Last week the administration released its fiscal year 2019 budget proposal, further revealing a plot to deregulate and defund land, water and wildlife conservation institutions and programs, while boosting handouts for resource extraction and development special interests. Ryan Zinke’s Interior Department, home to national parks, national wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management lands, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (keeper of the Endangered Species Act), is ground zero for this slash and burn strategy. Zinke, a devotee to Sarah Palin’s “drill baby drill” mantra, has dedicated himself to transforming the Interior Department into a militarized outfit with one sole purpose: “Energy dominance” on public lands. And now he has proposed a budget to carry out that plot.

The administration’s proposed Fiscal Year 2019 budget for the Department of the Interior reads like a bad romance novel starring Zinke and the dirty energy industry. While cutting Interior’s funds by 17 percent overall (including significant cuts to renewable energy programs on public lands), the oil and gas industry will be pleased to see a 13 percent boost to support onshore oil and gas development. This includes over $137 million for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to expand areas available for oil and gas leasing on public lands, including nearly $10 million to establish an oil and gas leasing program within the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which was offered up to the oil companies in the 2018 Tax Bill.

Wind River Range and Sagebrush Steppe

Many of those millions of dollars will go to funding oil and gas development, including habitat destroying drilling rigs, roads and other infrastructure. and to mineral leasing within Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Monuments After illegally slashing the monuments’ protections, Trump and Zinke opened these lands to developers, and have plans to do the same within currently protected, yet targeted for rollback, greater sage-grouse habitat,. And, just to ensure that nobody is left out of the energy dominance spending rampage, the Interior budget proposes to invest $20 million into the BLM’s archaic coal management program, priming the pump for new federal coal leasing, after controversially ending a 2016 coal leasing moratorium last year.

Meanwhile, the budget also slashes the institutions and programs that support and enforce land, water and wildlife conservation on public lands. The budget would cut the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by nearly 20 percent ($300 million) below the enacted fiscal year 2017 level; starve the National Wildlife Refuge System at levels more than $90 million below baseline needs; and eliminate departmental science and endangered species conservation programs. Funding for science-based decisions about whether to protect additional species under the Endangered Species Act would be cut by 47 percent, possibly leading to more species extinctions. The budget also takes an axe to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, hacking the popular program’s current acquisition budget by 95 percent. Never mind that Zinke, when interviewing for his Secretary job in front of the Senate, stated that the program had his “full commitment.”

The proposed budget puts up nearly $20 million to fund Zinke’s contentious effort to reorganize and decentralize the Department of the Interior, a bureaucratic transformation that complements the administration’s deregulate and defund strategy. Among other things, the reorganization is part of a larger scheme to shed over 4,500 positions from Interior, further stripping its capacity to serve the public interest, while doubling down on fossil fuel development. Zinke wants to divest authority to regional czars that oversee 13 geographic regions; meaning that relatively independent Interior agencies charged with land and wildlife conservation–such as the national parks and national wildlife refuges–as well as administration of the Endangered Species Act, could lose their existing autonomy to make conservation policy and independent decisions.