Karen Budd-Falen speaks at the Alturas Sheriff‘s Panel in 2012. Robert Exter/Youtube

The American public probably believed that the drama involving the Bundy family was over. Their standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in Bunkerville Nevada in 2014, and their occupation of the Mahleur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 were isolated incidents in the American West. Events that, while certainly troubling to the majority of Americans, really would have no repercussions in the rest of the country, and would fade away as obscure history.

The American public would be wrong if that’s what they believed. One of the most extreme right wing states rights attorneys in the country and Cliven Bundy’s former lawyer is now Assistant Secretary for the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Parks. She has been with the Trump administration from the beginning.

E&E News reported that “On May 23, 2019, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt quietly signed the 27th version of an order purporting to delegate duties of presidentially appointed positions to a series of acting officials. In this latest order, Bernhardt tapped Karen Budd-Falen for the role of Assistant Secretary for the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Parks. Budd-Falen worked on the Trump administration's Interior transition team in early 2017. For over a year, her name circulated as a front-running contender for the job of Bureau of Land Management director”.

Budd-Falen is one of the original creators of the prevailing ideology of the Bundy family and all the folks that showed up at the Bundy ranch and then went to Malheur, when she described land-management agencies as part of “a dictatorship” intent on taking away “private property and private property rights.” In the 1990s, Budd-Falen encouraged counties to create land-use plans that turned the National Environmental Policy Act against the federal government.

“Putting Karen Budd-Falen in this position is like putting Genghis Khan in charge of a day care center,” said PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) Senior Counsel Peter Jenkins, pointing out that she was previously slotted into an Interior deputy solicitor job that required no Senate review.

“Since David Bernhardt knows Budd-Falen is so right wing that she could never be confirmed for the job he just gave her, this maneuver only underlines the administration’s continuing contempt for the Senate’s constitutional advice and consent prerogative,” Jenkins said.

Greg Zimmerman, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, stated in a blog post that “Budd-Falen is behind an effort — starting in the 1990s in Catron County, New Mexico — to declare that county officials should have greater power than federal authorities in controlling BLM-owned lands.”

"The Catron ordinance is a detailed handbook for county supremacists and anti-public land extremists who’ve led multiple armed standoffs with public land managers and law enforcement," Zimmerman writes.

Salon writer Amanda Marcotte wrote a story about Budd-Falen when the Trump administration was considering her as the Director of the BLM in 2017. “During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump rejected the radical anti-federal land movement, made famous during the Bundy family occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Trump claimed to hold the more mainstream view that federal lands should stay in public hands and he picked former Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who likes to compare himself to conservationist Teddy Roosevelt, as interior secretary.”

“In the months since he took office, however, Trump has done nothing but defy the promise to protect and preserve public lands. That began with the president's unprecedented executive order calling on Zinke to "review" the national monument designations of the Obama administration and continued with his nomination of energy industry lobbyist David Bernhardt as deputy interior secretary.”

“The appointment of Budd-Falen at BLM would demonstrate that the Trump administration is embracing a right-wing fringe movement that is hostile to conservation efforts on federally owned lands and, in many cases, objects to the idea that the federal government has any right to own land at all”.

Budd-Falen eventually turned down the position.

High Country News wrote that “Budd-Falen is a lifelong Sagebrush Rebel, a veteran of the 1980s-era conflicts over public-land management in the West. She is an alumna of the Mountain West Legal Foundation, which spawned the so-called “Wise Use” movement and helped launch the careers of both Watt, who tried to dismantle the Interior Department from within, and Gale Norton, George W. Bush’s drill-happy Interior secretary. In 2007, she told HCN’s Ray Ring that her most important case was Wilkie v. Robbins, in which she used RICO, an anti-racketeering law, to intimidate BLM agents who had cited her client for violating grazing regulations.” The Supreme Court ultimately rejected that application of the law.

The Washington Post wrote a story about Budd-Falen when she was selected as the Deputy Solicitor for Parks and Wildlife in 2018. “In her new role she will help interpret for other department employees environmental statutes that she in the past has denounced in harsh terms. In 2011, for example, she told Congress that the Endangered Species Act has been “used as a sword to tear down the American economy.”

The Post explains that “Her most prominent former client is Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy. After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Mojave desert tortoise endangered in 1989, BLM restricted grazing on hundreds of thousands of acres to protect the reptile. Budd-Falen represented Bundy and other ranchers who called the federal government's actions a “land grab.”

“For years afterward, Bundy stopped paying grazing fees and ultimately, in 2014, got into a standoff with federal law enforcement officers who had repossessed Bundy's cattle. Bundy and his sons were later indicted on federal conspiracy charges only to have a federal judge dismiss those charges.”

“The Cliven Bundy situation goes to show how American citizens react when a government has so expanded that it believes that the citizens are subservient to political power,” she told the Daily Caller, a conservative website, in 2014.

Reuters wrote about the situation between the BLM and Cliven Bundy in 2014. ”Bob Abbey (son of Edward Abbey), who was the BLM’s Nevada director for much of this period, acknowledged that the steps taken by the BLM to protect the tortoise had made life difficult for some ranchers.”

“When you limit grazing in such a prescriptive nature many ranchers feel they cannot make a living,” he said. Abbey said the BLM worked with Clark County (NV) to offer payments to the ranchers because it was the “fairest way of resolving” the issue.”

The federal listing was not without cause. The Mojave desert tortoise population has been in decline, in part to climate change, as have most southwest tortoises. The Desert Tortoise Council was established in 1975 to promote conservation of the desert tortoise in the deserts of the southwestern United States and Mexico. The Council is a non-profit organization comprised of hundreds of professionals and laypersons who share a common concern for desert tortoises in the wild and a commitment to advancing the public’s understanding of the species. Some researchers believe all southwestern tortoises will disappear altogether as climate change becomes increasingly more extreme. The desert tortoise lives in particular locations where there is enough rainfall and temperatures are a little milder, and where many of the mammals, birds, retiles, and plants in the Mojave also thrive. Protecting desert tortoise habitat indirectly protects all of the rest of these species, and in general makes it possible to avoid federally listing them unless they are in critical decline.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has an ECOS portal (Environmental Conservation Online System) for information on all listed species. Here is the link for the Desert Tortoise.

The Hill has the story about Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) going after the Department of the Interior for sidestepping the Senate when filling posts, such as the appointment of Karen Budd-Falen.

According to a complaint filed in June by PEER, the Secretary of Interior keeps illegally shuffling political officials into jobs requiring Senate confirmation. The latest move places a controversial property rights lawyer associated with the infamous Bundy Clan and right-wing militias to oversee all Interior actions by both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service.

PEER wrote on their website that ”PEER has filed a series of complaints about the illegality of these attempts to circumvent Senate confirmation, the latest filed today with the Department’s Inspector General concerning actions that were claimed to have been taken by the “BLM Director” when the office was vacant. Decisions being made by improperly acting officials may invalidate the legitimacy of Trump’s months-long effort to undo protections across six states for the sage grouse in order to facilitate oil and gas drilling.”

“Today, PEER also filed a lawsuit against Secretary Bernhardt’s office for failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests seeking communications about his elaborate efforts to keep in place lower-level political appointees who violate requirements of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to properly fill an “acting” designation.”

“David Bernhardt is running Interior through a succession of shadow puppets,” added Jenkins. “Not only does the Senate lack an opportunity to question these people in open session but Interior is refusing to produce the paper trail explaining how and why these illicit acting officials got elevated.”

My first diary on Daily KOS was on April 16th 2014 because of the Bundy standoff. I wrote a second diary about it on the April 22nd, because I’ve worked with federal listed species in the Mojave desert for ~30 years and I’m intimately involved with these issues.

Oregon Public Broadcasting did a 7 part podcast called Bundyville that discusses the rise of ant-federal government extremism in the west, after the Malheur National Refuge incident shocked many Oregonians. Highly recommended.