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 claims that moving the Bureau of Land Management's headquarters to Colorado and hundreds of other positions out West will save taxpayers $123 million over the next two decades.
The Bureau of Land Management has approved one of the nation's largest photovoltaic solar power projects in the Southern California desert — the first in a series of major renewable energy projects BLM plans to authorize this year.
Seventy thousand or so Interior Department employees — in other words, the entire roster of career staffers and political appointees — will be worth watching in 2020.
House Natural Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has rejected Interior Secretary David Bernhardt's offer to meet and discuss the lawmaker's concerns over the Bureau of Land Management's move out West.
The Trump administration is poised this year to do what congressional Democrats and other critics of the president's "energy dominance" campaign have been demanding for months: advance large-scale renewable energy projects on federal lands.