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Back in the spring of 2022, as the U.S. oil and gas industry and its congressional enablers were looking to use Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to justify “unleashing” drill rigs on public lands, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat, called “bullshit” on the whole business. Really, using precisely that wording in his press release. It was classic Grijalva, blunt, no-nonsense and utterly fearless about defending public lands and the well-being of his constituents.
Sadly, Grijalva died this month at the age of 77, leaving behind family, friends, thousands of admirers and probably an equal number of adversaries. He also leaves a tremendous void in Washington, D.C., and in the Democratic Party, just when we need him most.
American presidential history is littered with examples of corruption, influence peddling and outright criminality, from Warren G. Harding’s ostentatious corruption — i.e., the Teapot Dome scandal — to the Bush-Cheney administration’s lavish oil and gas industry giveaways, which then-rookie Rep. Grijalva battled relentlessly.
And yet, in just its first 60 days, the second Trump administration has managed to outdo them all, launching an unmitigated assault on democracy, the rule of law, public lands, the federal government and the American people that is genuinely unprecedented in its scope and audacity.
As of March 20, Trump had issued 150 executive orders, ranging from the absurd (“Promoting Beautiful Civic Architecture,” “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness”) and the misleading (“Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California”), to the chillingly vindictive (orders targeting law firms that had represented Trump’s political opponents) and the clearly unlawful (dismantling the Department of Education and attempting to do away with birthright citizenship). Others are inane and unnecessary (declaring an “energy emergency” even as the U.S. produces historic amounts of oil), or openly bigoted and racist, including an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that scrubbed all mention of Navajo Code Talkers and fallen Hopi soldier Lori Piestewa, along with other veterans of color, as well as anyone or anything remotely linked to LGBTQ+ issues, including the legendary bomber Enola Gay.
Meanwhile, Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin has rolled back more than two dozen landmark regulations, ranging from tossing out life-saving limits on mercury emissions from power plants to gutting the agency’s environmental justice programs. “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” Zeldin announced gleefully. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion. …” He is also bludgeoning Western waterways by removing Clean Water Act protections from wetlands, arroyos and ephemeral streams.
Zeldin has effectively jettisoned two-thirds of his agency’s name (the “Environmental Protection” part), and now he plans to do the same with its budget, shutting down critical offices and eliminating thousands of senior staff.
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion. …”
As extensive as the rollbacks are, it is unclear exactly what they will accomplish, other than enhancing corporate bottom lines. The U.S. petroleum industry is already the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and most utilities have either retired their coal plants or equipped them with previously mandated pollution controls. That said, the rollbacks may allow Colstrip coal plant in Montana — one of the West’s largest polluters — to continue to operate indefinitely.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who pals around with petroleum tycoons, has been only slightly more subtle in dismantling the regulatory framework that protects hundreds of millions of acres of public land. He picked oil and gas lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma to run the Bureau of Land Management, where she can generously bestow drilling permits and leases on the same corporations that previously paid her salary, while Karen Budd-Falen, an architect of the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use movements, is now Interior’s third-in-command.
Burgum issued his own orders “unleashing” American energy, opening up to 82% of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska and the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. He is equally eager to expedite other controversial projects in Alaska, including the Ambler Road and a proposed liquefied natural gas pipeline and export terminal. More broadly, the administration has scrambled to expedite the mining of “critical minerals” — including uranium, copper, gold, potash and, really, just about anything else you can imagine — on public lands, while circumventing environmental regulations to encourage logging.
After a secret review of all national monuments created under the authority of the Antiquities Act, Trump impulsively revoked the newly established Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments in California — only to delete the order hours later. The fate of those monuments, and that of others created by Democratic presidents, remains shrouded in mystery.
Burgum said he distinguishes between “special” and “our most beautiful” public lands, i.e., most national parks and national monuments, and the remaining expanses managed by the BLM — lands he has dismissed as “underused,” “inhospitable or unoccupied.” He is willing to preserve the former, unless the administration rescinds their “special” status, but regards the remaining acreage as merely “a bunch of assets,” as he told the National Congress of American Indians in February, that should be exploited by oil and gas companies — the BLM’s “customers,” according to Burgum — to pay down the national debt.
One solution, apparently, is to turn these “inhospitable” acres over to real estate developers. In mid-March, Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner unveiled a plan to transfer “underused” federal land to states or municipalities for housing development. Exactly what this would entail, and how they plan on ensuring that the housing is affordable, was not made clear in the brief Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the plan. Nobody seems concerned about how or where they might find enough water to supply all that housing.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE has begun gutting Interior’s workforce through mass firings of probationary employees even as he orders Burgum to slash another 30% of his staff. DOGE is further weakening the agency by canceling leases on dozens of Interior Department facilities around the West, including ones occupied by the U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation and others.
In other words, Trump and Musk and their minions have been spewing an uninterrupted stream of what Grijalva would most likely identify as “bullshit,” to say the least.
Many of Grijalva’s Democratic colleagues, either cowed by the thought of angering moderate voters or still stunned by their November defeat, have been restrained, even timid, in their response. Not Grijalva, who refused to back down from his principles or his independence, even if it meant alienating the donor class. In 2008, he refused to temper his opposition to offshore oil drilling, thereby passing up the chance to be Barack Obama’s Interior secretary. He never hesitated to veer from the establishment — endorsing Bernie Sanders for president, for example, pushing back on Biden’s efforts to streamline public-lands mining and ultimately urging Biden to abandon his re-election bid after that disastrous debate.
Grijalva, like many of the most successful politicians, came from humble roots. His father was a migrant worker from Mexico, and as a young man Grijalva became a militant leftist community organizer in Tucson. Yet he was a rarity in that he remained loyal to those roots, standing up for the poor, the underserved and the voiceless. His entire life contradicted the stereotype that Democrats are elitists.
Grijalva was compassionate and pugnacious, an unabashed environmentalist and social justice champion who fought equally hard for the working class and public lands. We can only hope that his followers will try to emulate him and rise to the occasion.
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