A senior Interior Department official was granted a partial ethics waiver earlier this month to work on issues that could benefit her family’s ranches in the West, according to documents obtained through a public records request.
Karen Budd-Falen is currently the third highest-ranking official at the department, involved in a wide range of public lands issues, including ranching on national park land in California and the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul National Environmental Policy Act regulations.
She’s faced criticism from ethics watchdogs over her husband’s multimillion-dollar water deal with the developer of the Thacker Pass lithium project on federal land, which was made during the first Trump administration when Budd-Falen was in a different Interior job. That prompted congressional Democrats to ask for an investigation, over her failure to disclose the water rights deal.
Until earlier this month, Budd-Falen was recused from fully participating in policies governing some aspects of ranching on public lands — like grazing permits from the Bureau of Land Management — because of potential conflicts of interest tied to her family’s ranch properties in Wyoming and Nevada.
