Project 2025: Militarize the Bureau of Land Management
Creating a trained army to enforce the exploitation of public resources to enrich the funders of Project 2025 (Scroll to the end to listen)
Many Americans don’t grasp how much public land the federal government manages. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the agency of the Department of the Interior that administers these lands under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 that defines “a multiple-use and sustained yield mandate to serve present and future generations.”.
Bureau of Land Management. Manages and conserves resources for 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of subsurface federal mineral estate, including energy and mineral development, forest management, timber and biomass production, and wild horse and burro management.
Project 2025, page 519
Mainstream media outlets have made much of Project 2025’s fossil fuel objectives as they relate to federal lands. Project 2025 would open all federal lands to unfettered drilling and extraction, prioritizing resource exploitation over all other uses of these public resources.
Who will benefit most from this exploitation, Project 2025’s billionaire funders or you and me?
But mainstream media hasn’t covered how Project 2025 plans to enforce this billionaire takeover of the profits from resources owned by American taxpayers.
In 2002, at the direction of the Secretary of the Interior in the days following the 9/11 attack, the Inspector General (IG) for DOI made a series of department-wide recommendations regarding law enforcement. Then-Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton ordered adoption of those recommendations, which drew strong bipartisan support from Congress. Over the years, most were implemented. One, however, remained undone: placing all BLM law enforcement officers (LEOs), that is, its 212 Law Enforcement Rangers and 76 Special Agents, in an exclusively law enforcement chain of command.
Project 2025, page 527
You don’t need militarized enforcement regimes to protect recreational access for camping, hiking, fishing, or hunting. Nor would you expect BLM enforcement to be charged with protecting against foreign invaders.
Project 2025 wants to militarize the Bureau of Land Management’s law enforcement division by placing it under people who look like this to protect the profits of those who seek to exploit our natural resources:
For people who decry “Big Government,” this certainly looks like another massive government expansion and invasion of our freedoms to me.
Who does Project 2025 plan to give control of this law enforcement function to?
This was not just the IG’s recommendation in 2002, but that of every IG who followed. It is also the strong recommendation of the department’s top LEO. Moreover, it has been the urgent recommendation of law enforcement professionals across the country, especially in the West, for decades, including the Western States Sheriffs Association.
Project 2025, page 527
Here’s what Democracy Docket says about the Western States Sheriffs’ Association:
The Western States Sheriffs’ Association (WSSA), which represents sheriffs in the Western United States, described the Second Amendment as “an individual’s right to self-preservation,” and argued that, no matter the outcome or policy intent…Quoting Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would sacrifice essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Source: These Sheriffs Are Refusing to Enforce State Law, Democracy Docket
The Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association is another far-right law enforcement group Project 2025 would task with “chain-of-command” for Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officers. I’m not linking to their website, but here’s what they say about themselves there:
The CSPOA was founded in 2011 by Sheriff Richard Mack. As a Sheriff in SE Arizona, he, along with every Sheriff in America, were ordered by the Clinton Administration to enforce the Brady Bill (a federal gun control act) which Mack believed to be unconstitutional. The federal government threatened to arrest all sheriffs who failed to obey the federal government’s orders. Mack and six other sheriffs refused to enforce the federal law and instead sued the Clinton administration. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States where the SCOTUS ruled in favor of the Sheriffs.
This case established that county Sheriffs have the authority and duty to enforce the constitution and to protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government.
Source: CSPOA website Press Intro page
In 2022, CSPOA partnered with the Federation for Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant hate-group, to protest the Biden Administration’s work at the southern border. They have also unapologetically partnered with white supremacist hate groups in the southern United States.
These are the kinds of far-right groups Project 2025 envisions guarding federal lands and their valuable deposits of natural resources. How might this militarized law enforcement structure impact YOU?
Your ability to explore and enjoy federal national parks and monuments could be greatly restricted. Many of these landscapes could vanish altogether.
When allowed, visits to federal lands could be even more dangerous, as the “private sector” would manage safety protocols for visitors. Whenever the “private sector’ manages safety, it leads to more personal injury and death.
This epic destruction of landscapes would accelerate climate change, with dramatic impacts on water resources, especially for those living in the western United States.
Climate activists could receive a militarized response to climate activism on federal lands.
Worldwide inequality will grow as billionaires take taxpayer-owned resources for their own profit, charge obscene amounts for us to use them, and refuse to pay taxes on their grift.
Whether or not billionaires believe in climate change, the planet will continue to heat. Ice sheets will continue to melt. Oceans will continue to rise. Swaths of the earth will become uninhabitable for us, while they retreat to their bunkers and let us and our descendants suffer and die.
Check this map for the Public Lands that Trump and Project would target.
Vote for Democrats to protect your Public Lands From Exploitation By Billionaires
https://arcg.is/4K5Lb
Hi Andra.
Note that the NYTimes has broken news that Justice Alito has flown a Christian nationalist flag outside his vacation home in NJ.
Kathy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/us/justice-alito-flag-appeal-to-heaven.html