Scott writes about the Interior Department and related agencies. He has reported on a wide range of topics during a 25-year reporting career, including EPA regulation of oil refineries, the potential health risks posed by toxic chemicals in household items and the role of federal lands in renewable energy development. Before joining E&E News in 2009, he was an environmental reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and before that with the Pensacola News Journal. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the Scripps Howard Foundation's Edward J. Meeman Award for environmental reporting and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers winner for special projects.
The Trump administration today unveiled final management plans for the significantly reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, calling for opening up more acreage to energy development and possible mining.
The Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) retirees organization wants the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to follow the lead of House Democrats and hold an oversight hearing on the Trump administration's proposal to move BLM's headquarters to Colorado.
A top Interior Department official said the agency will now begin executing a plan to transfer the Bureau of Land Management's Washington, D.C.-based headquarters to Colorado after the conclusion of a congressional review period passed without objections from lawmakers.
In 1980, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan tossed support to the Sagebrush Rebellion, declaring himself a "rebel" opposed to federal land ownership en route to a landslide win in the West. Now President Trump — who previously opposed selling federal lands to states — is building an Interior Department that walks in Reagan's bootsteps.
White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney appears to have disclosed a key motivation behind recent proposals to move hundreds of Agriculture Department and Bureau of Land Management jobs out of Washington, D.C.: to "drain the swamp" by reducing the federal workforce.