U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has stirred controversy with most his cabinet appointments. His selections thus far are people who have made it clear that they will be totally loyal to the president and allow for little daylight between their agency and Oval Office. Furthermore, a number of them are individuals who have been openly hostile to the mission of the programs that they will now run.
Over the weekend, the president-elect announced that he will appoint Chris White, the CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy, to head the Department of Energy. Wright has been a staunch critic of the entire concept of a climate crisis. Former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, taking over at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is not someone known for spending much time celebrating Earth Day. At the Department of the Interior and as head of the National Energy Council, South Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, known for championing oil and gas drilling, will likely be in charge.
These names and others follow the release of the now infamous 900-page Project 2025 plan published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, which outlined a plan for gutting agencies of civil servants who are not subservient to the president.
Though some of Trump’s picks have been unusually controversial, the basic strategy behind these decisions is decades old. Conservatives have been filling key executive positions with leaders who are hostile to the programs that they oversee since the 1970s, when the modern conservative movement took form.
Usually unable to directly dismantle policies, which tend to be more popular than conservative elected officials anticipate, the not-so-subtle alternative strategy has been to weaken, freeze, gridlock, and gut disliked programs from within.
In her book Panic at the Pump, Princeton University historian Meg Jacobs—disclosure: We are married—showed how Republican President Gerald Ford began working with his party’s Washington insiders to weaken Democratic efforts to undertake broad energy reforms in favor of deregulation.
After his watershed election victory against President Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan perfected the craft. The president, noted public policy expert Richard Nathan in his book The Administrative Presidency, penetrated administrative operations by appointing policy officials charged with “grabbing hold of spending, regulatory, and personnel decisions.”
Few of Reagan’s appointments were as controversial as James Watt, who headed the Department of the Interior from 1981 to 1983. Watt was from Lusk, Wyoming. The son of a homesteader, Watt graduated with his juris doctor degree from the University of Wyoming in 1962.
After working for Sen. Milward Simpson and serving as a lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce, Watt gained his first executive-level job in the administration of President Richard Nixon, under Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel. In 1964, he had become a born-again Christian. During the 1970s, Watt emerged and gained respect as part of the legal wing of the conservative movement that rocked U.S. politics.
He became a well-known ally to the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” a revolt of cattlemen and their allies in the West who fought against the federal government taking over larger swaths of land to protect and regulate. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 phased out the practice of transferring federal land to individuals seeking to farm or ranch property. The so-called Western rebels, who Reagan said he identified with, fought for authority to be switched back to the state and local government or, even better, into private hands.
Starting in 1976, Watt had worked for an organization created by the conservative beer magnate Joseph Coors Jr. called the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which mounted lawsuits against the Department of the Interior.
When Reagan announced Watt’s appointment to the department in December 1980, environmental organizations were livid. The Interior Department was responsible for approximately 350 million acres of federal land. Activists warned that having Watt, who believed that his mission was to “undo 50 years of bad government,” would undermine everything that had been achieved over the decade. His nomination was the “worst thing that ever happened to America,” proclaimed the head of the Wilderness Society.
In an era when the fault lines had not yet hardened in the upper chamber, the Senate confirmed him 83 to 12.
At only 42 years of age, Watt was determined to wage war with his own agency and its programs rather than against the forces that were endangering the environment. Interior, he warned, was filled with “environmental extremists” who had more sympathy with communism than market-values. To “see the failures of socialism, you need not go to Russia. Come to the American Indian reservations,” he quipped.
Shortly after taking over, Watt met with all the senior career officials and made one thing clear: “Some of you will be excited about the changes” that were coming, while “others won’t find it comfortable.” If anyone was not ready to be loyal to the administration, he said, they should pack their bags and “seek other opportunities.”
During his tenure, Watt achieved a number of Reagan’s goals. Besides holding the line on the budget, he went after a number of specific programs. Though his efforts to relinquish public land often fell short, federal land managers did pull back on some of their demands of the state. Watt granted oil and gas corporations the ability to drill in a billion acres of the outer continental shelf—the area of the ocean floor that begins about three miles out from the U.S. coastline and extends to the edge of the country’s exclusive economic zone—and opened up federal lands to coal mining.
The fossil fuel and lumber industry cheered when the secretary granted them increased access to protected wilderness area. “We’re deliriously happy,” said the president of the National Coal Association, Carl Bagge. The hospitality industry jumped with joy at the opportunity to open up new facilities on national parks. (Although its proposal to privatize the entire park system fell flat.)
Notwithstanding his success, Watt simultaneously learned that shifting far right could stimulate a backlash. Conservatism in practice—with real programs being slashed—frequently proved to be less appealing than abstract philosophical arguments about the dangers of big government.
As early as June 1981, the Washington Post reported, a Harris poll found that support for Democrats was booming in the West in response to “dissatisfaction with the environmental and land policies” that Watt was peddling. According to Arizona Democratic Rep. Morris Udall, the chair of the House Interior Committee, “When a new administration comes in, you expect change. But you didn’t expect them to go out and pick the most controversial, bombastic person they could find and put him in.”
“With the advent of the Reagan administration and the dismantling of the Federal trusteeship,” former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbit noted in an interview with the New York Times in 1986, “there was a spontaneous awakening all over the West.” More than a million Americans sent “Dump Watt” petitions to Washington.
In the end, however, what brought Watt down from power were his ongoing controversial statements.
In the summer of 1981, the press took note when Watt said to legislators asking him about protecting more wilderness areas, “I don’t know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns,” seeming to suggest that federal policies were unnecessary.
In 1983, Watt criticized the bands that had played at recent Independence Day celebrations on the National Mall, claiming that they attracted the “wrong element” to the patriotic concerts and fireworks shows. Though he didn’t mention them by name, most assumed he was talking about the Beach Boys, the legendary rock band that had been playing the gig for years. The music industry went after him. They were unexpectedly joined by the president and first lady Nancy Reagan, who loved the Beach Boys, and instructed Watt on the error of his ways in a meeting where Reagan handed him a pointed gift: a plaster foot with a bullet hole in it.
Watt finally went a step too far in September 1983, when he promised 200 lobbyists that he was immune from criticism because the commission that was reviewing his coal-leasing program included “every kind of mix you can have.” He added: “I have a Black—I have a woman. two Jews, and a cripple.”
While Watt apologized, he was too much of a lightning rod. He announced his resignation on Oct. 9, 1983. Reagan stood by him until the end, characterizing the effort to remove him as a “lynching” in his diary. But the damage was done. The Interior Department was not the agency it had been when he took over. Watts, along with a number of colleagues, had pushed the debate over the environment to the right and weakened core policies.
Reagan made similar appointments elsewhere. Anne Gorsuch, the mother of current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, headed the EPA, notwithstanding her shared opposition to environmental programs. Collectively, the result was that for years the government stood still on key issues such as toxic waste. One of the most lasting consequences was the decision to authorize the Office of Management and Budget the power to review and approve EPA decisions and regulations using cost-benefit analysis.
As the historian Samuel Hays argued in his book Beauty, Health and Permanence this administrative shift would have enormous long-term consequences by making environmental measures more vulnerable to attack.
During his time in office, President George W. Bush embraced the same strategy. He named Vice President Dick Cheney, a strong supporter of fossil fuels, to head the Energy Task Force that developed the administration’s national energy strategy. And Bush’s secretary of the interior was Gale Norton, a staunch anti-environmentalist as well.
Trump has already tested this strategy out. Trump’s critics keep underestimating his strategies and seemingly forget the well-established conservative playbook that he can easily draw on. Based on the appointees that he has rolled out thus far, Trump is prepared to take a page from Reagan and empower the leaders of each agency to do the dirty work of dismantling them from within.
The one source of hope for Trump’s opponents from the history books is that Reagan damaged environmental programs, but he certainly did not dismantle them. The programs remained in place, and in the coming decades, they would grow. Lee M. Thomas, Reagan’s last EPA administrator, persuaded Reagan that the United States should sign the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer in 1987. When Reagan delivered his farewell address, the EPA was still standing.
The reaction against his administration going too far, moreover, stimulated a massive mobilization that produced an environmental movement that was stronger in scale and scope than when he started. Membership in one of the largest organizations, the Sierra Club, reached 364,000 people by 1985. Five years earlier, they were only at 181,000. Although the environment suffered eight years of cuts and inaction, the worst fears did not come to pass, the New York Times reported in 1989, since as a result of “Congress, the courts and public opinion … the laws, agencies and public lands survived the Reagan years more or less intact.”
For the time being, Congress and the courts will not provide an obstacle as they did in the 1980s. But the public might. Recently energized state governments, working in coalitions, could prove to be effective allies.
Given how radical Trump is acting with his picks, it is certainly possible that the opposition feels more energized than ever as the real-world costs of his agenda start to be felt by Americans, as has been the case with reproductive rights.
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