Julie MacDonald, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks for the Interior Department, abruptly resigned April 30 on the verge of a congressional committee hearing. Saying that her term has been contentious is an understatement.
An investigation by the department’s inspector general, Earl Devaney, concluded that MacDonald had repeatedly altered reports to minimize protections for endangered species, disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions and ease the impact on private landowners. (Washington Post, 3/30/07)
MacDonald, a hydraulic engineer with a master’s degree in management but no background in natural sciences, joined the Bush Administration in July 2002 as a senior adviser for fish, wildlife and parks. She was promoted to deputy assistant secretary in 2004. Not long after, MacDonald began taking license with federal endangered species protections.
According to a December 2004 report in the New York Times, MacDonald changed scientific documents to prevent the protection of the Greater Sage Grouse, and disputed the conclusion that oil and gas operations could interfere with the birds’ breeding and nesting. In the margins of the report she wrote, “Has nothing to do with sage grouse. This belongs in a treatise on ‘Why roads are bad’?”
In a startling report published in February 2005, the Union of Concerned Scientists sounded the alarm on MacDonald on their website. “Julie MacDonald Reverses Scientists’ Decisions by Decree.” They then described, “…new examples of political interference with endangered species science."
Gunnison’s Prairie Dog: its current habitat had been reduced by more than 90% due to oil and gas drilling, urban sprawl and continued shooting and poisoning. It was on tract to receive a positive 90- day finding to deserve protection as endangered until Julie MacDonald forced the FWS to change their positive report to a negative one.
Perhaps the most egregous was her handling of the White-Tailed Prairie Dog, headed for extinction with 92% of its habitat having vanished. Handwritten and Microsoft “track changes” edits show MacDonald herself eliminated or disregarded information from the draft that would have led to positive determination. She also changed scientific conclusions, added erroneous scientific information and ordered the finding to be changed from positive to negative.
The report goes on to list seven more instances where MacDonald interfered through “manipulation, suppression, and distortion of Endangered Species Act science.” In a survey of FWS scientists, 84 reported having been directed to exclude or alter information from documents.
In another example stated in the New York Times, MacDonald pressured staff members to combine three different populations of the California Tiger Salamander into one, which in effect excluded it from the endangered species list. This was overturned by a federal judge in 2005, who said the decision had been made “without even a semblance of agency reasoning.”
Apparently MacDonald was more interested in helping big business and industry than endangered species. The inspector general found that Ms. MacDonald had sent internal government documents by e-mail to the lawyer for Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights group that frequently challenges endangered species decisions. Twice she sent internal Environmental Protection Agency documents, one involving water quality management, to e-mails with a “chevrontexaco.com” address.
(N.Y. Times)
The inspector general’s report also stated that she improperly provided department information to lobbyists and private- sector interests including the California Farm Bureau and the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California.
Even more disturbing, MacDonald admitted sending internal documents
about the Delta Smelt, an endangered species fish, to a young online gamer friend.
MacDonald has been no friend to conservation. As Kieran Suckling from the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity, said to the Washington Post. “She has demoralized the entire U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by deriding its scientists, overruling its decision-makers, and showing complete disregard for professional channels of decision making.”
Even though the resignation of MacDonald is a relief to the conservation community, there still remains much to be done regarding endangered species. In an executive summary, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that the Endangered Species Act requires the FWS to make “expeditious progress’ in placing imperiled plants and animals on the endangered species list. The number of species listed per year steadily increased from the Ford/Nixon administration through Clinton. It then precipitously declined during the current Bush administration to the lowest rate in the history of the Endangered Species Act. The average annual listing rates have been; Ford/Nixon (15), Carter (38), Reagan (32), Bush Sr. (59), Clinton (65), and Bush Jr. (7).
That pretty much says it all regarding Bush Jr. and conservation.
“The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.”
Marya Mannes (1904- 1990) More in Anger, 1958
Cheri Cabot, Politics Correspondent
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Cheri is a single teacher and writer, living in Southern California. She has two grown children, one in Iowa and one at Columbia University, and is the proud grandmother of two. Cheri is also a purveyor of fine coffee, warm chatter and dry wit.
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Comments: 37
It's been said that one can judge a nation based on how it treats its animals. If this is true, between the Bush administration's efforts to give the whole damned country away to big business, particularly oil, and the purchase of ingredients from China (almost surely in order to save a negligible amount of money) for pet food and the human food chain as well, we should hardly be able to hold our heads up in international company. The government of Madagascar, an impoverished African nation, has recently begun to take an active interest in preserving its wildlife, just as the United States rolls back attempts to save our own. The next time the term "third world" is used, this comparison should come to mind.
Thanks for sharing this, Cheri. I hope there are many more resignations to come over the next few months now that the Dems are peeking behind the curtain in Oz.
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
Thanks for another great article. Let's hope our planet can recover from all the damage that's been done....although it may take decades to replace our gray matter, so that we begin to make wise choices again. In the case of our current administration, I think they're synapses are irreversibly misaligned.
Folks - when you vote please remember this an all the other fiascos committed by BushCo because they choose to select department & committee heads, federal attorney's, World Bank leaders, etc, based upon political favors due, rather than based upon work experience and excellence.
I can't remember a more detremental leadership of our country. Every single time repubs run our government we all suffer - they run up our national debt, create wars, ruin our environment, give tax breaks to the wealthy, hire their inexperienced pals to run agencies they don't think should exist... more most importnatly... they select the wrong Supreme Court judges who will be around years after BushCo is a mere memory.
Excuse me, I've got to go and puke.
That's not to say that our present leader isn't pretty darned awful.
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
The Interior Department is a rat's nest of special interests and give-aways of the nation's national resources.
Don't understand why the Democrats suddenly have cold feet about following up on the spectacularly bad deal of the oil leases. They were subsidized -and forgiven payments of royalties on the plunder.
The US subsidized the development of the fields, then conveniently "forgot" to collect royalties.
It surely has nothing to do with the status of EXXON MOBIL as the largest corporate donor to the Republican Party.
It kills me to hear the repubs whining now about the dems "playing politics" by exposing this lunacy and holding hearings making these clowns accountable for what they have done to this government and country. "Playing politics" my *ss. Upholding the law and bringing a bit of ethics and respect back into Washington, that's what they are finally doing.
And it was a pleasure to hear today that Europe is now demanding for Wolfie's resignation from the World Bank.
Since she just quit last week it's still a developing story.
Thanks for all the wonderful comments!
I think we're related.
Suzi: Are you a MacGregor, a MacNab or another of the rather large collection of MacNab septs?
To repeat the quote from the article:
"The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future."
Marya Mannes (1904- 1990) More in Anger, 1958
I made up the quote, but it is nonetheless true.
MacDonald is merely the latest in a long line stretching back to Anne Gorsuch and James Watt in the Reagan Administration to "revise" the EPA mission to fit their own thinking.
All these awful appointees that quit should go into rehab and claim they have a drinking and drug problem and didn't know what they were doing...that's what they do out here in Hollywood.