode Ventures enter a residential neighborhood intent on building a new data center and refuses to do any community town halls, refuses to discuss their water and electricity uses, and refuses to testify before this committee, then Texans rightfully get upset."

Harris's conclusion: "The transparency of utilization of resources shouldn't be optional."

Here's the part that shows how seriously Texas actually takes this. Blowing off that water survey is a crime — a Class C misdemeanor. But the Water Development Board doesn't enforce it. Enforcement would have to come from a local prosecutor or some other agency. So nobody does it.

A law nobody enforces isn't a law. It's a suggestion. The companies figured that out.

So His Fix Is to Ask Them Again

Knowing all of that, look at what the audit actually is.

The grid operator will send information requests to the big projects in late August and early September. Then, possibly, more rounds through October and November. Then it writes up what it got and files the report on December 10.

That's it. The same companies that ignored a legally required state survey are being asked more questions, on a longer timeline, by an agency with no more power to make them answer than the water board had.

The chairman of the Public Utility Commission, Thomas Gleeson, described the community-impact survey that goes with it in three words: "a fact-finding mission."

Nothing in that schedule creates a penalty. Nothing in it makes a single company hand over a number it doesn't want to hand over. And it reports back after the votes are counted.

The Calendar Keeps Doing Abbott Favors

Notice what the pause actually moved.

Before Abbott's letter, the grid operator expected to finish its study of that first group of projects — and start approving them — in April 2027. Abbott's order pushed the paperwork to December and the approvals to some unnamed date after that. The projects were already months away from getting the green light. Nothing was about to be built in October that isn't going to be built now.

Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature doesn't come back until January. Anything lawmakers pass on data centers — ending the tax break, setting water rules, deciding where these things can go — wouldn't take effect until well after that. Until then, the rules are the generous ones Abbott presided over.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican elected statewide the same year Abbott was, says that is the entire point. He accused Abbott of giving "a wink and a nod to his data center people saying 'Hey, you have plenty of time to get grandfathered in, then we'll put the screws on all your competition.'" Miller called the crackdown "smoke and mirrors and campaign fluff to gain votes." He says he asked Abbott for a one-year pause, for a special session, and for the return of campaign money from data center companies, and got nothing back.

That money is not hypothetical. Black Mountain Power, a Fort Worth firm building a 430-acre data center campus in southeast Fort Worth, gave Abbott's campaign $500,000 in November 2025 — and its founder and CEO gave another $500,000 in March 2026.

Why the Delay Costs You Either Way

While the state gathers facts, the line keeps growing. Roughly 90% of everything now waiting to connect to the Texas grid is a data center.

Somebody pays to build the power plants and the giant transmission lines that serve all that new demand. Across the country, that somebody has turned out to be regular customers — the people whose only role in the AI boom is the bill at the end of the month. In Texas it's the same grid that collapsed in 2021 and killed at least 210 people.

The water is worse, because you can't build more of it. The state's long-range water plan is being written off a 17% response rate, and the industry drawing from the aquifers still won't say how much it's taking.

Abbott's Own Voters Already Called It

Rural Texans didn't need the December 10 filing date to figure this out. They'd reached the verdict weeks ago — lifelong Republicans in Hood County and Tom Green County describing the pause as "smoke and mirrors" and "just covering his butt." One woman who says she can't remember ever voting for a Democrat put it plainly: "He sold Texans out to big business, and I just don't trust him anymore."

His Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, has spent the campaign trying to seize on that backlash.

An audit that reports after the election isn't information. It's a receipt handed to you on the way out.

Greg Abbott had eleven years to ask these questions. He asked them in August of an election year, and set the answers to arrive in December. We deserve better.

Source

Benjamin Wermund, Greg Abbott's data center audit won't be done before the election, The Dallas Morning News, August 20, 2026. Photo: Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman.

The Order Protecting the Boundary Waters Expires 90 Days After Walz Leaves Office. Lisa Demuth Wants the Copper Mine.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:06:31 +0000

On Tuesday, August 18, Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order aimed at blocking a copper-nickel mine upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

There's a catch written into it. The order expires 90 days after Walz leaves office.

Which means the person who really decides whether the Boundary Waters gets a sulfide-ore mine in its watershed is whoever wins the governor's race this November.

One of the two major-party nominees is Lisa Demuth. The Star Tribune summed up her position in six words: "Pro-mining, all mining, including Twin Metals."

What's actually at stake

The Boundary Waters is a million acres of lakes and forest in northern Minnesota. People take their kids there. It is one of the most visited wilderness areas in the country, and the tourism and recreation economy built around it depends on one thing: the water staying clean.

Twin Metals wants to put a copper-nickel mine outside the wilderness but upstream from it. That word does all the work. Water runs downhill. Anything that leaks out of that site runs into the Boundary Waters.

This is sulfide-ore mining, which Minnesota has never done. It's a type with a long, documented record of leaving polluted water behind. Conservation groups warn a failure would flow downstream and permanently contaminate the wilderness.

And the company that would cash in is not a Minnesota company. Twin Metals is a subsidiary of Antofagasta, a Chilean mining conglomerate.

How the protection got knocked down in the first place

In 2023, the federal government pulled about 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest — the land that drains straight into the Boundary Waters — off the table for mining leases for 20 years.

Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber wrote a resolution to erase that. It passed the Senate 50-49 in April, Trump signed it on April 27, and the 20-year protection was gone. Every Senate Democrat, including Amy Klobuchar, voted against lifting it.

That vote is what pushed conservation groups to ask Walz for a state-level order. Which is what he signed Tuesday. Which is what expires 90 days into the next governor's term.

So the whole thing now rests on one election.

What Demuth says

Demuth's public statement about the order didn't discuss the specifics of Twin Metals' proposal. It went after the politics:

"Tim Walz, Amy Klobuchar and Democrats in the legislature continue their hostility toward Minnesota mining, taking job growth opportunities off the table before they can even go through the regulatory review process."

She has said before that she supports the Twin Metals project specifically.

In her own words to reporters this week, on why the review should go ahead:

"It provides jobs. It provides minerals and I think we can look better at Minnesota and how we can help with those critical minerals rather than just shutting down the process."

And then the claim worth writing down:

"I believe that we can do the mining safely in Minnesota, safer than any other place in the country if not the world for those critical minerals that we absolutely need and that review process should be allowed to go forward."

Safer than any other place in the country. If not the world.

That is a big promise about a kind of mining Minnesota has never done once, on a site where the water runs into a national wilderness. It is offered as a belief — "I believe that we can" — not as evidence.

The jobs argument cuts both ways

Demuth frames this as jobs versus environmentalists. That framing skips something.

The Boundary Waters already supports jobs. Outfitters, guides, lodges, resorts, restaurants, gear shops — a whole regional economy that exists because people come from all over the country to paddle clean water. Those jobs are here now, and they are the ones that disappear if the water goes bad.

The trade isn't jobs versus no jobs. It's a Chilean conglomerate's mine versus the tourism economy Minnesotans already built, with the wilderness itself as the collateral.

Demuth's statement said mining can be approved while protecting "our beloved outdoors." She did not say how, and she did not address what Twin Metals specifically would put in the watershed.

The pattern

This is a candidate who has been comfortable claiming more than the record supports before.

She took credit for a viral daycare video — and the YouTuber who made it said he had no idea who she was. She had herself elected Speaker of the Minnesota House, and ten days later the state Supreme Court ruled it never legally happened. And a billionaire who funds abortion bans is bankrolling her run for governor.

Now she is telling Minnesotans that a copper-nickel mine upstream from the Boundary Waters can be done more safely than anywhere on earth.

Voters get to decide whether they believe that, because the order protecting the place runs out 90 days after the next governor is sworn in. There is no do-over on a poisoned watershed.

Sources

Dave Orrick, "Klobuchar vs. Demuth: Where they stand on mining near the Boundary Waters", The Minnesota Star Tribune, August 18, 2026.

"Republican Demuth Opposes Governor's Executive Order Protecting BWCAW from Mining", Learfield / willmarradio.com, August 19, 2026.

Zach Lahn Calls Agribusiness a 'Cartel.' He Built His Career at the Koch Brothers' Political Shop — and Still Sits on a Koch-Funded Board.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:49:33 +0000

Zach Lahn has built an unusual campaign for a Republican in Iowa. He calls agribusiness multinationals "cartels" that "have pillaged our state." He wants to break them up with antitrust lawsuits. He promises to "tax the heck" out of Wall Street hedge funds. He says the EPA has been captured by corporate interests.

He told Tucker Carlson it sometimes makes him sound like a "hippie."

A new investigation by Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network asks the obvious question about a man who says all that: where was he before?

The answer is that he was working for the other side.

He ran the Koch brothers' Montana operation

In 2014, Lahn was hired to direct the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity — the Koch brothers' flagship political advocacy group.

What did he do there? He urged Montana's Republican legislators to vote against the state's Medicaid expansion. When some of them supported it anyway, he tried to run them out of office.

Lahn is singled out by name in the award-winning 2018 documentary Dark Money as an example of how the Koch political operation works.

That is not ancient history that a man can simply grow out of. It is a career spent doing the specific thing Iowa's rural communities are still paying for. He's still defending privatized Medicaid today, after Iowa's own state auditor found it caused an 891% jump in illegal denials.

And he still sits on a Koch-financed board

In 2018, Lahn co-founded a private school in Kansas with Annie Koch, wife of Koch scion Chase Koch, who financed the project. Lahn and Annie later married.

Lahn still serves on that school's board of directors.

Now hold that next to his stump speech. Lahn wants the agribusiness "cartels" broken up. Koch Industries is one of them: its fertilizer arm, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, is one of just four companies — with CF Industries, Nutrien and Yara — holding 84% of North America's nitrogen fertilizer capacity. Farmer advocacy groups have accused it of monopolistic practices in Iowa specifically.

To be fair and precise: Lahn did not work in the Koch family's agricultural business. He worked in their politics. But the distinction is thinner than it sounds — the politics existed to protect the business, and Americans for Prosperity was campaigning in Iowa too, for Republican candidates Mother Jones describes as friendly to Big Ag and corporate interests.

Austin Frerick, an expert on Iowa agricultural antitrust and author of Barons, offered the most economical summary:

Lahn, "at his core, is an all-star, major league political operative."

The crisis he's campaigning on is real

None of this means Iowa's problem is invented. It is severe, and both parties have avoided it for decades.

Iowa has the nation's second-highest cancer rate, and is one of only three states where the rate is increasing. The Iowa Environmental Council has explicitly tied that trend to agricultural pollution.
Pesticides, high-nitrogen fertilizers and hog-manure lagoons have laced the majority of Iowans' drinking water with unsafe contaminants.
The average farmer now makes less than 15 cents of every food dollar consumers spend.
Agribusiness spent about $224 million on lobbying last year — often outspending defense and oil and gas.

"When you live in these areas, you're living in a crisis," Frerick says. Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Farmers Union, puts it this way: "We have hit a level of corporate control that we've never gone through before."

That's why Lahn's pitch works. The grievance is genuine. The question is whether the messenger will act on it.

The test he's already failing

Here's the cleanest way to judge whether Lahn will actually take on the powerful: watch what he says about the administration he's tied himself to.

Because on the specific issue at the center of his campaign — glyphosate, the weed killer in Roundup that Lahn says the EPA won't admit causes cancer — the Trump administration has gone the other way, repeatedly:

Trump signed an executive order declaring the production of glyphosate critical to U.S. national security.
The nation's top pesticide regulator and its undersecretary for food safety are both former Big Ag lobbyists.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot sue Bayer, glyphosate's producer, over failing to warn consumers about the herbicide's alleged dangers.

Lahn accepted Trump's endorsement as a "patriot." He has not, so far as the reporting shows, challenged any of it.

The same goes for the rest of what Washington has done to Iowa farm country: tariffs crushing farmers, fertilizer costs climbing as the war in Iran drags on, DOGE's cuts to USDA services and regenerative farming programs, and the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in Trump's budget bill that agricultural communities increasingly rely on.

One Iowa soybean farmer told Mother Jones what he wants: "We need a governor who will stand up for Iowa when our Iowa interests are being ignored" — including, he added, by the president.

Who's paying for the anti-corporate campaign

Lahn deserves credit for one thing: unlike his primary opponent and his general-election rival, he didn't fund his primary campaign with big checks from Big Ag. He put in roughly $2.5 million of his own money.

But the money coming in now is not grassroots either. A PAC associated with the Republican Governors Association contributed $5 million. Steak 'n Shake CEO Sardar Biglari gave $25,000.

The party establishment does not write $5 million checks to candidates it expects to break up its donors' companies.

The rest of the platform

Lahn's anti-corporate message travels with positions that have nothing to do with fertilizer monopolies:

He's vowed to pull mRNA Covid shots off the market and end every childhood vaccine requirement in Iowa schools — during the worst measles year since 1991.
He's pushing a life-at-conception law, which would effectively end abortion access in Iowa.
He promises to drive "Marxists" out of Iowa schools, after running a school with no accreditation, no state tests and no licensed teachers.
He accepted an endorsement from former Rep. Steve King, who lost his seat in 2020 after questioning why "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" are offensive terms.

And the man presenting himself as a sixth-generation Iowa farmer didn't register to vote in Iowa until October 2024 — barely clearing the state's two-year residency requirement — as the Wall Street Journal documented. The Des Moines Register reported in May that he still flies to Kansas about once a week. The Daily Beast reported he has never claimed the Belle Plaine farm as his primary residence.

Lahn's campaign declined Mother Jones' interview request, and declined to answer questions about his role in the farm's day-to-day operations.

Lahn rails against out-of-state owners of Iowa farmland, and his critics note that he was one of them until recently. Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist at the University of Iowa, put it this way: "It takes one to know one."

What Iowa should ask

Iowa farmers are right to be furious, and they are right that nobody has been fighting for them. If Lahn has genuinely changed his mind about the Kochs, monopolies and corporate power, that would be worth something.

But a conversion is proved by what you give up, not by what you say. Lahn is still on the board of a Koch-financed school. He has not criticized a president who declared glyphosate a national security priority. And on Medicaid he has not moved: he campaigned against expansion in Montana, and he is defending Iowa's privatized system now.

Iowa deserves a governor who fought Big Ag before it was popular, not one who joined the fight after checking the polling.

Source

Zach Lahn Is MAHA's Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be? — Teresa Cotsirilos, Mother Jones, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, August 18, 2026. Top image illustration by Mark Harris.

Trump Is Paying $1.2 Billion of Your Money to Kill a Wind Farm — and Making the Company Spend $900 Million on Gas Instead

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:48:23 +0000

Trump promised to kill offshore wind by executive order on day one. Federal judges blocked him.

So he switched to a method the courts can't stop: writing checks.

Last week his administration agreed to pay German energy company RWE more than $1.2 billion to walk away from its U.S. offshore wind projects — including the only one planned in the Gulf of Mexico's federal waters, a 2,000-megawatt wind farm south of Louisiana that could have powered more than 350,000 homes.

That's your money. Paid to a foreign company. So that it doesn't build something.

The scale of it

The RWE deal is the biggest so far, but it isn't the first. The administration has now bought out about a dozen offshore wind leases, paying developers nearly $4 billion.

RWE isn't a marginal player. It's the world's second-largest offshore wind developer, running 19 wind farms across five countries. In late 2023 it paid $5.6 million for the right to develop in the Gulf's first-ever offshore wind lease auction — 102,000 acres about 40 miles south of Lake Charles.

RWE's own explanation of why it quit:

"After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future."

Not "the economics changed." Not "the wind is bad." There is no path forward to permit these projects.

The part that should make you sit up

The settlements don't just pay companies to stop building wind. Many of them require the company to spend its money on fossil fuels instead.

Under this agreement, RWE will invest:

$900 million to acquire a stake in Louisiana LNG, a planned liquefied natural gas export terminal near Lake Charles — one of the largest in the country, and set to be one of the state's largest sources of climate-warming pollution.
$300 million to reserve natural gas turbines for new gas-fired power plants.

Read that structure again. The federal government pays a company $1.2 billion to cancel a project, and as a condition, the company redirects $1.2 billion of its own money into the industries the administration prefers.

That is not deregulation. It is the government using public money to pick which private company invests in what — the exact thing Republicans spend every energy debate saying they oppose.

More than 50 environmental groups had urged RWE not to give in to the administration's "fossil fuel whims" before the deal closed.

What Louisiana specifically lost

Louisiana wasn't a reluctant host. RWE said Louisiana's political support for offshore wind, and its large offshore energy workforce, steered its interest toward the state. That workforce is the people who have spent careers building and servicing oil and gas platforms in the Gulf.

Those are the same workers. The same skills. The same shipyards.

Louisiana companies with offshore oil and gas ties helped build America's first offshore wind farm off Rhode Island, and had picked up engineering and construction contracts on East Coast projects. RWE planned to tap that workforce. It had already signed an agreement with Entergy to sell the power to customers in Louisiana and Texas.

Nobody knows exactly what the project would have been worth. But a 2020 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study of a smaller hypothetical Gulf wind farm — 600 megawatts, modeled at Port Arthur, Texas, just across the state line from Lake Charles — estimated nearly 4,500 construction jobs and $445 million in economic output during construction, then an ongoing 150 jobs and about $14 million a year once it was running.

Louisiana had set a goal of 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, proposed in 2021. Under Gov. Jeff Landry, who took office in 2024, that goal appears to have been abandoned.

Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, on what the deal does:

"This decision walks back years of development and stymies economic opportunity for the state."

She added that the administration should be supporting options for domestic energy production, "not removing them."

Where the policy actually comes from

It is worth being honest about the origin of this. Trump's hostility to wind turbines is not an energy analysis. It appears to date to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight with the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil the views from a golf course he planned to develop. He lost, and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees.

Since then he has suggested wind turbines drive up food prices, interrupt television reception, cause cancer, and drive people insane.

Four billion dollars of public money is now moving on the strength of that.

The pattern

When the courts said no, the administration didn't change course — it found a way around. That's becoming the house style. When a federal judge ruled the EPA's climate grant cancellations illegal, the agency decided the ruling meant it had to do nothing. When the Endangered Species Act got in the way, the administration simply rewrote the rule defining what counts as harming a species.

Meanwhile in Congress, Republicans have been running the same play through legislation — writing bills to make burning gas legally "clean" and to gut clean-air protections on behalf of Big Oil.

Still a chance, eventually

Madelyn Smith of the Southeastern Wind Coalition points out that a project on RWE's scale could be revived fairly quickly — much of the siting and feasibility work is already done, and another federal lease sale could be organized without much trouble.

The obstacle isn't engineering, or economics, or Louisiana. As she put it, for now the main obstacle is Trump.

"There's still hope under a different administration."

Source

Tristan Baurick, "Trump's offshore wind crackdown reaches the Gulf of Mexico," Verite News / Louisiana Illuminator, Aug. 15, 2026. Photo courtesy of RWE.

Trump's EPA Approved Two Chemicals It Admits It Can't Assess. You're Not Allowed to Know Their Names.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:43:53 +0000

The Environmental Protection Agency looked at two new chemicals headed for semiconductor factories and wrote down what they might do to people. Its own consent orders list acute toxicity, genetic toxicity, eye corrosion, skin and respiratory irritation, neurological and systemic effects, and reproductive and developmental toxicity — and record that for this class of chemical, "acute lethality is the primary concern." Acute lethality means a single short exposure can kill you.

Then it acknowledged it didn't have enough information to know how bad the risks actually were.

Then it approved them.

On Friday, the Sierra Club and CHIPS Communities United — represented by Earthjustice — sued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to undo those approvals.

You are not allowed to know what the chemicals are

Here is the part that should stop you.

Neither chemical has a public name. In the complaint, they appear only as EPA premanufacture notice numbers P-26-0029 and P-26-0045. Their actual identities are withheld as confidential business information.

So a federal agency has written down that two substances may damage genes and harm reproduction and development, that the main concern with their chemical class is that a short exposure can be fatal, has admitted it doesn't fully understand the danger, has cleared them for manufacture — and the people who will live near the plants making them are not permitted to know what they are.

You cannot test your water for a chemical whose name is a trade secret. You cannot ask your doctor about an exposure you can't name. You cannot warn your neighbors.

This is what the data center boom actually looks like

Semiconductors are the physical hardware artificial intelligence runs on. Every AI data center announcement — every "we're investing $50 billion in compute" press release — resolves, eventually, into chips, and chips get made in factories, and those factories use chemicals.

The point the petitioners press is that the harm doesn't stay inside the data center's fence line. "The rush to build more and more data centers is causing harm far beyond the data centers themselves," said Jane Williams, who chairs the Sierra Club's Grassroots Network National Clean Air Team — from the plants where the chemicals are used, to the roads they travel on, to the incinerators where they are burned.

And the chemistry problem isn't confined to fabrication. The chemicals tied to data center cooling, fire suppression and electronics manufacturing include refrigerants like Freon and Opteon, Teflon for cable insulation, Krytox for pumps and robotics, and Viton for sealing. Cooling systems can consume vast quantities of water, and the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that some immersion cooling techniques rely on PFAS — the "forever chemicals" that don't break down in a human body or in groundwater.

None of that shows up in the ribbon-cutting.

The EPA's own finding was that these may be dangerous

Under federal law, before a new chemical enters commerce, the EPA has to make a determination about it. That is the entire function. It is a gate.

The agency made one, and it is not reassuring. Under the heading "EPA's Determination," each order records that "in the absence of sufficient information to permit the Agency to make a reasoned evaluation of the health and environmental effects" of the substance, its manufacture, processing, distribution, use or disposal "may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment."

That is the statutory finding for a chemical the government cannot vouch for. Having made it, the EPA did not hold the approval back and go get the data. It authorized manufacture subject to conditions — gloves, chemical goggles, exposure controls, hazard labelling — and told the company to run the tests afterward, on a schedule that starts only once the EPA has approved the test protocols.

"We don't know" is not a finding of safety. It is the absence of one.

A pattern of an agency that doesn't want to regulate

This is the same EPA that, when a federal judge ruled its climate grant cancellations were illegal, decided the ruling meant it had to do nothing.

The through-line is an agency that treats its own obligations as optional — court orders, risk determinations, the statutory gate on new chemicals. What stays mandatory is the approval.

Who carries the cost

Chip fabs don't get built in wealthy neighborhoods. They get built where land is cheap, water is available, and a state government has offered a tax package. The people living downwind and downstream are the ones who absorb whatever P-26-0029 and P-26-0045 turn out to be.

They didn't get a vote on the approval. They aren't allowed to know the chemical's name. And the federal agency that exists to answer "is this safe?" wrote down that there are "currently insufficient data to assess these compounds," and signed off.

Meanwhile Republicans across the country are competing to bring data centers to their states — often, as we've documented, while taking money from the utilities and tech firms building them and telling constituents their electric bills won't go up.

The chemicals are the part of the deal nobody puts in the press release.

Source

Brett Wilkins, "Green Groups Sue Trump EPA for Approving Toxic Semiconductor Chemicals Amid AI Data Center Boom," Common Dreams, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo via Common Dreams.

The hazard findings and the determination quoted above are taken from the EPA's own TSCA Section 5 consent orders for P-26-0029 and P-26-0045 — signed by the EPA on June 3, 2026 — filed as appendices to the petitions for review. Earthjustice's press release describes those findings as "cancer... and even sudden death"; the orders themselves say "genetic toxicity" and "acute lethality," and do not identify either substance as a potential carcinogen.

Michael Whatley Spent a Decade Lobbying for Oil and Gas. You Won't Find a Word of It on His Campaign Website.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:38:08 +0000

Michael Whatley's campaign website tells you he was a federal law clerk. It tells you he was chief of staff to a U.S. senator. It tells you he chaired the Republican National Committee.

It does not tell you that he spent over a decade as a lobbyist for oil and natural gas companies.

Spectrum News reported this week that Whatley's biography leaves out the entire chapter — and when reporters asked the campaign why, "the campaign didn't provide an answer."

What's missing from the résumé

In 2009, Whatley helped found HBW Resources, a lobbying and public relations firm. Spectrum News reviewed 12 years of lobbying disclosure reports and found that Whatley and other lobbyists at the firm took in $3.5 million total, with $1.2 million of it coming from energy clients.

Until 2019, he was executive vice president of the Consumer Energy Alliance — a group that presents itself as a voice for energy consumers. It is nothing of the sort. The research outfit DeSmog says CEA was founded by Whatley of HBW Resources. The Energy and Policy Institute, which tracks utility and fossil-fuel front groups, reports that CEA "is operated out of the offices of the Houston-based public relations and lobbying firm HBW Resources," that its tax filings show it "has no staff," and that "nearly all the representatives listed on CEA's website are HBW employees" — and that CEA has routed $26.5 million, 56 percent of everything it has raised since 2010, straight to HBW.

In other words: Whatley was a partner in a lobbying firm, and an officer of the "consumer group" that hired his lobbying firm.

Its funders include ExxonMobil and Chevron.

He still owns the stock

Whatley's family holds hundreds of thousands of dollars in Exxon and Chevron shares.

Duke Energy was also a Consumer Energy Alliance client during Whatley's tenure. His family still owns Duke shares.

We've written about that last one before. Whatley and his wife own up to $445,000 in Duke Energy stock — while Duke has been asking North Carolina regulators for permission to raise power bills across the state. Now we know the company was a client of the front group where he was executive vice president.

That's the part the missing résumé line hides. Without it, the Duke shares look like an ordinary investment. With it, they look like the last thread of a working relationship.

The pattern of not answering

The campaign declining to explain the omission is not a one-off. It's Whatley's standard operating procedure:

Organizers at one of his events called the police on a reporter, and his spokesman declined to address it.
He would not say a word about taking money from Chemours, the company that contaminated the drinking water of half a million North Carolinians.
Trump named him Hurricane Helene "recovery czar" — and then audio surfaced of Whatley saying he'd told Trump to get rid of FEMA.

Every one of those is the same shape: a documented fact about Whatley's record, and a candidate who will not discuss it.

Why it matters for North Carolinians' bills

North Carolina is a state where energy policy lands directly on household budgets. Duke Energy is the dominant utility. Rate cases decide what people pay to keep the lights on. Coastal drilling and pipeline fights decide what the state's economy and shoreline look like for decades.

A senator's history of being paid by oil and gas companies — and serving as an officer of a front group funded by them — is exactly the kind of thing voters weigh before handing him a vote on all of it.

Whatley is asking North Carolina to send him to the Senate on a biography that lists the law clerkship and skips the decade he spent working for Exxon's and Chevron's side of the argument.

Voters can decide whether that's an oversight. But they can only decide it if somebody tells them, because his website won't.

Source

Reuben Jones and Ashley Gatz, "Whatley's lobbying work not featured on campaign website," Spectrum News, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: AP, via Spectrum News.

Five Republicans Filed Five Resolutions in Five Days to Undo California's Clean-Air Rules. Three of Them Represent California.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:10:33 +0000

Over five days in August 2026, five House Republicans filed five separate resolutions in Congress. Each one kills a different Environmental Protection Agency decision. Every single one is about California.

Here they are, straight off the congressional record:

Filed	Resolution	Sponsor	What it kills
Aug 6	H.J.Res. 210	Vince Fong (cosponsor: Gallagher)	The rule for ocean-going ships idling at California docks
Aug 6	H.J.Res. 211	Gary Palmer	California's waiver for greenhouse gas standards on cars, 2009 and later
Aug 6	H.J.Res. 212	August Pfluger	California's Advanced Clean Cars program waiver
Aug 10	H.J.Res. 213	James Gallagher (cosponsor: Fong)	Commercial harbor craft emission rules
Aug 10	H.J.Res. 214	Jay Obernolte	Small off-road engines — lawn mowers, leaf blowers, generators

All five went to the same committee: House Energy and Commerce.

That isn't five members having the same idea by accident. That's a package.

What a "waiver" actually is

California has been allowed to set stricter air pollution limits than the federal government since the Clean Air Act was written. The reason is simple and old: Los Angeles had the worst smog in America, and Congress let the state that already had its own program keep going. Other states can then choose to follow California's standards instead of the weaker federal ones. The authority is Section 209 of the Clean Air Act. For cars, EPA "shall grant a waiver unless" it finds California was arbitrary and capricious in concluding its standards are at least as protective as the federal ones, or doesn't need them for its own conditions, or wrote enforcement rules that clash with federal law. For engines that aren't cars — ships, boats, lawn mowers — the same three-part test runs under a parallel provision EPA calls an authorization. Under Section 177, other states can adopt California's car standards without asking EPA at all.

Either way, California can't enforce its rules until EPA signs off. Each of these five resolutions targets one of those decisions: two waivers and three authorizations.

Pfluger, Palmer and Obernolte's own announcement of their three is direct about the goal. August Pfluger:

"California should not be allowed to dictate what kind of vehicles Texans and Americans across the country can drive. … I'm proud to introduce this CRA to restore consumer choice, protect American families from costly mandates, and put an end to California setting de facto national auto policy."

Gary Palmer: "California should not be allowed to set de facto national vehicle standards for the rest of the country. This resolution reaffirms that the Clean Air Act cannot be used to give one state the power to reshape America's auto market."

Their release says the point is to stop California's rules "from quietly becoming the law of the land, without a single vote in Congress."

That line is worth holding onto, because of what the tool they picked actually does.

The tool they picked

The Congressional Review Act is a fast lane. A CRA resolution can't be filibustered in the Senate, needs only simple majorities, and skips the normal committee grind.

It also does something ordinary legislation doesn't: once a rule is killed by CRA, the agency is barred from issuing a rule in "substantially the same form" ever again — unless Congress passes a new law authorizing it. That's written into the statute itself: a disapproved rule "may not be reissued in substantially the same form … unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after" the disapproval.

So the complaint is that California's standards might take effect without a full congressional debate. The remedy is a procedure specifically designed to avoid a full congressional debate, with a permanent lock on the door afterward.

What's on the list is not abstract

Three of the five resolutions aren't about cars at all.

H.J.Res. 210 targets the at-berth rule for ocean-going vessels. That regulation requires that every vessel visit to a regulated California port use an approved emission control strategy for the whole time it's docked, unless the visit qualifies for an exception — instead of running diesel engines while tied up next to a neighborhood. Container, refrigerated and cruise ships came under it starting January 2023.

H.J.Res. 213 goes after the commercial harbor craft rules — tugboats, ferries, fishing boats working the same waters.

Those two rules are about the air in port communities. Long Beach. Wilmington. Oakland. The people who live there breathe what idles at the dock.

H.J.Res. 214 covers small off-road engines: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, portable generators. Jay Obernolte's contribution to the package is the lawn equipment.

Who filed them

This is the part that makes the package legible.

Gary Palmer chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment — the panel that is supposed to protect America's air and water. He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 1% lifetime score. In 2025 he cast 33 anti-environment votes and zero pro-environment votes, with a coal company, a power company and a quarry company on his donor list.

August Pfluger has a 0% LCV score for 2025 and 0% lifetime. He represents the Permian Basin and sits on Energy and Commerce.

Vince Fong has a 0% 2025 score and 4% lifetime — a record built while serving on the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

Jay Obernolte has a 3% 2025 score and 6% lifetime.

James Gallagher represents California's 1st District, which contains Paradise — the town destroyed by the deadliest wildfire in California history. In eleven years in the California Legislature he compiled an 11% lifetime environmental score, and California Environmental Voters put him in what it calls the "Polluter Caucus."

Four of the five have a lifetime League of Conservation Voters score in the single digits. The fifth spent eleven years earning an 11% lifetime score in the state legislature of the state these resolutions target.

Three of them represent California

That's the detail that should stop a Californian cold.

Fong, Obernolte and Gallagher are all California congressmen. They are not defending their constituents from another state's rules. They are asking Washington to overrule their own state — including the rules governing the ports and harbors on California's coast and the smog their own districts sit downwind of.

Pfluger's argument is about Texans being told what cars to drive. Fine — that's a real argument, and voters can weigh it. But nobody in Texas is affected by whether a tugboat in Oakland has to run a cleaner engine, or whether a container ship plugs into shore power in Long Beach instead of burning diesel at the pier.

Those two resolutions do only one thing: let more pollution into the air over California port towns. Both were filed by California Republicans.

Where it stands

All five resolutions are sitting in the Energy and Commerce Committee, where Palmer chairs the environment subcommittee and Pfluger and Obernolte are members.

They are not law yet. But CRA resolutions move fast when leadership wants them to, and this package was clearly built to move together.

If you live in one of these five districts, your congressman put his name on it.

Sources

Congressional record for H.J.Res. 210, 211, 212, 213 and 214, 119th Congress. Members' announcement: "Pfluger, Palmer, and Obernolte Push Back on California's EPA Waivers".

99% of Americans Who Weighed In Said Don't Touch the Roadless Rule. Harriet Hageman Wrote a Bill to Make Sure It Never Comes Back.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:52:10 +0000

In 2001, the Forest Service put 58.8 million acres of national forest off-limits to new road building. It's called the Roadless Rule, and what it does is keep new roads from being cut into the backcountry. The land stays public and stays open — it just stays roadless.

Wyoming has 3.3 million of those acres, spread across nine national forests.

Last year the Trump administration moved to erase the rule, and did the thing agencies do before a big change: it asked the public what it thought.

The public answered. More than 99% said don't.

Harriet Hageman read that result and introduced a bill to make the repeal permanent.

What the public actually said

The Forest Service ran a 21-day comment period in the summer of 2025. When it closed, regulations.gov showed 223,862 comments posted, on top of roughly 400,000 more submitted in bulk petitions — about 625,737 submissions in all.

The Center for Western Priorities pulled a random sample of 5,000 from the 183,000 that had arrived by the morning of the last day and coded them. The result: 99.2% opposed the repeal, 0.6% supported it, 0.2% were neutral, with a margin of error of 1.4 points.

"Across state lines and party lines, Americans spoke with one voice to tell President Trump to stop this attack on America's forests," the group's deputy director, Aaron Weiss, said.

This is not a new or partisan opinion. When the Clinton administration proposed the rule in the first place, it drew 1.6 million comments, more than 90% in favor. A 2019 Pew Charitable Trusts poll found 75% support — the same in rural areas as in cities.

What Hageman's bill does

On February 25, 2026, Hageman introduced H.R. 7695. Four Republicans signed on the same day: Troy Downing of Montana, Celeste Maloy of Utah, Pete Stauber of Minnesota, and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin.

The bill does three things. It declares the 2001 rule to have "no force or effect" — writing the administration's repeal into statute. It goes further than the administration went: it says a future Agriculture secretary "may not take any action to propose, finalize, implement, administer, or enforce any rule substantially similar to the rule." And it orders the Forest Service to build "such permanent and temporary roads as the Secretary determines necessary" for restoration work, hazardous-fuels reduction and replacing existing roads.

That second clause is the point. An agency rule can be undone by the next agency. A statute can't. Hageman's bill is designed to take the question away from every future administration — and from the 223,862 people who just answered it.

The Wyoming Outdoor Council's public lands program manager, Gabby Yates, put it this way: "By sidestepping the already scant public process that the administration is using to rescind the rule, H.R. 7695 adds insult to injury and ignores hundreds of thousands of Americans who are currently opposing the rescission."

The wildfire argument, and what the Forest Service said about it

At a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on May 21, 2026, Hageman testified for her bill. She called the Roadless Rule an "environmental catastrophe."

"The Roadless Rule has been devastating to the Interior West," she said. "The Roadless Rule has been devastating to Wyoming."

Her evidence is wildfire. She told the subcommittee that nine of the ten "most catastrophic" national forest fires have happened since 2001, and, earlier in the hearing, called the claim that ending the Roadless Rule would mean more wildfires "absolutely wrong."

"The science and the facts and the history demonstrate, without question, that you are absolutely wrong," Hageman said.

Rep. Andrea Salinas of Oregon made that argument anyway, citing the Forest Service's own assessment and an analysis finding 85% of wildfires are human-caused.

The Forest Service's own associate chief, Chris French, was there too. His agency supports the repeal and supports Hageman's bill; he offered "technical assistance" to help pass it. And he still would not back her up on that point. It is a "longstanding fact," French said, that "most" wildfire ignitions are human-caused and "most are going to be associated with where humans go, including roads."

He added that severity can be worse in untreated roadless areas, and that "there are different facts you can pull out to support an opinion."

That's the agency on her side of the bill declining to say the thing she said "without question."

This is her second run at Wyoming's public land

Hageman has been fighting the Roadless Rule since it existed. Twenty-five years ago, as a private attorney, she litigated against it on Wyoming's behalf. That's a long-held conviction, and she's entitled to it.

But she is now the person Wyoming sends to Congress, and the last time she got out ahead of Wyoming on public land it went badly for her.

In 2025 she backed a provision in Trump's budget bill that would have required selling off federal land across 11 Western states, Wyoming included. Wyomingites showed up at her town halls furious. She did not pull her support: the amendment was stripped out in the Senate, and the Powell Tribune reported that "none of Wyoming's U.S. delegation stood against" it. Weeks later she was at a Converse County town hall saying she still wants to sell federal land.

The pattern is the same here. National hunting and angling groups have come out hard against ending the Roadless Rule, because roadless backcountry is where the elk and the native trout are. Wyoming conservation groups oppose it. Nearly everyone who bothered to file a comment opposes it. The people lined up behind the repeal are Western Republican officeholders and a timber industry that's been shrinking for decades — Gov. Mark Gordon and Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis are all on record for it.

Hageman's response to that lineup isn't to argue the public out of its position. It's to write a law saying the public doesn't get asked again.

Why this matters right now

Hageman is running for Cynthia Lummis's open Senate seat, and Wyoming's primary is August 18, 2026 — one week from today. Her main opponent, rancher Sam Mead, is running on a pro-public-lands platform.

Hageman has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 1% lifetime score. She chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries. Her donors include Peabody Energy, the country's largest coal producer, and Koch's corporate PAC. We've written about her bill to kill the lawsuits towns file when energy companies wreck them, and about her resolution to strip California's power to limit vehicle pollution.

H.R. 7695 fits the set. What makes it different is who it's aimed at. The clean-air resolution was aimed at California. This one is aimed at the 223,862 people who filed a comment, and at every American who might file one in the future.

Wyoming has one voice in the House. Right now it is being used to argue that the public has already said too much.

Source

Wyoming's Hageman aims to block future 'roadless areas,' despite overwhelming support to keep public land pristine — Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile, May 21, 2026.

Photo: The northern Wyoming Range. Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile.

Troy Downing Wrote a Bill to Permanently Repeal the Rule That Would Clean Up America's Dirtiest Coal Plant. It's in His District.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:08:47 +0000

On February 19, 2026, the EPA finalized a repeal of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards amendments — the 2024 rule that tightened limits on soot and toxic metals from coal-fired power plants. The repeal returns the country to the 2012 standards, dropping the stricter particulate limit, the tighter mercury limit for lignite plants, and the requirement that plants continuously monitor what comes out of the stack.

The next day, Troy Downing put out a statement celebrating it:

"For too long, the Biden-era MATS rule has strangled American coal-fired energy. I applaud President Trump and his administration for taking decisive action to rescind this rule that places unfair constraints on coal plants like Colstrip in Rosebud County, threatening American energy independence and grid reliability."

He wasn't finished. In the same statement he urged the House to pass his own bill, the COAL POWER Act, which would roll the standard back to the first Trump administration's level and declare that the 2024 rule "shall have no force or effect" — so a future administration couldn't restore it.

Rosebud County is in Downing's district. And Colstrip is not just any coal plant.

The dirtiest unit in America

Colstrip Unit 4 has the highest rate of filterable particulate emissions of any coal-fired unit in the country. Unit 3 has the third-highest rate of toxic air pollution in the nation. Together they make Colstrip the largest source of toxic air pollution in Montana.

The reason is simple, and it is the part of this story Downing's press release leaves out.

There are 170 tangentially-fired coal plants in the United States using the same technology as Colstrip. Every one of them except Colstrip has installed either an electrostatic precipitator or a fabric filter baghouse — the equipment that catches soot and the heavy metals riding on it — or both. Colstrip is the only one that has neither.

That filterable particulate matter is not just dust. It carries the toxic metals. Between 2012 and 2022, Colstrip released 3.3 tons of lead, 1.45 tons of arsenic, 2.1 tons of chromium, 14 tons of manganese, 2 tons of nickel, and 6 tons of selenium into the air over eastern Montana.

"Not yet commercially viable"

Downing's press release says the 2024 rule mandated "compliance using emissions-control technologies that are not yet commercially viable."

The technology has been commercially available and in use for more than fifty years. The other 169 comparable plants already run it. Colstrip's own owners did not argue in court that the technology doesn't exist — they argued it costs too much for a plant with a short remaining life, putting the upgrade at about $350 million and saying they could not recoup it.

That is a real business argument, and people can disagree about it. It is not the argument Downing led with. He told Montanans the technology isn't ready. It has been sold in this country for half a century.

The owners took that cost argument to the Supreme Court, asking for an emergency stay of the rule. In October 2024, Chief Justice John Roberts turned them down in a one-page order with no explanation.

Having lost in court, the plant got relief from the White House instead: on April 8, 2025, President Trump issued a proclamation exempting Colstrip and other coal plants from the rule. Then the EPA repealed the rule outright. Downing's bill would make sure nobody can put it back.

What comes out of that stack lands on people

Mercury is a neurotoxin. It settles into water and soil, concentrates up the food chain into fish, and does its worst damage to developing brains — which is why the standard exists in the first place. The metals in the particulate stream — lead, arsenic, chromium, nickel — are linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory illness.

Dr. Robert Byron, responding to the presidential exemption, put the Montana stakes plainly:

"By exempting or delaying the Colstrip plant's compliance with air pollution standards they increase the risk to all Montanans, especially pregnant women and their fetuses, children, the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions, of having birth and developmental defects, or getting other serious medical conditions from exposure to air pollution — air pollution that could be prevented."

The people breathing it are Downing's constituents. Rosebud County and the country around it are in Montana's 2nd District. He is not defending a plant in somebody else's state.

This is what a 0% score looks like

Downing has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 0% lifetime score. Not a low score. Zero.

The Colstrip bill is what that number means in practice: a member of Congress whose district contains the single dirtiest coal-fired unit in America, using his seat to make sure it never has to install the filters that every comparable plant in the country already has.

He is also, on a separate front, calling the drug discount program that keeps his district's rural hospitals solvent "crazy" — which is a strange position to pair with making the air dirtier in the same counties those hospitals serve.

And Montanans who want to raise any of it with him in person are out of luck. Downing has held seven telephone town halls and zero in-person ones since taking office in January 2025.

There are honest arguments to have about Colstrip — about jobs, about grid reliability, about who pays for a $350 million retrofit at a plant with a finite life. Downing's statement gestured at reliability, and his office's background material at cost. But the claim he led with was that the pollution controls aren't commercially viable yet, and he wrote a bill to make sure they're never required.

We deserve better.

Sources

Rep. Troy Downing, "Downing Applauds Reversal of MATS Rule", February 20, 2026; Montana Environmental Information Center, "President Grants Pollution Exemption to Coal Plant that Emits Most Air Toxins in the Nation"; Daily Montanan, "U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear Colstrip pollution challenge", October 2024. Photo: Montana Free Press.

Mike Simpson Wrote the Bill That Delists Wolves and Yellowstone Grizzlies — and Says No Court Is Allowed to Review It

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:00:02 +0000

There is a way to change a law without ever passing a bill about it. You attach a paragraph to the spending bill that funds the agency, and you attach a second paragraph saying no court may review the first one.

On May 20, 2026, the House Appropriations Committee released its Interior and Environment spending bill for the coming year. The chairman of the subcommittee that wrote it is Mike Simpson, the Republican who has represented Idaho's 2nd District since 1999. He holds the pen on the bill that funds the Interior Department, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Park Service and the EPA.

Here is some of what he put in it.

Wolves, delisted by paragraph — with the courthouse locked

Section 125 orders the reissuance of the Trump-era rule stripping gray wolves of Endangered Species Act protection nationwide, and specifies that the action "shall not be subject to judicial review." That last clause is the whole trick. Ordinarily, when the government strips a species of protection, the science behind that decision can be tested in court. Section 125 says: not this time.

The Wolf Conservation Center notes this is not a new tactic — it traces to a 2011 rider that delisted wolves in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Utah, the first time since the Endangered Species Act was written in 1973 that Congress removed protections for a species by legislation. An identical rider was in Simpson's previous bill, the FY26 version. It came out after public opposition. He put it back.

What makes this specifically an Idaho story is what Idaho has already done with the wolves it manages.

In 2021 the Idaho Legislature passed Senate Bill 1211, and Governor Brad Little signed it. According to Idaho Fish and Game's own summary, the law established a year-round wolf trapping season on private property, allowed unlimited purchase of wolf tags, and made any method legal for taking coyotes and foxes legal for taking wolves. In practice that means night hunting with spotlights or night vision, hunting over bait on private land, using dogs, and hunting from motorized vehicles — none of which are allowed for other big game.

To be fair about what the state says: Fish and Game Director Ed Schriever pushed back at the time on the widely reported claim that the law would cut Idaho's wolf population by 90%, saying the Commission's rules would "reduce wolf conflicts while maintaining a viable wolf population that is not subject to relisting under the federal Endangered Species Act."

Read that last clause carefully. Idaho's own wildlife director described federal relisting as the backstop — the thing that keeps state policy inside a line. Simpson's rider removes the backstop, and then says no judge may look at whether removing it was justified.

Grizzlies, in four ecosystems at once

The bill does not stop at wolves.

Section 141 requires the government to reissue its 2017 rule delisting the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly population within 180 days — again with judicial review blocked.
Section 149 requires a final delisting rule for the Northern Continental Divide grizzly population, to be issued "without regard to any other provision of law that applies to the issuance of such rule" — and it too is shielded from judicial review.
Sections 127 and 128 prohibit spending any money to establish experimental grizzly populations in the North Cascades and the Bitterroot ecosystem.

The Bitterroot straddles the Idaho–Montana line. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem reaches into eastern Idaho — Simpson's own district. He is not writing about somebody else's mountains.

And the list keeps going. In Western Watersheds Project's section-by-section reading of the bill, Section 126 targets wolverine protections. Section 124 covers the northern long-eared bat, Section 123 the lesser prairie-chicken, Section 147 the Canada lynx, Section 146 the northern spotted owl. Section 116 is a standing prohibition on the government even writing a threatened or endangered listing for the greater sage grouse. Section 131 blocks three 2024 rules that strengthened the Endangered Species Act across the board. Section 134 freezes management of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to the Trump administration's 2020 plan.

On top of the riders, the bill slashes funding for listing threatened and endangered species by nearly half the previous year's level, and two-thirds below FY25. If you can't list a species, the protections never begin.

Mary Beth Beetham, Director of Legislative Affairs at Defenders of Wildlife, put it plainly:

"Anti-wildlife Members of Congress just can't seem to appreciate that the American people cherish our shared wildlife."

The judicial review bar is the point

Strip out the species names and one design choice runs through the whole bill: decisions get made, and then courts are told to stay out.

That is not a fringe idea in this Congress. Bruce Westerman's Endangered Species Act rewrite — which conservation groups call the "Extinction Act" — does a narrower version of the same thing, barring courts from reviewing a decision to delist a species during the monitoring period that follows it — at least five years. His own party pulled that bill from the floor rather than vote on it on Earth Day.

Simpson doesn't need a floor vote on a standalone bill. He has a spending bill that has to pass, and a gavel that lets him decide what's in the first draft. That is a quieter way to do the same thing, and it is why appropriations riders exist.

This is the second liability shield in two years

Simpson has used this bill for exactly this kind of work before. The FY26 version of the same spending bill carried Section 453, a provision that would have shielded Bayer and other pesticide makers from cancer failure-to-warn lawsuits. Democrats spent six months getting it out.

Both riders follow the same pattern: something that would never survive as a standalone bill, tucked into must-pass funding legislation, with the courts written out.

His League of Conservation Voters score reflects it — 3% in 2025, and 10% for his career.

Idaho pays for this too

Idahoans who hunt, fish, guide, outfit and run backcountry businesses have a stake in whether the animals and the country around them are managed on evidence or by rider. Simpson has spent decades presenting himself as the delegation's conservationist, the Republican who cares about Idaho's rivers and backcountry.

The bill he wrote in May tells a different story. It delists two of the West's most contested species by fiat, blocks grizzly recovery in the Bitterroot on Idaho's own border, defunds the process for listing anything new, and forecloses the one place a citizen could challenge the delistings.

We deserve better.

Sources

Defenders of Wildlife, "House Interior Bill Attacks Crucial Protections for Imperiled Wildlife and Public Lands", May 20, 2026; Wolf Conservation Center, "House Interior Bill Seeks to Strip Key Protections for Gray Wolves", May 2026; Western Watersheds Project, "Copy and Paste: The FY27 Interior Appropriations Bill Continues Attack on Wildlife and the West". Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Rick Allen Passed a Bill Called the 'Woke Policies' Act. It Failed. So He Changed the Name and Passed the Same Bill.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:14:20 +0000

Congress does a lot of things in the dark. This one is in plain text on a government website, and it takes about thirty seconds to check.

On September 18, 2024, the House passed a bill by Georgia's Rick Allen about how the people who manage your 401(k) are allowed to pick investments. Its official title — the long, formal one that describes what the law actually does — was:

"To amend the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to specify requirements concerning the consideration of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors, and for other purposes."

Its short title, the name on the marquee, was the Protecting Americans' Investments from Woke Policies Act.

It died in the Senate.

On January 15, 2026, the House passed H.R. 2988. Its official title is:

"To amend the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to specify requirements concerning the consideration of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors, and for other purposes."

Not similar. Identical, word for word. Same sponsor. Same four divisions, same amendments to ERISA.

The new short title is the Protecting Prudent Investment of Retirement Savings Act.

Why the name change matters

Allen's whole public argument for this bill is that it takes politics out of your retirement account. His office announced the 2026 passage under the headline "Allen's Legislation Protecting Americans' Retirement Savings from Risky ESG Factors Passes House."

The last time he ran the same bill, he named it after the politics.

You cannot spend one Congress selling a bill as a strike against "woke policies," then the next Congress rename it "prudent" and insist the objection to it is partisan. The text is all but identical — the 2026 version adds a section ordering a government study of brokerage accounts, and otherwise does the same things to the same law.

What changed, twice over, was the naming. In 2024, Division A of the bill was the "Roll back ESG To Increase Retirement Earnings Act." In 2026 it is the "Increase Retirement Earnings Act." What he changed is what he thought would sell.

What the bill actually does to your 401(k)

Federal law already says the people managing your retirement money have to act solely in your interest. That's ERISA, and it's been the rule since 1974. Nobody is proposing to change it.

What Allen's bill changes is what your fund manager is allowed to look at.

It requires investment decisions to rest on "pecuniary factors" only. It permits non-pecuniary factors in narrow cases — mainly when the manager genuinely cannot tell two options apart on financial grounds — and it requires paperwork justifying it when they do.

In practice, that puts a manager who wants to weigh a long-term risk — a utility's exposure to climate rules, a supplier's forced-labor problem, a company's governance record — one lawsuit away from having to prove the risk was "pecuniary" enough. The safe move becomes: don't look.

The Congressional Sustainable Investment Caucus put it this way the day before the 2026 vote:

"We strongly oppose H.R. 2988 because it injects partisan politics into workers' retirement plans and ties the hands of the people responsible for managing those savings. … This bill would make it harder for fiduciaries to consider real financial risks and opportunities, limiting default investment options, and discouraging the responsible exercise of shareholder rights."

When the 2024 version came up, the White House budget office made the same point, saying the bill "undermines that longstanding framework":

"ERISA already requires fiduciaries to act solely in the interest of plan participants and beneficiaries. ERISA ensures that retirement advisors, plan trustees and administrators, and all other covered entities who are fiduciaries make investment decisions with the singular goal of protecting or growing hardworking Americans' life savings."

That is the tell. The law Allen says he's protecting already requires exactly what he says he wants. His bill's real work is narrowing what counts as a risk.

Both times, by a handful of votes

Neither version was popular. Both squeaked through.

Bill	Date	Roll call	Result
H.R. 5339 — "Woke Policies" Act	Sept. 18, 2024	2024-427	Passed 217–206
H.R. 2988 — "Prudent Investment" Act	Jan. 15, 2026	2026-31	Passed 213–205

Allen voted yes both times, as you'd expect of the sponsor. Both times it went to the Senate. The 2024 version never came back. The 2026 version is sitting in the Senate HELP Committee.

He is the chairman who writes these rules

This is not a backbencher filing a message bill.

In January 2025, Allen was named chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee's Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions. Pensions is in the title. Retirement plan rules are his jurisdiction, and he wrote this one himself.

He also has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 1% lifetime score across eleven years in Congress. A congressman who has voted against the environment essentially every time it came up now wants your fund manager legally discouraged from pricing environmental risk into your retirement.

He is entitled to that view. He is not entitled to call it neutral after naming the same bill the "Woke Policies Act."

Meanwhile, the people whose retirement it is

Allen has represented Georgia's 12th District since 2015. In eleven years, constituents in Augusta say they have never gotten an in-person town hall out of him. On February 27, 2025, more than 100 of them staged a sit-in at his Augusta office to ask for one. Three weeks later, asked whether any were coming, Allen said: "We do that digitally. We do digital town halls."

So there has not been a room in the district where somebody could stand up and ask him the simple question: if this bill is about prudence, why did you call it the Woke Policies Act?

We deserve better.

Sources

Congress.gov — H.R. 2988, Protecting Prudent Investment of Retirement Savings Act and H.R. 5339, Protecting Americans' Investments from Woke Policies Act (compare the official titles)
Congressman Sean Casten, Sustainable Investment Caucus Statement Opposing H.R. 2988 (Jan. 14, 2026)
Office of Management and Budget, Statement of Administration Policy: H.R. 5339 – Protecting Americans' Investments from Woke Policies Act (Sept. 17, 2024)
ESG Dive, House GOP passes pair of anti-ESG bills targeting 'woke' investment policies (Sept. 20, 2024)

Photo: Official congressional portrait.

The Chemical Industry Spent $80,276 on TV Ads Praising Brett Guthrie — Months After He Started Rewriting the Law That Regulates It

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:49:00 +0000

Trade associations don't usually buy television time to say nice things about a congressman who has done nothing for them.

On May 5, 2026, the American Chemistry Council — the trade group for America's chemical manufacturers — spent $80,276 on a "television and online advertisement" supporting Brett Guthrie. It reported the expenditure to the Federal Election Commission the next day.

The ad ran for about two weeks across Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District. It praised his work on taxes and energy, and it asked his own constituents to call his office and tell him to keep it up.

Guthrie chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That committee writes the nation's chemical safety law.

What happened four months earlier

On January 15, 2026, Guthrie and Gary Palmer, who chairs the Environment Subcommittee, released a discussion draft of a bill to rewrite the Toxic Substances Control Act — TSCA, the main federal law governing industrial chemicals. It was last significantly updated in 2016.

Guthrie and Palmer's framing, in the announcement:

"Targeted and measured reforms will increase accountability, strengthen domestic manufacturing, and safeguard the health and safety of our communities."

The chemical industry's reaction was immediate and warm. ACC chief executive Chris Jahn, in a statement dated the same day:

"Getting TSCA back on track is critical for American chemistry... this bill will help provide the durable fixes to TSCA — for both new and existing chemicals — that make the U.S. the most competitive place in the world to manufacture chemicals."

Environmental and public-health groups read the same draft and saw the opposite. Melanie Benesh of the Environmental Working Group:

"President [Donald J.] Trump promised to 'Make America Healthy Again,' but this legislation would do the opposite, flooding the market with chemicals whose risks are unknown and potentially dangerous, and drastically undermining chemical safety in the workplace."

And Joanna Slaney of the Environmental Defense Fund said the draft "also severely undermines EPA's ability to protect Americans from the worst toxic chemicals already in use, like cancer-causing formaldehyde and vinyl chloride."

The committee held its hearing on the draft on January 22.

Then the ads

Sequence matters here, so here it is plainly:

January 15, 2026 — Guthrie's committee releases the TSCA rewrite draft.
January 15 — the American Chemistry Council publicly praises it, hours later.
January 22 — Guthrie's committee holds the hearing.
May 5 — the American Chemistry Council spends $80,276 on television and online ads in Guthrie's district, telling his constituents he's doing a great job.

The $80,276 is not an estimate. It is the amount on ACC's own FEC filing, reported as an independent expenditure supporting Guthrie. (The filing appears twice in FEC records — once as a 24-hour notice and once on the periodic report. It is one $80,276 buy, not two.)

The ACC's political action committee has been giving to Guthrie's campaign directly for years, too — $27,000 since 2008, according to his committee's FEC filings. Ten thousand dollars of that came in a single day, March 10, 2025 — his first months as chairman.

Why a chairman is worth this much

Energy and Commerce is not a normal committee. Its jurisdiction runs across health care, energy, telecommunications, consumer protection and the environment — your doctor's bill, your phone bill and your power bill all pass through it. Guthrie was elected to chair it on December 9, 2024, taking the gavel at the start of the current Congress.

Chemical safety sits inside it. So when a chairman decides to open TSCA up, the industry regulated by TSCA has an enormous amount riding on how he does it — and on whether the law's provisions get weaker or stronger in the process.

There was a specific reason the law was going to be reopened in 2026 at all: TSCA's authority for the EPA to collect fees from industry to fund chemical reviews was expiring. Environmental groups warned all through the previous year that cracking the statute open to fix the fees would create an opening to weaken everything else in it. Then the draft came out, and that is what they said had happened.

The pattern on this committee

Guthrie is also the chairman who handed the Environment Subcommittee — the panel that handles the Clean Air Act, chemical safety, hazardous waste and Superfund — to Gary Palmer, a member with a 1% lifetime environmental record and $33,000 from Alabama's biggest coal company.

Palmer is the subcommittee chair whose name is on the TSCA announcement alongside Guthrie's. He is also on the same FEC filing. The report that disclosed the $80,276 for Guthrie disclosed $131,018 for Palmer, on the same day, through the same ad agency, for the same kind of television and online advertisement — $211,294 between the two of them.

What Guthrie's record already says

Guthrie has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 5% lifetime score. Over 17 years in Congress, that is a record with almost no tension in it — a lifetime score of 5% means he sided with the environmental position on roughly one vote in twenty.

And it's not only chemicals. The industries his committee regulates run his donor list. His three biggest organizational totals this cycle are Alphabet at $54,500, AT&T at $51,500 and Comcast at $40,062 — money from those companies' PACs, employees and their families rather than from the corporations themselves; the Alphabet total is entirely employee money. On the PAC ledger since 2020, the drugmaker Amgen has given him $40,000 and the Louisville health insurer Humana $38,500.

The chemical industry's ad campaign is just the most public version of the arrangement. Most donors write the check quietly. The ACC bought airtime to tell his constituents how pleased it is.

The thing to hold onto

An industry trade group does not spend $80,276 in a congressman's district as a thank-you note. It spends it because it wants the same thing to keep happening.

What was happening, in this case, was a rewrite of the law that decides which chemicals can be sold in this country and how carefully anyone has to check them first — written by a chairman whose lifetime environmental record is 5%, and whose subcommittee chair's is 1%.

The people in Kentucky's 2nd District who saw that ad in May were being asked to call their congressman and thank him for it.

Source

American Chemistry Council, "ACC Launches Ad Highlighting Rep. Brett Guthrie's Work on Taxes and Energy", May 5, 2026; and Larry Pearl, "Republicans release draft proposal to update TSCA", Chemical & Engineering News, January 16, 2026. Photo: Associated Press, via C&EN.

Glenn Thompson Wrote a Farm Bill That Shielded Pesticide Makers From Cancer Lawsuits. Five Days After His Committee Passed It, the Pesticide Lobby Wrote Him a Check.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:39:51 +0000

On April 30, 2026, the House of Representatives did something it almost never does: a big bipartisan majority reached into a bill written by the chairman of the committee and tore a page out of it.

The page protected pesticide companies from being sued by people who say their products gave them cancer. The chairman who put it there is Glenn Thompson, the Republican congressman for Pennsylvania's 15th District and chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

The vote to strip it out was 280 to 142. Democrats and Republicans, together.

Thompson voted no. He wanted it to stay.

What the language actually did

Section 10205 of Thompson's farm bill barred any state, any subdivision of a state "or a court from directly or indirectly imposing or continuing in effect any requirements for, or penalize or hold liable, any entity for failing to comply with requirements that would require labeling or packaging that is in addition to or different from the labeling or packaging approved by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency ... including any requirements relating to warnings on such labeling or packaging."

Read that again in plain English. If the EPA's approved label doesn't warn you that a chemical causes cancer, then a jury cannot make the company pay you for not warning you that it causes cancer.

That is not a hypothetical. For years, people have sued Bayer — and Monsanto before Bayer bought it — over Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, and as CNBC reported the day of the vote, the companies have frequently been found liable for failing to warn of cancer risk. The EPA does not classify glyphosate as a carcinogen and does not require a cancer warning on the label. The World Health Organization's cancer agency reached a different conclusion in 2015, calling glyphosate "probably carcinogenic to humans."

So the fight is precisely about whether the EPA's label is the last word. Thompson's bill said it was.

Bayer certainly knew what it was losing. After the House stripped the language, the company told CNBC the removal was "a missed opportunity for Congress" and that "Congress has turned their backs on U.S. farmers."

Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, who was helping lead the push to take it out for Democrats, put it differently on the House floor:

"It preempts states' rights to regulate pesticide usage or labeling [and] provides a liability shield for pesticide manufacturers. Put simply, this language puts chemical company profits over the health of Americans."

Thompson's defense

Thompson told reporters the night before the vote that striking the provision would be "such a blow to the American farmer." He rejected the phrase "liability shield," saying the language would only stop "frivolous lawsuits" and that "bad actors" could still be sued.

Two problems with that.

First, the text doesn't say "frivolous." It says no court can hold "any entity" liable for failing to use a label different from the EPA's. It does carry one exception, and it is a narrow one: the shield lifts only if the company is in "material violation" of three provisions of federal pesticide law — knowingly falsifying a registration application or a required record, falsifying information about a pesticide test, or submitting data it knew was false to get a product registered — and has already been penalized by the EPA for doing it. Short of that, the shield covers the frivolous suits and the ones where a jury heard the evidence and decided the company hid something.

Second, farmers aren't the ones being sued. Bayer is. A provision that stops juries from awarding damages against a chemical manufacturer is worth an enormous amount of money to that chemical manufacturer, and precisely nothing to a farmer in Centre County — who still buys the same product at the same price either way.

The vote tells you which reading Congress found convincing. Thompson lost by 138 votes, in his own bill, with 73 Republicans voting against him.

Who pays him

Thompson's biggest financial backers are the industries his committee governs — crop insurance, the cattlemen, the Farm Credit system he oversees, the rural electric co-ops, and, at the top of the list, CropLife America, the pesticide industry's trade association.

Federal Election Commission records show CropLife America's political action committee has given Thompson's campaign committee, Friends of Glenn Thompson, $20,000 since 2023 — $10,000 in the last election cycle and $10,000 in this one.

Look at the timing of the most recent check.

March 5, 2026 — the House Agriculture Committee, chaired by Thompson, approved the farm bill with the pesticide language intact, on a 34-17 vote.
March 10, 2026 — five days later, CropLife America's PAC cut Friends of Glenn Thompson a check for $4,000. The PAC's own filing dates the disbursement to March 10; Thompson's campaign recorded it as received on March 18.
April 30, 2026 — Thompson voted to keep the language in. The House voted it out anyway.

Nobody has alleged a crime here, and none of this is hidden. It's a disclosure form. That's the point: this is what the ordinary, legal, above-board operation of the House Agriculture Committee looks like, and the industry gets its money's worth in public.

Why the 280-142 vote may not be the end of it

The farm bill passed the House 224 to 200 and went to the Senate. If the Senate passes a different version, the two chambers negotiate a final text — and that is where a committee chairman's power is at its greatest and the public's visibility is at its least. There is no roll call on what gets put back into a bill behind closed doors. There is no amendment anyone can force to the floor. There is a room, and the chairman is in it.

The 138-vote margin was a message. It is not a lock.

Thompson, for his part, celebrated the bill's passage on X, calling it "a win for our farmers, ranchers, foresters, rural communities, and all Americans across our country" — a bill that a bipartisan majority had just had to sanitize before they'd vote for it.

This is the same chairman who wrote the SNAP cuts

The pesticide shield is not a one-off. It is what Thompson does with the gavel.

As chairman he also personally released the committee text that cut food assistance in Trump's budget bill — two months after telling Pennsylvania reporters there would be "absolutely no reductions in the nutritional benefits" and calling warnings about SNAP cuts "just misinformation." In his own district, 46,392 households rely on SNAP to eat.

And if you live in PA-15 and want to ask him about any of it face to face, you can't. Thompson has not held an open, in-person town hall since at least March 2025, and called the idea of attending one organized by county Democrats "not logical."

Seventeen years in Congress. The gavel on the committee that writes the rules for the food you eat and the chemicals sprayed on it. And when a bipartisan majority of the House said one of those rules went too far, the chairman was on the other side of the vote.

Source

House strips MAHA-hated pesticide provisions from farm bill — CNBC, April 30, 2026. Photo: a sign protesting Chairman Glenn Thompson's farm bill in Washington, D.C., April 30, 2026, by Angela Greiling Keane / CNBC.

Dominion's PAC Gave Morgan Griffith $67,000. Last Week He Asked the Governor to Protect Dominion's Coal Plant.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:47:25 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Governor Abigail Spanberger announced she would intervene in the case that will decide whether Florida's biggest utility gets to buy Virginia's.

No Virginia governor appears to have done it before. The State Corporation Commission's spokesman told VPM News he wasn't aware of a previous instance. Spanberger said she was doing it for three reasons: making energy more affordable for families and small businesses, protecting utility workers, and developing clean, local, affordable energy.

The next day, Morgan Griffith wrote her a letter asking her to use that intervention to protect a coal plant.

"I urge the Governor to work to ensure this merger does not prematurely close a world-class coal plant that supports Southwest Virginia communities."

The plant is the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center in St. Paul, Wise County. Dominion Energy owns it.

Dominion Energy's political action committee has given Morgan Griffith's campaigns $67,000 since he was first elected, according to his own committee's FEC filings.

What the plant costs, and who pays

Here is the part Griffith's press release leaves out.

The Virginia City plant was built outside Dominion's own service territory. The people who pay for it are Dominion customers in eastern and central Virginia — as the Virginia Mercury put it, "the region doesn't bear the plant's costs."

And the costs are not small. Using Dominion's own estimates, the Sierra Club's Virginia chapter calculated in 2022 that keeping Virginia City running would cost ratepayers at least $472 million by the end of the decade — while producing only 6.3% of the power it is capable of generating.

That last number is the whole problem. The commission's own senior hearing examiner, Michael Thomas, put it plainly: "we have a facility that was designed and constructed to operate 80 percent of the year and it's operating somewhere down in the teens."

Virginians are being billed for a power plant that mostly sits idle.

Spanberger's stated reason for intervening is that she wants lower bills. Griffith's response was to ask her to keep that plant running.

The case for the plant, honestly stated

There is a real argument on the other side, and it deserves to be on the page.

The plant is a genuine economic anchor for Wise County. It put more than $8.9 million in property taxes into county coffers in 2020 — money that pays for schools and sheriff's deputies in a county that does not have many other sources of it. It employs people. And it burns waste coal from "gob piles," the heaps of mining leftovers scattered across coal country; Griffith's own statement notes it has "cleaned up millions of tons of waste coal."

Southwest Virginia has been left holding the bill for coal's decline for forty years. A congressman fighting for what's left of the tax base there is doing his job.

The question is what he's fighting for, and what he isn't.

Griffith is not asking Virginia to replace those jobs and that tax revenue with something that lasts. He is not asking for transition money, or for the site to be redeveloped, or for the county to be made whole whenever the plant does close. He is asking for the closure to be delayed, and for ratepayers elsewhere in the state to keep paying for the delay.

That is not a plan for Wise County. It is a stay of execution, billed to somebody else.

He is not a neutral party on coal

Griffith's own press release lists his credentials, and they're worth reading as he wrote them:

He is Co-Chair of the Congressional Coal Caucus.
In February 2026 he attended a White House event "touting Beautiful Clean Coal."
In April 2025 he attended the White House signing of executive orders to boost the coal industry.
Later in 2025 he voted to write one of those orders into law, reestablishing the National Coal Council.
In May 2025 he celebrated the Energy Department designating metallurgical coal a critical material.

His environmental record matches. The League of Conservation Voters scores him at 3% for 2025 and 6% for his career. And on February 1, 2017, he voted to wipe out the Stream Protection Rule — the Interior Department regulation that kept mining waste out of Appalachian streams and drinking water, in the same coalfields he is now defending a plant in.

The rest of the energy money

Dominion's PAC is not the only one. Over the same period, his filings show he has also taken:

$82,500 from Koch, Inc.'s PAC
$74,500 from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association's PAC
$67,000 from Dominion Energy's PAC

Griffith sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the industry writing those checks. Since 2020, 68% of his campaign money has come from PACs — about $2.8 million of $4.2 million, by Who Bought My Rep's count. Roughly 3% comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him 381st out of 440 House members on that measure.

What the merger fight is actually about

Spanberger said at a press conference that the guarantees the utilities have offered — about $10 a month in bill credits for two years, and 18 months of job protection for Dominion employees — are "not sufficient yet."

"The benefits of this merger will last for far longer for the companies participating than two years, and so I'd want to see the benefit to Virginians last longer as well."

Public witness hearings are set for November 5, 9 and 10. The evidentiary hearing begins November 17. The commission has until January 11, 2027 to decide.

Into that fight, the member of Congress for Southwest Virginia has entered one request: keep the coal plant open.

Not lower bills for his constituents. Not a commitment to rebuild the Wise County tax base for the years after coal. One plant, owned by one company, which has given him $67,000.

Source

Griffith's letter and statement are on his official House website: Griffith Urges Spanberger to Protect SWVA Coal, Lower Energy Costs in Proposed NextEra Dominion Merger (August 7, 2026). Spanberger's intervention was reported by Patrick Larsen for VPM News. Photo: Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, Virginia Mercury.

Congress Protected the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge From the Border Wall. Monica De La Cruz Voted for the Bill That Got Around It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:33:29 +0000

On Wednesday, June 17, 2026, the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, Texas posted a short notice on Facebook. The levee would be closed to bicycles and pedestrians for the rest of the summer. Bicyclists should use Bobcat Trail instead.

That was how people in the Rio Grande Valley learned that the border wall was finally coming to Santa Ana.

The refuge sits in Monica De La Cruz's district. She voted for the bill that made it possible, and when her constituents asked her to stop it, her office did not answer.

What is being built

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection map shows a nearly three-mile stretch labeled the "Rio Grande Valley 4 Project" cutting through the top of the refuge along Levee Road.

Scott Nicol, a longtime anti-wall activist in the Valley, described what that means on the ground:

"What's going to happen is they're going to carve away the river-facing (side) roughly one-third of that levee and replace that side of it with a concrete slab, so just a straight vertical wall that'll be around 10-feet tall. Then at what is now the top of the levee, they'll put steel posts that are 6-inches wide and spaced 4-inches apart, and that'll stand about 15 to 20 feet above that concrete wall … and so you get a total of 30 feet."

Thirty feet of concrete and steel bollards, with four inches between the posts.

"Because of the limited space between the posts and the concrete is impassable to most terrestrial animals, you know a bobcat or an ocelot, they can't get up that 10 feet and they can't get between those bollards, so it's going to be absolutely devastating for wildlife."

Santa Ana is 2,088 acres of subtropical woodland — one of the last remnants of the forest that used to line the Rio Grande. The Fish and Wildlife Service calls it "the jewel of the National Wildlife Refuge System," a premier birding destination with species found nowhere else in the country outside deep South Texas, and home to more than 300 kinds of butterflies. And when the river floods, the levee is how animals get to higher ground. A wall on the levee cuts that off.

Nicol says the project is part of a $1.14 billion contract to Spencer Construction that also covers La Lomita, the National Butterfly Center, Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, the Salineño Wildlife Preserve in Starr County and areas near La Grulla.

This had already been settled

Here is what makes this De La Cruz's story and not just Washington's.

During Trump's first term, activists in the Valley won this fight. Rep. Henry Cuellar, the Laredo Democrat, and the rest of the Rio Grande Valley delegation got the protection written into the annual homeland security spending bill, and the 2020 version runs to a single sentence:

"Federal funds may not be made available for the construction of fencing — (1) within the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge; (2) within the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park; (3) within La Lomita Historical park; (4) within the National Butterfly Center; (5) within or east of the Vista del Mar Ranch tract of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge; or (6) within historic cemeteries."

That sentence was never repealed. It was routed around.

It sits in the appropriations bills — the annual laws Congress passes to fund the government — and it governs the money those laws hand out. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was not one of those. It put $46.5 billion into border barrier construction through the budget process instead, which is how the Department of Homeland Security was able to bypass the appropriations process and spend it in the protected areas anyway. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told the Texas Tribune the quiet part outright: funding received under the One Big Beautiful Bill "does not have any prohibited or excluded areas for border barrier construction."

Cuellar is now trying to put the same language into the 2027 spending bill. He does not expect it to arrive in time. "What they're doing, in my opinion, and I think we all know, is they're trying to beat the clock on this to say, 'Before that law comes in, we're going to go ahead and get it built,'" he said in July.

On July 3, 2025, Monica De La Cruz voted for that bill. Roll call 190 — she is recorded as "Aye."

She is the member of Congress for Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. The money now paying to wall it came out of a bill she voted for, in a form the protection cannot reach.

In February, her constituents asked her to fix it

This didn't happen quietly. In February 2026, more than 100 people rallied at the refuge to oppose the plans. What they wanted from De La Cruz was specific and small: back the restoration of the protective language in the ongoing congressional negotiations. Put it back the way it was.

Marisa Oliva, president of Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, warned that without action "we are going to leave the gates wide open" for the funding to reach Santa Ana.

Cuellar, who wrote the original protection, said of the administration: "They're trying to go around the language that I added."

De La Cruz's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Four months later, the levee closed and the contractors moved in.

"It could happen tomorrow"

When the levee closure was announced in June, Nicol called on De La Cruz, along with Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz — all three of whom voted for the bill — to intervene.

"They could push for this contract to be canceled or rewritten. It could happen tomorrow. I don't think they're going to do that, but I also don't think that just because they're in the same party as the president they should get a pass for that. Basically, they're deciding that they care more about fealty to Trump than they care about people in the Rio Grande Valley or the environment in the Rio Grande Valley."

That is the whole question in one paragraph. There is no procedural obstacle here. A member of the majority party, representing the district, asking her own party's administration to rewrite one contract in one place is about as easy a lift as exists in Congress.

She has not done it, and she has not explained why.

The Texas Observer asked her about the wall through Santa Ana in July. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Update, August 13: a water district stopped the wall. She didn't.

The work at Santa Ana is halted, and the refuge had nothing to do with it.

On July 30, 2026, a state district judge in Hidalgo County ordered Spencer Construction and its subcontractor to stop, after Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2 went to court saying the crews had trespassed on a 120-foot strip of land it owns around one of its irrigation canals and had "recklessly allowed large amounts of dirt to fall into" it. The federal government moved the case into federal court on August 12, and a magistrate judge extended the pause the next day, to August 27.

The district is not trying to save the refuge. It wants the wall moved 15 or 20 feet south so its crews can still reach the canal. At the hearing the government's own lawyer told the judge that a wall along Santa Ana was inevitable, and that Washington would take the land by eminent domain if it came to that.

So a water district worried about a maintenance road has done more to stop this than the member of Congress whose district it runs through.

The ocelot problem is not sentimental

Fewer than 100 ocelots are left in Texas. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, they survive in two small, isolated breeding populations — on private ranch land and at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge — and the federal plan for them turns on giving those populations somewhere to disperse to.

A 30-foot wall with four-inch gaps is a wall to an ocelot in exactly the way it is a wall to a person.

This is also happening at a moment when the federal government has stopped counting habitat destruction as harm at all. In July, the Interior and Commerce departments finalized a rule redefining "harm" under the Endangered Species Act so that wrecking the place an endangered animal lives no longer counts — only directly injuring the animal does. A study of species listed between 1975 and 2017 found that 81% were threatened by habitat loss and only 17% by direct killing.

So the wall goes up through the habitat, and the law that used to call that harm has been rewritten to say it isn't.

What her district gets

De La Cruz's constituents did not get a vote on this. They got a Facebook post about a closed bike path.

They also got the rest of the bill she voted for. In Texas's 15th District, the Joint Economic Committee's House Democrats estimate that 65,193 people will lose health insurance — 3,493 of them losing Medicaid under the bill, and 61,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage as the enhanced premium tax credits lapse. 55,480 households in the district — about 21% of all households — rely on SNAP, which the same bill cut.

And a wildlife refuge that Congress had already agreed to protect is getting a 30-foot wall through the top of it, on her watch, with her vote.

Sources

The construction announcement and Scott Nicol's description of the project were reported by Francisco E. Jimenez for MyRGV.com / The Monitor: Border wall construction set to begin in Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge (June 19, 2026). The February rally was reported by David Martin Davies for Texas Public Radio: New border wall plans threaten Rio Grande Valley nature areas, via Texas Standard (February 12, 2026). How the budget bill's money got around the appropriations riders, and Henry Cuellar's account of it, come from Berenice Garcia for The Texas Tribune: Historic Rio Grande Valley church saved from being cut off behind border wall (July 9, 2026) and Federal judge extends pause on border wall construction at South Texas wildlife refuge (August 13, 2026). The protective language is section 210 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020. Photo: Pintail Lakes Trail, Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, via Wikimedia Commons.

Riley Moore Blacklisted Five of the Biggest Banks in America for West Virginia. Analysts Estimate It Added Up to $29 Million to the Interest on One Year's Borrowing.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:03:00 +0000

Before he was in Congress, Riley Moore was West Virginia's state treasurer. The treasurer's job is unglamorous: manage the state's cash, run its banking relationships, and get West Virginia the best terms it can when it borrows money.

Moore used it to run a political campaign against banks.

In July 2022 he published a "Restricted Financial Institution List" barring five of the largest financial firms in the country from new state banking business: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. Their offense, as Reuters reported at the time, was being deemed to "boycott" fossil fuel companies — which in practice meant weighing climate risk when deciding where to put money.

Then he did it again. In February 2024, Moore sent notices to six more banks — BMO, Citibank, Fifth Third, Northern Trust, TD Bank, and HSBC — warning they were headed for the same list.

What he said he was doing

Moore's framing was that he was protecting West Virginia's industries from coordinated financial pressure. Here is how he put it in 2024:

"While we have been effective in our fight against ESG activism, we must remain vigilant to ensure we do not entrust state funds to banks that are engaged in coordinated political efforts to destroy our state's critical industries."

He wanted the banks, in his words, "to return to fairer, more objective treatment of our coal, oil and natural gas industries."

That's a coherent political position. The question is who pays for it.

What it costs

When a state tells the biggest underwriters in the country they can't bid on its business, fewer firms compete to handle its bonds. Fewer bidders means worse pricing. Worse pricing on borrowing means higher interest — and interest on state debt is paid by taxpayers, out of the same budget that funds schools, roads, and water systems.

This is not a theoretical objection. Somebody has put a number on it.

The consulting firm Econsult Solutions, engaged by the climate group the Sunrise Project, studied Texas, which passed similar laws, and put the extra interest on the bonds Texas issued in one year at between $303 million and $532 million — spread over the life of those bonds. Applying the same model to West Virginia, Econsult estimated that if Senate Bill 262 worked the way the Texas laws did, the extra interest on West Virginia's own bonds from that year would run $9 million to $29 million.

Nine to twenty-nine million dollars in extra interest, on a single year's borrowing. In one of the smallest and poorest states in the country.

For comparison: in June 2026, Moore stood in front of the House Appropriations Committee holding a jar of brown tap water from a McDowell County home and asked for $50 million to fix southern West Virginia's drinking water. The committee said no.

The high end of what his bank blacklist may have added to the interest on one year of West Virginia's borrowing is more than half of the water money he couldn't get.

Who this was actually for

Moore's line is that the banks were attacking West Virginia's industries. Look at whose money moved when he ran for Congress.

Three outside groups spent more than $1 million electing him — led by the cryptocurrency industry's super PAC at $726,377 and the Koch network's at $265,673, against the $924,000 he raised from PACs directly. His direct donors include the corporate PACs of Marathon Petroleum, Valero Energy and the steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs. Only 9% of his money came from small grassroots donors; he ranks #344 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

Whatever the five banks on that list were doing to West Virginia's coal industry, blacklisting them did not put a miner back to work or keep a plant open. What it did do was give a state treasurer a national fight to be seen having — and, as it turned out, a profile that converted into more than $1 million of outside money when he ran for Congress two years later.

Moore carried the same approach into Congress, where he now has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025. A perfect zero in his first year.

The trade he made

West Virginia is a state that needs cheap money. It has old water systems, old bridges, and a tax base that can't absorb a bad borrowing year the way Texas can.

Its treasurer decided the state should pay more to borrow, in order to make a point about how five banks in New York think about climate risk.

He got the point made, and the profile that came with it. The bill for the point is in the interest line of West Virginia's bond payments, where nobody has to look at it.

Sources

Lamar Johnson, "West Virginia warns 6 banks they're headed for restricted list over fossil fuel stances", ESG Dive, March 1, 2024; and "West Virginia bars five financial firms for deemed fossil fuel 'boycotts'", Reuters, July 28, 2022. Photo: Archive Photos via Getty Images, via ESG Dive.

Mike Kennedy's First Bill Would Freeze Road Management on 6 Million Acres of Utah — Until Courts Settle 12,500 Claimed "Roads"

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:46:30 +0000

The very first bill Mike Kennedy introduced after being sworn into Congress was not about health care, which is his profession. It was about dirt roads.

On January 14, 2025 — eleven days into the job — he filed H.R. 376, the Historic Roadways Protection Act. Sen. Mike Lee filed the matching Senate bill the same day. Kennedy's three fellow Utah House Republicans signed on as cosponsors.

Here is how Kennedy explained it in Lee's announcement:

"The Bureau of Land Management has a long history of overreach in rural Utah, and their attempt to make decisions about road access on public lands—before these roads are fully identified and established—is yet another overstep. I am pushing back with this legislation."

That sounds modest. Finish identifying the roads first, then plan around them. Reasonable, even.

It is not modest at all, and the reason is buried in the phrase "fully identified and established."

What has to happen first

The roads Kennedy is talking about are R.S. 2477 claims. R.S. 2477 was a line in an 1866 mining law that let states and counties build roads across federal land to encourage settlement of the West. Congress repealed it in 1976, but preserved any right-of-way that already existed.

So who owns which two-track in the desert is now a question for the courts. And Utah went to court in a big way.

According to the State of Utah's own public lands office, the state and 22 of its counties filed litigation covering 12,500 right-of-way claims. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance counts more than two dozen lawsuits filed in 2011 and 2012, claiming title to over 12,000 alleged rights-of-way totaling more than 35,000 miles across public land.

How is that going? The state's own website answers it. In 2015 the federal district court set up a "bellwether" process: pick 15 representative rights-of-way in Kane County, resolve the legal questions those raise, and only then appoint special masters to work through the rest of the state.

Fifteen, out of 12,500. That process started more than a decade ago. As SUWA puts it: since Utah filed in 2011–12, "not a single case has been adjudicated by the district court."

Kennedy's bill says the Bureau of Land Management may not finalize or implement travel plans until those cases are adjudicated. Given the pace of the actual litigation, that is not a pause. It is a stop.

What the "historic roadways" actually are

The name of the bill does a lot of work. It conjures wagon ruts and pioneer trails.

Roughly 80% of Utah's claimed rights-of-way are unimproved dirt roads and trails — cow paths, stream bottoms, faded two-tracks. SUWA notes that some "do not even exist on the ground and are instead simply lines on a map." The photograph at the top of this post is one of the claims.

The claims are not confined to backcountry nobody cares about, either. Utah and its counties are claiming rights-of-way inside national parks, national wildlife refuges, national monuments, national recreation areas, congressionally designated wilderness, wilderness study areas, critical habitat, and archaeological sites. And SUWA says the state isn't only seeking title — it wants the right to improve and widen these routes, in some cases up to 66 feet wide. Utah's public lands office says the opposite: that the litigation "does not seek new roads or the expansion of existing rights-of-way."

Sixty-six feet is a six-lane road's worth of disturbance through a slot canyon approach or an archaeological site.

The four plans he'd cancel

H.R. 376 isn't only forward-looking. The bill text names four travel management plans the BLM has already finished and bars spending any money to implement them: Indian Creek (Canyon Rims), San Rafael Desert, San Rafael Swell, and Labyrinth/Gemini Bridges.

It also bars any new plan for ten named travel management areas: the Henry Mountains and Fremont Gorge, Dinosaur (North), the Book Cliffs in both the Vernal and Moab field offices, Nine Mile Canyon in both the Vernal and Price field offices, the San Rafael Swell, the Dolores River, Trail Canyon, and Paunsaugunt.

And read how the freeze ends. The prohibition runs until "the Secretary certifies to Congress that each of the R.S. 2477 cases has been adjudicated" — and the bill then lists those cases by name and docket number. There are 22 of them, one per county, and every docket number starts with 11 or 12. Every single one of them has to be finished before the BLM can plan a route anywhere on that list.

Kennedy's bill would leave those lands with no current plan at all — which, in practice, means whatever anyone drives on becomes the route.

Add it up and SUWA's estimate is that the legislation would stop the BLM from managing motorized vehicle use across more than 6 million acres of Utah redrock.

"If Senator Lee had his way, millions of acres of southern Utah would be a motorized playground free-for-all," said SUWA staff attorney Laura Peterson. She named the places at stake: "Labyrinth Canyon, the San Rafael Swell, and the Dirty Devil."

Why it matters that it's him

Kennedy is not a bystander on this. He is Vice Chair of the Federal Lands Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee — the panel that writes the rules for the land that makes up most of his state.

And this isn't the only place his committee work has landed. Utah's congressional delegation, Kennedy included, welcomed Trump's shrinking of Utah's national monuments as "appropriate" — a move that turned out to be the largest removal of protected land by any president in American history, by more than five times over.

The Historic Roadways Protection Act is moving. On February 4, 2026, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved the Senate version on a party-line vote, 11 to 9.

The tell

Strip away the pioneer framing and the structure of the bill is simple.

Kennedy wants public-land management suspended until a court finishes a job that has produced zero final decisions in fourteen years and, by design, has to work through fifteen sample routes before it can even start on the other 12,485.

If you genuinely wanted the roads sorted out first, you would push to speed up the litigation. This bill doesn't touch the litigation. It just turns off the management and waits.

The waiting is the point.

Sources

Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, "SUWA Statement on Historic Roadways Protection Act", February 4, 2026. Photo: an R.S. 2477 claim on Utah public land, courtesy SUWA. Bill quotes from Sen. Mike Lee's announcement, January 14, 2025.

Bryan Steil Is 'Proud to Have Worked to Bring' Wisconsin $94.3 Million for Lead Pipes. He Voted Against the Law That Paid for It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:20:00 +0000

On May 20, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $94.3 million for Wisconsin to find and replace the lead pipes that carry drinking water into people's homes.

Bryan Steil posted about it:

"Great news for Wisconsin! Proud to have worked to bring safe drinking water funding to our state."

The money came from the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021, which set aside $15 billion nationally to rip out lead service lines.

Steil voted against that law.

The vote

On November 5, 2021, the House passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 228 to 206. The roll call is public and it takes about ten seconds to check.

Steil: Nay.

That's the law. That's the $15 billion. That's where Wisconsin's $94.3 million came from. Four and a half years later he told his constituents he was proud to have worked to bring it to them.

Why lead pipes are not an abstraction

This is not a story about a ribbon-cutting on a road.

Lead is a neurotoxin, and the people it damages most are small children. Wisconsin has one of the country's biggest lead pipe problems: the EPA's 2023 survey projected 343,834 lead service lines here, the ninth-highest count of any state. As water systems finished their own inventories the number came down — to about 164,000 lines still needing replacement as of April 2026, roughly one line in ten statewide. In parts of Milwaukee, Wisconsin Public Radio reported, around 20 percent of kids in some areas have lead poisoning.

The EPA is blunt about it: there is no known safe level of lead exposure for children, and even low levels are linked to lower IQ, trouble paying attention, and worse performance in school. The damage doesn't heal. You get one chance not to poison a kid, and the only real fix is pulling the pipe out of the ground — which costs money the cities don't have.

That's what the $15 billion was for. That's what Steil voted against.

His explanation, and what's wrong with it

To his credit, Steil's office answered when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked about the contradiction. Here's the statement:

"Safe drinking water is a top priority, and I strongly support federal lead abatement programs... While the 2021 legislation contained some positive provisions, I opposed the massive bill because it vastly overspent on unnecessary Green New Deal programs that contributed to inflation and drove up prices for all Americans."

That's a real position. Plenty of Republicans held it. If Steil had stopped there — I didn't like the overall bill, and I'm glad this piece of it is helping Wisconsin — there'd be no story.

But that isn't what he posted. He didn't say he was glad the money arrived. He said he was proud to have worked to bring it. Those are different claims. One is an opinion about a bill. The other says he did something to get the money, when what he actually did was vote no on the only vote that mattered.

He also pointed to a second vote: "I voted in support of the 2026 federal spending legislation that included funding for the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund."

The Cap Times looked at that bill and reached an uncomfortable conclusion. In a June 3, 2026 editorial titled "Even by DC standards, Bryan Steil is an utter hypocrite," the paper wrote that, according to figures from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the 2026 appropriations act Steil voted for cut lead service line replacement funding by $125 million, moving that money to wildland fire management at the Interior Department.

The law says so too. Section 444 of that act moves $125,000,000 out of the EPA's infrastructure-law grant account — "from amounts that will become available for fiscal year 2026" — and into the Interior Department's wildland fire management account. Steil voted for it on January 8, 2026.

So the bill he's citing as proof he supports lead abatement is a bill that took money out of lead abatement.

The pattern

Steil is not the first Republican to run this play, and we have the receipts on the others.

Kentucky's James Comer voted against the infrastructure law and said its money was going to things that "do not affect Kentucky's 1st District" — then took credit for $24 million of it. North Carolina's David Rouzer voted against the bridge money and then called it a game-changer.

The move works for a simple reason: the vote happens in Washington late on a Friday night in 2021, and the check arrives in your hometown years later with a press release attached. Almost nobody lines the two up.

It's worth lining them up.

What it costs Wisconsin to have it both ways

Here's the part that isn't about hypocrisy — it's about arithmetic.

Wisconsin still has about 164,000 lead lines in the ground. The state just got $94.3 million. That is a down payment, not a finish line — a problem that size takes many more rounds of federal money to solve.

Which means the votes still ahead matter more than the ones behind. Every future round of lead pipe funding will come up for a vote, and Steil will have to decide again whether the package around it has too much in it for his taste.

His record says he votes no and posts the announcement.

Steil is on the ballot again this November in Wisconsin's 1st District. Voters there might reasonably ask him the question the Journal Sentinel already put to his office: if he's proud to have brought the money home, what exactly did he do to bring it?

The roll call has an answer.

Sources

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin congressman Steil touts water funds he voted against (Ricardo Torres, May 29, 2026)
House Roll Call 369 — Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, November 5, 2021 (Steil: Nay)
EPA Announces $94.3 Million to Reduce Lead in Drinking Water in Wisconsin (May 20, 2026)
WPR: EPA announces $94M for Wisconsin to find and replace lead pipes (Danielle Kaeding, May 20, 2026)
The Cap Times editorial: Even by DC standards, Bryan Steil is an utter hypocrite (June 3, 2026)
Wisconsin's lead pipe count is falling. But the search isn't over. (Hongyu Liu, Wisconsin Watch / WPR, June 12, 2026)
2023 Update to the 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment: Lead Service Line Information (U.S. EPA)
Public Law 119-74, Sec. 444 — Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, 2026
House Roll Call 7 — H.R. 6938, January 8, 2026 (Steil: Yea)

Julie Fedorchak Celebrated a $38 Million Payout for Policing Standing Rock. Her Statement Never Mentions the Tribe.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:18:41 +0000

On June 11, 2026, the federal government agreed to pay North Dakota $27.8 million to settle a lawsuit over the state's costs policing the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Combined with $10 million recovered earlier, the state's total came to nearly $38 million. The state had sued in 2019, arguing the federal government caused the protests to grow by allowing demonstrators to camp on federal land.

The same day, Julie Fedorchak put out a statement. Here is the heart of it:

"The Dakota Access Pipeline was legally permitted, has operated safely for nearly a decade, and remains critical to North Dakota's economy, energy industry, and America's energy security. More than 30 hours of public hearings were held with input from hundreds of people. Yet, for more than 230 days, North Dakota communities, law enforcement officers, and taxpayers carried the burden of responding to unlawful activity while the federal government failed to act responsibly on federal land."

"The people of North Dakota should never have been left footing the bill for the Obama administration's failure to enforce the law during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests."

Read the whole thing. It runs to two paragraphs of statement plus a "Background" section with arrest counts and agency counts.

Now count the words that don't appear anywhere in it: Standing Rock. Sioux. Tribe. Tribal. Treaty. Water.

Who was there, and why

The people at Standing Rock were not a weather event that happened to North Dakota. They were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program lays out the tribe's case: the pipeline runs within half a mile of the reservation's current boundaries, "through land taken from the Tribe by Congress in 1958," and through "important cultural and burial sites." The tribe and others opposed it over "concerns that a spill would contaminate state and tribal drinking water" — the crossing is under Lake Oahe. They also pointed to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which set aside that land "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux Nation.

Fedorchak represents them. Standing Rock is in North Dakota. North Dakota has one House seat. She holds it.

Her statement treats the entire episode as a line item: 761 arrests, 178 response agencies, 230 days, dollars owed. In her telling, the only injured parties are "North Dakota communities, law enforcement officers, and taxpayers." The tribe appears in the story not as constituents with a grievance but as an unnamed source of "unlawful activity."

What "responding" looked like

On the night of November 20, 2016, at the Backwater Bridge outside the camps, police used water cannons on demonstrators in temperatures in the low 20s, along with tear gas, sound weapons and rubber bullets. PBS NewsHour reported that a spokeswoman for the Indigenous Environmental Network told the Guardian more than 160 people were injured and another seven were taken to a hospital.

The Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council said that night: "we are concerned for the real risk of loss of life due to severe hypothermia under these conditions."

Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network called the water cannons "an excessive and potentially deadly use of force." Morton County's sheriff's department said officers were responding to an "ongoing riot," and that water was used for "crowd control" and to douse fires.

That is the response the $38 million reimburses. You do not have to conclude that every protester behaved well to notice that a member of Congress summarizing all of it as "the burden of responding to unlawful activity" has decided in advance whose account counts.

The "out-of-state" line

Fedorchak's background section makes a point of noting that of 761 arrests, "709 involving out-of-state individuals."

It's the outside-agitator framing, and it's doing a specific job: suggesting that local people had no real complaint, only visitors did. But the tribe whose treaty land and water were at issue is a sovereign nation whose supporters came from other tribal nations — which is to say, from out of state. Of all the details Fedorchak could have chosen to include about 761 arrests, that's the one she picked.

She has been consistent about which North Dakotans she speaks for

This is not a one-off.

Fedorchak spent twelve years on the North Dakota Public Service Commission — the state's utility regulator — and went from there straight onto the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where natural gas transmission and gas and electric utilities are among her top industries. She has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 0% lifetime score — zero pro-environment votes and 33 anti-environment votes in 2025 alone.

One month before this statement, the Trump administration proposed cutting all federal funding for tribal colleges and universities — a proposal that would close institutions in her district, one of whose presidents called it "the death knell for our institutions." North Dakota's senior senator said he expects Congress will keep funding them. Fedorchak said the president's budget was "a starting point" and that she planned to review priorities.

So: on the money the state spent policing a tribal-led protest, she issued a same-day statement with a quote, a thank-you list and a background section. On a proposal to close five tribal colleges in her state, she needed to review her priorities.

The last line of her statement

She closes by thanking Attorney General Drew Wrigley, the late Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, "and the law enforcement officers and local officials who stood up for our communities."

Our communities. It is worth asking her, sometime, in a room where somebody else picks the questions, which ones she meant.

Source

Federal government to pay North Dakota $28M for Dakota Access Pipeline protests — Mary Steurer, North Dakota Monitor, June 11, 2026, and Fedorchak Statement on DAPL Protest Settlement, June 11, 2026. Photo by Mary Steurer / North Dakota Monitor.

Colorado's Coal Bill Is $87 Million. Jeff Hurd Says It's Worth It — and Wants More.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:29:24 +0000

His hometown paper asked him a simple question. Keeping Colorado's worn-out coal plants running past their retirement dates is going to cost more than $87 million, and that money comes out of people's electric bills. Was it worth it?

Jeff Hurd said yes. Then he said the federal orders forcing one of those plants to stay open should last longer.

That exchange ran in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel on August 4, 2026, in a Q&A by reporter Nathan Deal. It is worth reading slowly, because the man answering represents the two Colorado towns that are paying most of the bill.

Where the $87 million goes

The number comes from a July 21, 2026 investigation by Mark Jaffe in the Colorado Sun, which added up what it costs to keep aging coal units running after they were supposed to shut down. Three pieces:

Comanche 2 in Pueblo. It was supposed to close at the end of 2025. When the newer Comanche 3 unit was damaged and went offline, Xcel Energy got permission from state regulators to keep Comanche 2 going. Running it through March 2028 costs nearly $65 million in capital, maintenance, and fuel.
Craig Unit 1 in Moffat County. The 45-year-old plant was set to shut down on December 31, 2025. One day before, the Trump administration's Department of Energy ordered it to stay open. That order has cost at least $6.5 million so far — about $1 million a month.
Hayden Station in Routt County. Repairing the pollution controls on one unit runs $9 to $10 million.

Pueblo and Craig are both in Hurd's district. So the people footing this bill are, in large part, his own constituents. Xcel customers pay for Comanche. Tri-State, the wholesale power supplier ordered to keep Craig running, said the costs would be passed along to its member co-ops — which means the rural electric customers across western Colorado who buy power from them.

Colorado's governor was blunt about it when the order came down. Jared Polis said it would "pass tens of millions in costs to Colorado rate payers, in order to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed." Attorney General Phil Weiser called the order "an unlawful abuse of the department's emergency authority," and the state took it to court.

The law being used here was written for wartime

The Craig order was issued under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act — an emergency power meant for genuine crises, war, and disasters. The Trump administration has used it to stop power plants from retiring on schedule at eight sites, from Florida to Washington state. That is not what the provision was written for; before this, the Sun reports, it "had never been used by DOE to stop plants from closing down."

Craig Unit 1 was closing on its owners' own schedule — "to comply with clean air regulations and for economic reasons," as Tri-State put it — at 45 years old, and a valve failure had already taken it offline on December 19. The federal government stepped in, overruled that plan, and handed the tab to Colorado families.

What Hurd actually said

Asked directly whether the cost was worth it, here is how Hurd answered:

"Certainly the dollar amounts that we're talking about here are significant, but the honest comparison is not $65 million or $87 million versus zero; it's the cost of keeping dependable generation available compared to the cost of replacing replacement power in a very tight market."

Then:

"If it means blackouts and brownouts, then I think all of us should look at the seriousness of the situation and recognize that keeping reliable generation online is critical."

And:

"I think what we're learning in Colorado is that reality has a vote."

Notice what's missing. Not one word about the people whose power bills go up. Not a dollar figure for what this adds to a household in Pueblo or Craig. Not a question about whether a federal agency should be able to override a state's own energy plan and send the invoice to that state's customers. Hurd's whole answer is about the utility system. The ratepayer never appears in it.

He didn't stop there. He went on to complain that the federal orders are "limited to only 90 days" — too short, he said, for utilities to plan around. He suggested longer-term arrangements with Colorado so plants like Craig could run more efficiently instead of "turning off and on so quickly." That is where ratepayers finally turn up — once, at the end of that answer, as people a longer runway would let the utility "recoup costs" from, rather than as people whose bills the order is raising.

Read that again. His criticism of a federal order that costs his constituents $1 million a month is that it doesn't last long enough.

This isn't a one-off

Hurd's record on this is not ambiguous. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 3% score for 2025 — and a 3% lifetime score. He sits on the Natural Resources Committee's energy and minerals panel and on the Science Committee's energy panel, so these are the exact questions he was put in Congress to work on.

And on December 17, 2025 he was one of 218 Republicans who voted for the "Reliable Power Act," a bill that lets federal energy regulators stall EPA rules on power-plant pollution. Same instinct, same result: keep the old plants running, push the cost and the pollution onto everybody downwind.

To be fair where fairness is due, Hurd has broken with his party on public lands. He was "the lone Republican on the Natural Resources Committee to vote against the lands provision" that would have sold off federal acreage in the West. He is capable of telling his own side no. He just doesn't do it when the bill lands on a utility statement in Pueblo.

The question he didn't answer

"$87 million compared to what?" Hurd asked. Fine — here's a version of the question he might try answering next.

Compared to what a working family in Pueblo can absorb. Compared to what a household on a fixed income in Moffat County has left after groceries. Compared to the more than 32,000 people in his district projected to lose health coverage because of a bill he voted for — many of them the same people now paying more to run a broken coal plant.

Hurd is right that reality has a vote. Reality just doesn't get to vote on your electric bill. He does.

Source

Q&A: Hurd talks coal costs, budget framework and NDAA — Nathan Deal, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, August 4, 2026. Photo: The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

David Rouzer Has Spent Eight Years Shielding the Hog Industry From Its Own Neighbors

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:33:30 +0000

In the spring and summer of 2018, federal juries in North Carolina did something the state's political establishment had spent decades making sure never happened. Three times in a row, they sided with the people who live next to industrial hog operations.

The first verdict, in April, awarded 10 Bladen County plaintiffs $50 million against Murphy-Brown, the Smithfield Foods subsidiary that owns the pigs. In June, two Duplin County neighbors won $25 million. On August 3, a third jury took three hours to award six neighbors of a Pender County operation $473 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

That last verdict came in while David Rouzer was in a room in Raleigh, holding a meeting about how to stop these lawsuits.

The roundtable

On less than 24 hours' public notice, Rouzer convened a "National Agriculture Leaders Roundtable" at the state fairgrounds. NC Newsline reporter Lisa Sorg was in the room and wrote down what was said.

The room was packed with contract swine growers, USDA representatives, farm interest groups, and elected officials — several from out of state. Over 90 minutes they blamed Smithfield's courtroom losses on the media, on environmentalists, on trial lawyers, and on the federal judge hearing the cases.

Sen. Thom Tillis, who led the roundtable alongside Rouzer and Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler, said of the plaintiffs' lawyers: "We need to change the statutes and stop [the trial lawyers] from spreading like cancer in the country." He added: "I hope we can put them out of a job."

Rouzer's own contribution was a definition:

"Nuisance is like beauty. It's in the eye of the beholder."

Ahead of the event he had put out a written statement calling the suits "a very slippery slope that threatens the very existence of every form of agriculture nationwide," saying they were "destroying livelihoods and communities in North Carolina," and arguing that "every single farm family that is in compliance with all applicable regulations – no matter what they are growing – should have a safe harbor from legal action being brought against them."

Nuisance is not, in fact, in the eye of the beholder. It is a legal standard. As Sorg's fact-check laid out, a North Carolina plaintiff has to prove the defendant's use of their property was an unreasonable interference with the plaintiff's use of theirs, and that the plaintiff suffered substantial harm as a result. Three juries heard the evidence and found both.

Who was on the other side of the table

The families suing were not activists who moved next to a farm and then complained. Many had been there first. Others had lived there while the farms expanded around them, adding open-pit waste lagoons and sprayfields that mist liquefied manure into the air. Others had come back to land their families already owned.

And the communities around these operations are disproportionately Black, Latino and Native American. That is not our characterization — it is the allegation at the center of a federal civil rights complaint that the state settled.

In September 2014, the Waterkeeper Alliance, the NC Environmental Justice Network and REACH filed a Title VI complaint with the EPA alleging that North Carolina's general permitting process for swine farms — which let facilities operate with "grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste" — produced an "unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race and national origin against African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans."

In May 2018, three months before Rouzer's roundtable, the state's environmental agency settled it. The settlement required ambient air monitoring in and around Duplin County — the first time the state had committed to measuring what people there were breathing — plus a year of surface water monitoring and new transparency rules for animal waste permits.

"For too long people living in Duplin, Sampson and other counties in the heart of hog country have had trouble breathing when they go outside," said Devon Hall of REACH.

Bladen and Pender counties, where the first and third juries sat, are in Rouzer's district, and so is part of Sampson. Sampson and neighboring Duplin have more hog farms than any other counties in the nation.

The money

Sorg noted at the time that the National Pork Producers Council, Prestage Farms and the NC Farm Bureau were among Rouzer's major campaign contributors.

That has not changed. The National Pork Producers Council's PORK PAC has given Rouzer $35,000 since 2020, according to FEC-derived records — his twelfth-largest PAC donor. Over the same period the National Cattlemen's Beef Association has given $40,000, the National Turkey Federation $40,000, and the National Chicken Council $37,500. Rouzer has sat on the House Agriculture Committee, which writes the rules for all of them, since his first day in Congress.

He ranks #307 out of 440 House members in the share of his money that comes from small grassroots donors.

2026: the same fight, federalized

Eight years on, Rouzer is still at it — and now he's winning.

On April 30, 2026, the House passed H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, by 224–200. Rouzer put out a press release listing the provisions he secured. One of them is titled "Defending North Carolina Pork":

"Ensures the free movement of North Carolina-raised pork products for sale across the country, upholding the federal government's constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce."

That is Section 12006 of the bill. Read the actual text and it is broader than the press release makes it sound. It declares that "no State or subdivision thereof may enact or enforce, directly or indirectly, a condition or standard on the production of covered livestock other than for covered livestock physically raised in such State or subdivision." It applies to any domestic animal raised for slaughter or for dairy.

In plain terms: if a state's voters pass a law about how the meat sold in their state has to be raised, and the animal was raised somewhere else, that law is void. One category is carved out — animals raised primarily to lay eggs.

The Humane League, which tracks these provisions, calls Section 12006 language "identical to" the Save Our Bacon Act and "modeled after" the failed "Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression" (EATS) Act — and Save Our Bacon, it says, is nearly identical to EATS "with one strategic tweak: it exempts egg-laying hens." Its main target is California's Proposition 12, which 63% of that state's voters approved in 2018.

Rouzer's framing is "free movement." The mechanism is a federal veto over what other states' voters decided about their own grocery stores. It is the same instinct as 2018, scaled up: when a jury, a regulator, or an electorate imposes a cost on the pork industry, find a way to take the decision out of their hands.

What he does when it's his own state

The tell is what Rouzer wants when the shoe is on the other foot. He also wrote the 2012 North Carolina law telling the state not to plan for accelerated sea-level rise — overriding his own state's science panel because coastal developers didn't like its numbers.

Local control, in other words, is a principle he applies exactly as far as it protects the industries that fund him, and not one inch past that.

All three juries found for the neighbors. A federal appeals court affirmed the first verdict in November 2020 while ordering the punitive damages reconsidered, and hours later Smithfield settled the remaining cases on financial terms it would not disclose. The only public accounting anyone in hog country got was the air monitor the state agreed to install.

Sources

Fact-checking the allegations lodged about hog farms at the National Ag Leaders Roundtable — Lisa Sorg, NC Newsline, August 6, 2018. NC politicians support Chinese-owned hog farms, say nuisance lawsuits hurt American farmers — Port City Daily, August 2, 2018. Photo: Sen. Thom Tillis, Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler and Rep. David Rouzer at the Raleigh roundtable (Lisa Sorg / NC Newsline).

David Rouzer Carried the Bill Telling North Carolina Not to Believe the Ocean. Now He Represents the Coast.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:29:03 +0000

In June 2012, a North Carolina state senator stood in front of a legislative committee and explained why the state should not plan for the ocean rising as fast as its own scientists said it would.

"Science should be based on real hard data," said David Rouzer, who presented the bill. "Just because there is a group of folks that project the sea-level rise does not mean the sea will rise. There was consensus years and years and years ago that the earth was flat; turned out to be round."

That is verbatim from the committee hearing, reported at the time by Coastal Review. Rouzer was the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill — House Bill 819, filed by Rep. Pat McElraft — and he voted for the conference report that became law.

Fourteen years later he is the congressman for North Carolina's 7th District, which takes in Wilmington and the state's southeastern coast. And North Carolina's own science panel has now told his constituents to prepare for a foot of sea-level rise by 2050.

What the law actually did

North Carolina's Coastal Resources Commission has a science panel. In 2010 it recommended the state prepare for sea-level rise of up to 55 inches by 2100, with 39 inches being likely.

Coastal developers and some coastal counties objected. They wanted the state to use only the rate the ocean had risen over the previous century, which extrapolates to about 8 inches.

The bill Rouzer presented sided with the developers. It would have prohibited any "rule, ordinance, policy, or planning guideline that defines sea level or a rate of sea-level rise within a coastal-area county" outside an official state rate — and it barred the commission from using accelerated sea-level rise models if they were not "consistent with historical trends."

That is the whole trick. Sea-level rise is a problem precisely because the rate is accelerating. A rule requiring projections to match the past is a rule requiring the state to plan for a future it already knows is wrong.

Four of the scientists on the state's own panel — Rob Young and Steve Benton of Western Carolina University, David Mallinson and Stan Riggs of East Carolina University — wrote to the committee that the bill contradicted the scientific consensus and that its method for calculating sea-level rise had not been vetted or peer-reviewed in any transparent fashion. "In our opinion," they wrote, "it is not scientifically valid."

Duke professor Rob Jackson testified against it. "This bill basically says we can't use the best scientific information to protect people along the coast of North Carolina," he said.

The committee passed it anyway. Rouzer's hearing came, in Coastal Review's words, after "a heavy barrage of worldwide criticism and outright ridicule by sources ranging from Scientific American to the 'Colbert Report.'" He presented the bill anyway.

The text that finally became law that August, Session Law 2012-202, dropped the "historical trends" language — and still did the job. It barred the Coastal Resources Commission and the Division of Coastal Management from defining rates of sea-level change for regulatory purposes at all "prior to July 1, 2016." It made the commission the only state agency allowed to define such rates, while expressly leaving counties and towns free to set their own. And it ordered the science panel's next assessment to cover "sea-level fall, no movement in sea level, deceleration of sea-level rise, and acceleration of sea-level rise" — putting the possibility that the ocean is going down on the same footing as the finding the panel had already made twice.

Then the commission narrowed the horizon. For the 2015 update it directed the panel to limit the scope to 2015–2045 — 30 years — rather than the 90-year time frame of the original report. It took until 2019 for the commission to give its scientists permission to look past 30 years again.

The ocean did not consult the statute

Here is the historical trend the bill Rouzer carried would have tied the state to. At the tide gauge in Wilmington — the biggest city in his district — NOAA measures relative sea level rising 2.8 millimeters a year, based on data from 1935 to 2025. That works out to 0.92 feet in 100 years.

Here is what the state's science panel said in its 2024 update, applying the federal government's 2022 interagency projections to North Carolina: sea level rise of 1 foot to 1.4 feet by 2050, measured against 2000.

A foot in fifty years, instead of a foot in a hundred. And the panel says that number barely moves no matter which emissions scenario you pick — the divergence between scenarios comes later, after 2050, when it gets worse.

Reide Corbett, the East Carolina University coastal scientist on the panel, put the takeaway this way:

"This is a reality that we need to start planning for today. A 1 foot rise in sea level will significantly increase the number of days coastal North Carolina will experience high tide flooding."

The state's Division of Coastal Management director, Tancred Miller, said tide gauge observations and modeling for all scenarios are nearly the same out to 2050, "indicating we are solidly on track for at least one foot of sea level rise by 2050."

The bill Rouzer carried would have tied North Carolina to the first number. The law that passed stopped the state from naming a number at all until 2016.

He has not changed his mind. He has been promoted.

Rouzer has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 3% lifetime score. That is not a man who has quietly come around.

On December 3, 2025, he put out a statement applauding the Trump administration for its plan to gut federal fuel economy standards:

"I applaud President Trump and Secretary Duffy for revising the previous Administration's radical and unnecessary fuel economy mandates and their horrendous impact on working family budgets."

The rollback he was applauding would take the fleetwide standard for new cars and light trucks from roughly 50 miles per gallon by model year 2031 down to about 34.5 miles per gallon — a number his own press release supplies, from a rule NHTSA has proposed and not yet finalized. Burning more gasoline is the mechanism by which the ocean rises. He is now chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Highways and Transit Subcommittee, which is to say he is in charge of the roads.

He is also not shy about the money side of it. Since the start of the 2020 cycle, FEC filings show $35,500 to Rouzer's campaign from the American Council of Engineering Companies' ACEC/PAC and $40,000 from the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association's ROCKPAC — the engineering and aggregates industries that depend on the highway funding his subcommittee controls.

Who pays for this

Not Rouzer. The people who pay are the ones who bought a house on the North Carolina coast, or whose town has to decide right now how high to build a road, a pump station, a school.

Every year a local government plans without a state sea-level number — and the law Rouzer voted for forbade the state to set one until 2016 — is a year of infrastructure built to the wrong specification. That bill comes due later, and it lands on homeowners, county budgets, and the federal disaster funds the rest of us pay into.

This is not an isolated position. We've written before about how North Carolina's Republicans in Congress have voted on the things their constituents actually pay for, in our rundown of what they're costing the state.

Fourteen years ago Rouzer told a legislative committee that projecting sea-level rise was like believing the earth was flat. His own state's scientists have now told the coast he represents to plan on a foot of water by 2050. He responded by cheering the rollback of fuel economy rules.

The earth turned out to be round. The water is still coming.

Sources

Senate Panel OKs Sea-Level Rise Bill — Kirk Ross, Coastal Review, June 8, 2012. Science panel applies 2022 sea level report projections to NC — Jennifer Allen, Coastal Review, October 28, 2024. Photo: debris from a house collapse at Buxton, N.C., September 20, 2024 (National Park Service).

Craig Goldman's One Law Killed an Efficiency Rule the Energy Department Said Would Save $1.3 Billion

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:26:00 +0000

Craig Goldman has been in Congress since January 2025. In that time, exactly one thing he wrote has become law.

It is Public Law 119-9, signed by President Trump on May 9, 2025. It reads, in its entirety, that Congress disapproves a Department of Energy rule "relating to 'Energy Conservation Program: Energy Conservation Standards for Commercial Refrigerators, Freezers, and Refrigerator-Freezers'... and such rule shall have no force or effect."

Goldman's summary of why, from his own op-ed in The Hill three days after the House vote: "I led a resolution, H.J. Res. 75, to repeal burdensome standards on commercial refrigerators and freezers."

Here is what the Energy Department said the burdensome standards would do.

DOE's own numbers

The rule Goldman erased was published on January 21, 2025, at 90 Fed. Reg. 7464. Commercial refrigeration equipment is the reach-in display cases, chef bases and freezers in grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants and bodegas. (Walk-in coolers are a separate category with their own standards, which this rule did not touch.) It runs 24 hours a day, and the electricity to run it is a standing cost for every one of those businesses.

Congress requires DOE to revisit these standards every six years and set them at the level that is technologically feasible and economically justified. DOE ran the analysis, considered six different stringency levels, and picked the third. From the rule's own summary of national benefits and costs:

Lifetime energy savings for equipment bought over 30 years (2029–2058): 1.11 quadrillion Btu — a 6.5% cut in the energy this equipment uses.
Net present value of consumer benefits: $1.32 billion at a 7% discount rate, $3.43 billion at 3%. That figure is future operating-cost savings minus the higher purchase price of the equipment. It is already net of the sticker shock.
Emissions avoided: 19.7 million metric tons of CO₂, plus 6,000 tons of sulfur dioxide and 36,900 tons of nitrogen oxides — the pollutants that cause asthma attacks and heart attacks.
Average life-cycle cost savings were positive for every single equipment class, with payback shorter than the equipment's 14-year average life.

And the cost side, in DOE's words: manufacturers would incur "total conversion costs of $117.7 million," with industry net present value falling between $51.3 million and $77.8 million against a baseline of $3.02 billion.

Line those up. Roughly $118 million in one-time retooling costs for the companies that build the equipment, against $1.32 billion to $3.43 billion in net savings for the businesses that buy it and pay to run it. Compliance wouldn't have started until January 22, 2029 — four years of lead time.

Goldman's resolution deleted it. It passed the House 214–193 on March 27, 2025, with all 209 Republicans who voted saying yes and only five Democrats joining them, then the Senate 52–45 on May 1.

"Shall have no force or effect" is not the whole of it

H.J.Res. 75 was a Congressional Review Act resolution, and the CRA does something ordinary repeals don't. Once Congress disapproves a rule this way, the agency is barred from issuing a rule in "substantially the same form" unless Congress passes a new law authorizing it.

So this is not a pause. Congress requires DOE to review these standards every six years; Goldman's law makes it very hard for DOE to do anything with that review. The convenience store owner in Fort Worth paying to run a 1990s-efficiency cooler will keep paying it, and the agency that calculated the savings is not allowed to try again.

The follow-up bill

Ten months later, Goldman brought the Homeowner Energy Freedom Act to the floor. It passed the House 210–199 on February 25, 2026, and is now in the Senate.

His pitch, from his own press release: "I'm proud to lead the Homeowner Energy Freedom Act, a bill that could reduce the costs of new homes by up to $31,000."

The operative text is a single section. It repeals three sections of the Inflation Reduction Act and rescinds the unobligated balances of two of them:

Section 50122 is the High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Program — $4.5 billion, and it is not a subsidy for builders or utilities. Under 42 U.S.C. 18795a, it pays rebates directly to low- and moderate-income households: up to $8,000 toward a heat pump, $1,750 for a heat pump water heater, $1,600 for insulation and air sealing, $2,500 for wiring, $4,000 for an electrical panel, $840 for a stove or dryer — capped at $14,000 per household. For a household under 80% of area median income, the rebate covers 100% of the cost. Between 80% and 150%, it covers half.

Section 50123 is $200 million in grants to train home energy efficiency contractors. Job training, in a trade with a labor shortage.

Section 50131 is $1 billion in grants to states and cities that choose to update their building energy codes.

Where the $31,000 comes from

Not from any of that.

The $31,000 figure comes from the National Association of Home Builders, which does not claim it as its own research: "Home Innovation Research Labs has found that compliance with the 2021 IECC can add more than $20,000 to the price of a new home, but in practice, home builders have estimated increased costs of up to $31,000." NAHB is the home builders' trade association, and it endorsed Goldman's bill.

Set aside whether the number is right. Goldman's bill does not repeal the 2021 IECC. It cannot — the IECC is a model code written by a private standards body and adopted, or not, by state legislatures and city councils. What Section 50131 does is offer states a billion dollars if they choose to adopt it. Deleting the grant deletes the money. It does not delete a single line of code from a single jurisdiction, and it does not lower the price of a single house by a single dollar in any state that has already adopted the code — or in Texas, which hasn't.

What the bill unambiguously does do is take up to $14,000 off the table for a family under 150% of area median income that wanted a working heat pump, and claw back whatever is unspent.

Goldman represents Texas's 12th District, in a state where summer heat is a public health emergency and the grid has failed people in living memory. His answer to home energy costs is to cancel the program that pays low-income families to make their homes cheaper to cool.

What ties it together

Goldman sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which writes these rules. He has a 0% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters — 0% in 2025, 0% for his career. In February 2026 he also introduced the Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy Act, which would put expiration dates on the energy regulations of the Energy Department, four Interior bureaus and FERC — one year for every rule already on the books, five years for new ones. "Texas leads the nation in passing prudent energy deregulation policies," he said. "It's time for the federal government to follow Texas' example."

Every one of these is sold as lowering costs. The refrigerator rule was cost savings, calculated by the agency, in dollars: $1.32 billion net, minimum. The home rebates are cost savings that arrive as a check to a household that needs one. Goldman has spent his first term deleting both.

And he has been hard to ask about it. In September 2025, when constituents who said they had repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to reach his office to arrange a town hall protested outside a Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast, Goldman said it was not clear to him what the demonstration was aimed at.

We deserve better.

Source

Energy Conservation Program: Energy Conservation Standards for Commercial Refrigerators, Freezers, and Refrigerator-Freezers, U.S. Department of Energy final rule, 90 Fed. Reg. 7464, January 21, 2025; H.J.Res. 75, Public Law 119-9; H.R. 4758, Homeowner Energy Freedom Act, as passed the House. Roll call from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Randy Weber Called $5 Million for the Ike Dike a Win. The Project Needs $2 Billion a Year for 20 Years.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:59:21 +0000

Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in September 2008. It killed people, flooded the island, and made clear that the Houston Ship Channel — one of the largest petrochemical complexes on Earth — sits wide open to storm surge.

The answer, proposed by a Texas A&M professor and eventually named the Coastal Texas Project, is a system of gates and barriers across Galveston Bay. Locals call it the Ike Dike.

Congress authorized it in 2022. As of early 2026, the federal government had put in a total of $5.5 million.

The project is estimated to cost between $35 billion and $57 billion. Washington is on the hook for 65% of it.

Randy Weber has represented that stretch of coast in Congress since 2013.

The math

Public Health Watch's Elena Bruess laid out the numbers in February 2026. The federal contributions to date: $500,000 in 2024, and $5 million in early 2026. Texas has appropriated $950 million for coastal projects, though by Public Health Watch's account only $220 million of it went to the Coastal Texas Project.

Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, put the gap plainly:

"They're going to need $2 billion a year in federal money for 20 straight years, and they've been able to maybe get $5.5 million at this point."

That is not a rounding error. At $5 million a year, the federal share of a $35 billion project finishes in about 4,500 years.

How Weber described the same news

When the $5 million cleared Congress in January 2026, Weber put out a news release. Houston Public Media's Natalie Weber quoted it:

"This funding package has now cleared both chambers, and more than $30 million is heading back to Southeast Texas once the President signs it into law. That means more ships moving through our ports, paychecks for working families, and stronger protections for a coastline that fuels America's economy."

"Stronger protections for a coastline." The Ike Dike's share of that $30 million was $5 million — about 0.02% of what the project needs from Washington.

In a statement to Public Health Watch, Weber's explanation was that these things take a while:

"These efforts take time because they must be engineered correctly, built to last and be responsible with taxpayer dollars."

It has been 18 years since Ike.

His own hometown paper started asking whether it's dead

On February 6, 2026, the Galveston County Daily News — the paper that covers his district — ran an editorial by editor Michael A. Smith under the headline "Is the Ike Dike project just napping, or is it dead?" It questioned whether the certainty coming from the project's own managers was "well founded or just wishful thinking."

That is the shape of the thing. Eighteen years after the storm, the paper of record in Weber's own district is no longer asking when the seawall gets built. It's asking whether the project still exists.

The part that isn't bad luck

Weber can fairly point out that he asked for more. In 2023 he requested an additional $100 million for the Coastal Texas Project and lawmakers turned him down.

But Weber's party has controlled the House since January 2023, and the House, Senate and White House since January 2025. The appropriations bills that shortchange the Ike Dike are bills his own majority writes. He is not a backbencher in the minority pleading with the other side.

And when that majority did move real money, it went elsewhere. Weber voted Aye on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget law that cut Medicaid and food assistance across Texas. That same law set aside $85 million to bring a retired space shuttle from a museum in Virginia to Houston and build a facility to house it — more than fifteen times what the Ike Dike has received from Washington in its entire existence.

A storm barrier for the Gulf Coast got $5.5 million. A museum exhibit got $85 million.

What's actually at risk

The Coastal Texas Project isn't a nice-to-have for Galveston tourism. As Houston Public Media put it, the barrier system is aimed at protecting the state's coastline and the Houston region's petrochemical industry from storm surge during hurricanes — the refineries and tank farms along the Ship Channel that Weber himself calls the coastline "that fuels America's economy."

Every hurricane season that passes without it is a coin flip Weber's district is asked to take.

Eighteen years. Thirteen of them with Weber in the seat. $5.5 million.

Source

Elena Bruess, "Massive Galveston Bay Barrier System Gets One Step Closer to Construction," Public Health Watch, February 19, 2026, and Natalie Weber, "Congress allocates its first round of funding for 'Ike Dike' project," Houston Public Media, January 21, 2026. Photo: V. Lawhorn / Houston Public Media.