Climate & Environment

Climate & Environment https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment Climate & Environment en-US Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:47:00 GMT How Trump Unleashed an Existential Fight Over America's Dinosaurs https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/grand-staircase-escalante-dinosaurs-trump-national-monument Anna Kramer In Utah, Trump resurfaced a decades-long dispute over how to protect some of the country’s crown jewels. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:47:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/grand-staircase-escalante-dinosaurs-trump-national-monument

Katja Knoll, a paleontology technician, recovers fossils from an excavation site inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 2020. (Courtesy of Christian Venhuizen/Bureau of Land Management Utah)

Seventy five million years ago, a long-necked creature resembling an oversized ostrich curled into a ball to die.

In June, the dinosaur’s still-curled body took flight over the barren, jagged rocks of southeastern Utah, suspended from the base of a double-rotored military helicopter usually used to airlift tanks.

It was the second helicopter called upon to pull the ornithomimid into the sky. First came a Black Hawk, which struggled to lift the nearly 5,000 pounds of rock and bones. When it failed, state officials sent the far more powerful Chinook, armed with a cadre of soldiers on loan from the National Guard.

Few could see the camouflaged helicopter carrying its bobbing white package for what it was: an animal that once lived among tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs, set free. Its once marshy wetlands had long since been subsumed by the cliffs that Americans knew until very recently as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

“Nearly all of the dinosaurs and other fossils preserved in the region have been found nowhere else,” said Joe Sertich, a paleontologist who has studied in Utah for more than a decade.
IMG_3215 copy.jpg (1200x1500, AR: 0.80)Dangling hundreds of feet in the air that summer day was a perfect capsule of that land before time.

Then, just a few weeks after the ornithomimid flew, President Donald Trump declared the dinosaur fossils of Grand Staircase-Escalante “common” and “not unique,” stripping protections from the place where this particular creature had slept for millenia.

***

Trump shrank the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by more than 90% on July 13, removing almost 900,000 acres of geologic layers home to unusually complete dinosaur fossils.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and the entirety of the state’s congressional delegation stood behind him in the Oval Office as he signed the proclamation. They applauded, smiled and posed for photographs.

Back home, the scientists and paleontologists who have worked on that land for years sat in disbelief.

“It’s just an absolute distortion of reality to say that the fossils of Grand Staircase are common and can be found anywhere, and therefore don't need any special consideration or protection,” said Alan Titus, who served as Grand Staircase-Escalante’s official monument paleontologist for the Bureau of Land Management until the fall of 2025.

“I so vehemently disagree with that perspective, and I can guarantee the people that wrote it did not talk to a qualified paleontologist about it,” Titus said.

Most of the region’s local leaders disagree with Titus. They love dinosaurs, they say, but the national monument has been a burden. Trump’s order was a long-fought victory, finally giving them more control over the future of both the land — and dinosaurs — they see as theirs.

“The fossils don’t disappear because the boundaries change. That basin is still one of the richest Late Cretaceous ecosystems ever discovered,” said Kaden Figgins, Garfield County’s planning and economic development director.

Figgins believes both that the dinosaurs are an extraordinary resource and that the dramatic cuts to the national monument are a boon for his community.

There are indisputable facts. The fossilized bodies found in Grand Staircase-Escalante are unique. They have inspired massive movie franchises and even amusement parks. The most recent “Jurassic World” featured dinosaurs only known to scientists because of excavations there. Dinosaur species have been found for the first time in this desert.

For the last 15 years, paleontologists and local leaders have been working in tandem to bring that Hollywood attention to their backyard. They want to make Utah a dinosaur capital and build a world-class dinosaur museum — an international destination for scientists and tourists alike.

Trump (8640x5760, AR: 1.50)

Monumental Day of Action: Utah based public land rally (4800x3202, AR: 1.50)Then there is the debate. Trump’s proclamation has brought to the surface in Utah a long-simmering and existential disagreement about the future of this land, what it holds and who should control it. The same people who for so long have been united in their belief that the dinosaurs are among the nation’s greatest crown jewels are now fundamentally at odds with each other over what is required to protect them.

In his order, the president did not just dismiss the value of the monument’s scientific resources. He went further, suggesting that the lands could be opened for mining minerals and coal, perhaps helping make the U.S. less dependent on foreign sources of critical minerals.

While the local leaders are excited about what comes with the shrinking of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s boundaries, the researchers are warning that its still-pristine time capsule could be disrupted by industrial development. The dinosaur bones themselves are at greater risk of being stolen and sold on the black market. And without the prestige of a national monument, money for research, a museum or scientific infrastructure will be far harder to secure, they said.

“There needs to be a national dialogue about public lands, and what we want to do with them,” Titus said. “Is this really what we want to do with our public lands? Open them all up to extraction? Or do we want to balance this with conservation, protection, and scientific research?”

Paleontologists believe that this remote corner of southern Utah could be home to the next great undiscovered dinosaur — and the next, and the one after that.

That faith is so strong that one local official is willing to break publicly with his leaders.

State Paleontologist James Kirkland found himself at a loss for words when first asked about Trump’s presidential proclamation. He said that Democrats have sometimes gone too far in their defense of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s massive size. But for the president to attack the monument’s boundaries wholesale? That’s a decision so far beyond his personal red line that he’s willing to risk the consequences of speaking out.

“Yeah we need common sense, but we don’t want to just throw out the baby with the bathwater,” he said. “It’s just sad. We had so much to offer, and this is not going to help anybody.”

"We are talking gigantic dinosaurs,” he went on. “This is the story, the age of dinosaurs in Utah. It could be ground shaking."

***

President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument in 1996. Ever since, researchers in Utah have been discovering new dinosaurs at such a rapid pace they haven’t been able to name them all.

And every year, they dig out at least one especially well-preserved dinosaur. Last year’s dig produced the ornithomimid that scientists airlifted out this summer. The year before it was a tyrannosaur.

“It’s just every year we get something special, like a little baby hadrosaur covered in skin impressions,” said Titus, who retired last year, taking the early resignation offer the Trump administration used to dramatically cut the size of the federal workforce. “It always has a treasure every year. And you don't know what's out there until you go out and look for it.”

IMG_1271 (4032x2688, AR: 1.50)

51121918048_68f690813f_o copy.jpg (1620x1080, AR: 1.50)Unlike many of the better-known dinosaur hotspots in China, and even in North America, Grand Staircase-Escalante is still in the early stages of investigation, paleontologists said.

Even researchers from China — often credited with the most interesting dinosaurs yet known to man — have come to see the fossils of Grand Staircase-Escalante.

“The Chinese admit we have the best Mesozoic age of dinosaurs record anywhere in the world,” Kirkland said.

Discoveries have come thick and fast in recent years only because researchers finally had access to modern tools and transportation. The region, known as the Kaiparowits Plateau, is so remote that it was the last part of the contiguous United States reached by cartographers.

The Chinook that carried the ornithomimid in June was merely the most recent helicopter deputized for dinosaur transport. The fossils are so massive that in previous years, paleontologists have paid federal wildland firefighting teams to swing by with their helicopters at the end of a deployment to pick up bones.

“We’ll fly a camp deep into the backcountry and camp out there for two or three weeks,” Sertich said.

Because the digs are especially expensive, funding them has become increasingly difficult as research dollars grow scarce. Paleontologists have relied heavily on the Grand Staircase-Escalante name to help get the limited dollars flowing over the last two decades, they said. Without that monument status to attract attention, they predicted that resources that were already hard to tap will likely grow dry.

“The new executive order cuts us off at the knees in that effort” to make Utah a new epicenter for dinosaur study and tourism, Titus said. The Interior Department has not hired anyone to replace him as the monument paleontologist at the Bureau of Land Management.

A BLM spokesperson told The Washington Sun that paleontological resources and protection "is not limited to areas with monument designation.”

“BLM Utah will move forward with advertising the position as opportunity and funds become available,” the spokesperson said.

The region’s local leaders share Titus’ passion for the dinosaurs. Several told The Sun that no other place on Earth can compete with what’s been found in their backyards.

One official went so far as to say that the county’s great exports are twofold: “our children and our dinosaurs.”

But they don’t have Titus’ fear for the future. In fact, these local leaders said that they don’t believe there’s any risk at all in cutting the monument.

***

The contours of today’s fight trace back to at least 1976, when a group of power companies abandoned plans to build what at the time would have been the largest coal power plant in the country on the edge of the Kaiparowits Plateau. The plant would have been powered by coal blasted out of the same rocks that hold the fossils.

Back then, no one understood that there was an expansive dinosaur boneyard in those rocks. The plan fell apart because mining in the region was plagued with problems.

Mining the region was just as fraught in the 1990s, when another plan coalesced to build a coal mine in the middle of the plateau. But that time, the project died because Clinton established the national monument, effectively making it impossible to move forward. In the process, Utah Republicans grew increasingly angry with the federal government’s power over public lands; on the day of the monument designation ceremony, both Clinton and then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt were hung in effigy from lampposts in Escalante.
PRESIDENT CLINTON (1790x1430, AR: 1.25)Exactly 30 years after they sent black balloons into the sky and told The New York Times that “We’ve had it up to here with the federal government,” Utah’s local Republicans have freed the land from the monument.

But now they face a new challenge. The intervening three decades’ worth of research have irrevocably altered understanding of what’s inside those rocks in Grand Staircase-Escalante. Even if mining the plateau today is economically justifiable and technically feasible — questions as yet unanswered — any new mining effort would have to confront what could be lying on top of a possible uranium deposit.

Federal laws like the National Paleontological Resource Preservation Act, which prohibits anyone from taking fossils with vertebrae from federal lands, will remain in effect. The Bureau of Land Management's “legal responsibilities for paleontological resources did not change with the monument’s boundaries,” the BLM spokesperson said. “Vertebrate fossils are protected across all BLM‑administered lands, regardless of monument designation,”

But those laws are rarely enforced, Titus and Sertich said.

It is the land’s monument status, and the special protections that come with it — like the complete prohibition on taking anything out of the monument — that do far more to guarantee the safety of the dinosaurs in the long term, Sertich insisted.

Utah’s local leaders who advocated shrinking the monument say the dinosaurs aren’t at all at risk; if anything, they say, Trump’s order will boost their push for a regional museum.

“We hope it does bring attention to what’s there,” said Dave Dodds, the Garfield County public works director, arguing that shrinking the monument would lead to greater focus on what remains. “We hope that this can focus in on the dinosaurs down there.”

Garfield County Commissioner Jerry Taylor has been trying to get the museum off the ground for a long time; he had a feasibility study commissioned, he consulted experts who helped design North America’s most famous dinosaur museums, and he even recently persuaded the Utah State Legislature to provide a small amount of seed funding.

The presence of the monument has not helped advance those efforts, Dodds and Figgins said.

“We’ve never received federal funding for this, and we’ve been begging for 20 years,” Figgins said. “The museum does not exist because it was the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The museum exists because it’s one of the most significant dinosaur discovery regions in North America.”

The Bureau of Land Management said the government’s existing partnerships with universities and museums, and its work to “expand statewide capacity for preparation, curation, and research,” would be “unaffected by monument boundary changes.”

The government currently has partnerships with Utah State University Eastern’s Prehistoric Museum and the Natural History Museum of Utah.

***

The most legendary dinosaur quarry in Grand Staircase-Escalante is called “Rainbows and Unicorns.”

It’s there that in 2014 Titus discovered a family of tyrannosaurs that drowned in a flood together, all of them unusually intact. Paleontologists are still studying these massive creatures, hoping to answer the many questions that arose from their discovery more than a decade ago: Were tyrannosaurs actually social creatures, traveling in groups with their relatives? Are these fossils an entirely new species of tyrannosaur?

Rainbows and Unicorns is the single fossil-rich area that Trump protected when he shrank the monument in July, calling it “a globally important paleontological resource.”

IMG_1167.JPG (4032x2863, AR: 1.41)

IMG_0388.JPG (4032x3024, AR: 1.33)There was a deep irony in that for Sertich: The president kept protections for the one place where the most impressive fossils had already been found and largely removed from the site.

“Of course there are still bones in the ground, but you know the important stuff has already been excavated and removed, so now they're preserving largely a hole in the ground,” he said.

There are hundreds of thousands of acres across the Kaiparowits Plateau with the potential for equally impressive finds, paleontologists said — and now they are no longer protected by monument status.

The researchers who have devoted their lives to this work have a nagging fear that if they don’t find and study these bones themselves, the fossils could end up one day on display in a private compound instead of a museum in Utah.

“We’ve cracked the door on the safe over the last 30 years, and now people want fossils for themselves. There’s a whole underground market for illegal fossils, and I see these things pop up on Instagram and eBay all the time. That’s going to become rampant,” Sertich said.

Enthusiasm for dinosaurs is exploding globally, with or without Utah riding along. A tyrannosaurus known as Gus sold for $50 million in an official auction in July, and the black market is growing quickly in response to the demand.

The Bureau of Land Management’s “law enforcement responsibilities remain in place,” the agency’s spokesperson said.

Titus has in the past been involved in efforts to prosecute the thieves. But in certain parts of the Western United States, black market collectors have grown systematic and organized in their dinosaur looting, Titus said.

That level of sophistication has not yet reached Grand Staircase-Escalante. Still, he wonders if that’s only a matter of time in a world increasingly obsessed with the best possible fossils.

“The bad guys know that now they can go out there and just pretend they are looking for clamshells,” he said.]]> Trump Is Quietly Planning to Majorly Change How National Parks Are Run https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-quietly-plan-national-parks-run Anna Kramer, Eric Katz All Interior Department bureaus are considering major shake-ups under an edict from leadership. Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:31:02 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-quietly-plan-national-parks-run Donald Trump,Chris Wright,Doug Burgum

The Interior Department intensified its reorganization process in early 2026, with upper management telling leadership at each bureau that the dramatic staffing reductions opened the door to rethink how they are organized. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

The Trump administration is planning to significantly reorganize the National Park Service and other bureaus of the Interior Department, the second major shake-up of the nation’s public lands infrastructure in less than two years.

The agency is looking to reshape its most public-facing offices, according to draft internal agency planning documents from late August obtained by NOTUS and confirmed by an Interior executive involved in the reorganizations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The reorganization plans across Interior were developed in a “very hush hush” manner, the executive said, noting that no one aside from the very top leadership of each subagency has been involved in the discussions. That secrecy has created a culture of fear and anxiety in the agency and among National Park advocates, who have been cautioning against another reorganization, as NOTUS reported last week.

The Interior Department has already lost more than 10,000 employees since President Donald Trump retook office, largely through voluntary resignation programs directed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the White House. Last year’s reorganization moved support staff into Burgum’s office.

In its draft documents, NPS said that it anticipated it would avoid layoffs “in the short term,” but in prepared talking points tells officials to “avoid categorical promises; explain notification process” if asked about staff reductions.

The country’s 430 park units would experience a significant change under the proposed plans. The documents describe transitioning the park service to a new “hub and spoke” model, with some “hub” parks given the power to manage priorities, leadership and direction for “spoke” parks that would report them, according to the documents.

Currently park superintendents report to regional leadership. While the regional system will remain in place, the draft documents indicate that Interior intends for power to be centralized in the “hub” parks: They would direct priorities and vision, while “spoke” parks would be responsible for implementation.

The documents also indicate that the park service intends for resources to be shared more widely between the spoke and hub parks, with the hub carrying more responsibility for the management of those resources. (The draft plans included a visual representation of the reorganization created with Anthropic’s Claude AI tool, according to an internal note in one of the documents.)

The new organization is intended to “build a more efficient and effective operation, optimize resource sharing across parks and programs, and enhance accountability and supervision,” the draft documents read.

The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Details of the plan are still subject to change, according to the documents and people familiar with the plans. The Interior executive said last week a career official overseeing the effort introduced a new framework for bureaus to use to rearrange themselves. Previous deadlines were pushed back or removed altogether.

Rachel Borra, Interior’s human resources chief, who previously helped spearhead layoffs at the department last fall that were ultimately blocked in federal court, has been meeting with management in recent weeks to go over details of the various “realignments,” according to documents reviewed by NOTUS. She is scheduled to hold a progress meeting on realignment efforts on Tuesday.

Changes at National Parks could have disparate impacts, where functions range from the preservation of natural wonders in Yellowstone to the protection of rare ecosystems in Channel Islands to the preservation of historical and cultural memory at Valley Forge. While currently superintendents are largely responsible for ensuring that mission is met within their individual park, the new structure appears to centralize some management with the “hub” superintendent.

That centralization could come at the cost of each individual park’s needs, former officials said.

“It’s remarkable from A to Z how different units in the National Park Service are and how they have to adapt to location conditions, and that can drive people in D.C. crazy because they really like it when everything fits in neat boxes,” said Jeff Mow, the former superintendent of Glacier National Park and a 40-year veteran of the Park Service. “And there’s a whole lot about the National Park Service that doesn't fit into neat boxes.”

“Any time you see these top-down initiatives come through — almost never in my career did I ever see one that can encompass the diversity within the organization,” he continued.

Russell Galipeau, who served as superintendent of Channel Islands National Park for 15 years, said that it is already difficult for the country’s smaller and lesser-known parks to advocate on behalf of their needs and priorities.

“We want to reorganize. We want to make things more efficient. You know what? We can do all those things, but how is that actually helping us be a leader and setting an example of how we protect our nation's natural and cultural resources?” he asked.

The draft documents detailing the agency’s reorganization plans were not meant to be made public and stress the importance of delivering information to employees and stakeholders on the department’s own timeline.

While Interior in its internal communications insisted its plans represented common-sense solutions, declining to fully rule out layoffs, phrasing such as “reducing duplication” and demands that supervisors “not speculate about effects on specific employees,” coupled with previous efforts to slash staff and ongoing hiring restrictions, are likely to have staff and public lands advocates on edge about the administration’s intentions.

“National parks do not operate in a bubble, they are intrinsic parts of local communities. And if this proposed reorganization plan moves forward, it is going to jeopardize park relationships with communities, stakeholders, and partners,” said Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
America 250 Trump Roosevelt Library (4104x2736, AR: 1.50)The documents also lay out details of how individual offices within NPS are set to be restructured. The agency tentatively plans to remake its culture and science division into an office called Resource Stewardship. Employees have raised concerns that the administration would seek to de-emphasize its scientific and cultural work. A new Law Enforcement, Safety and Health Division would replace a Visitor and Resource Protection office.

The agency has been planning how to announce this reorganization since July 2026 but has not yet notified Congress of its intention to reorganize, according to the documents and a Senate aide. The Interior Department is legally obligated to notify Congress of any planned reorganization.

The secrecy of these plans have frustrated advocates, former officials and current staffers alike.

“This reorganization could fundamentally change how our national parks operate, without any clear communication about what ‘problem’ might be solved. It can't possibly be addressing budgets or efficiency,” Thompson said. “There are going to be countless issues and challenges involving park funding, travel and other logistics — this will waste taxpayer dollars and further contribute to the chaos that already exists.”

The implementation of the plan has already changed in at least one regard from the schedule laid out in documents obtained by NOTUS: While planning meetings were scheduled with senior officials for this week and superintendents for the middle of September, those meetings have been canceled, according to multiple sources familiar with the change. NPS planned to begin implementing the changes this year, though it is not clear if that timeline remains operative.

The Interior Department intensified its reorganization process in early 2026, with upper management telling leadership at each bureau that the dramatic staffing reductions opened the door to rethink how they are organized. At least at some bureaus, internal leadership maintained autonomy in developing plans and new organizational structures. They then worked with the Office of Personnel Management on implementation of those ideas.

Department officials made clear to individual bureau leadership that “This is the time to take a big swing,” the Interior executive said.

While Interior was on the verge of laying off thousands of employees at multiple points last year, they never took effect due to various court orders. The department still successfully upended some parts of its workforce. Last month, top agency officials reassigned more than two dozen of its top career executives, requiring many people to move into new jobs with limited relationship to their background and expertise.

The Park Service has already been “bleeding,” both because Burgum directed national park resources toward D.C. beautification efforts and because of last year’s reorganization, said one current employee. Bureaus across Interior are still paying Burgum’s office to house employees it subsumed as part of that reorganization, employees said.

Through the renewed reorganization efforts, Burgum is continuing to exert his influence over the shape of the department. He has already merged the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, undoing a change under former President Barack Obama. The secretary has also merged all the department’s firefighters into a new component over some bipartisan reservations from Congress.

Between those changes and the staffing losses from the Trump administration’s push to reduce the federal workforce, advocates are already concerned what another round of changes will portend.

“We find a way to say it's more efficient, and what we end up doing is finding out we have less and less resources to work with,” Galipeau said.

“Perhaps reorganization wouldn’t be necessary if these unnecessary cuts weren’t made.”]]> Democrats Are Plotting Government Efficiency in a Post-DOGE World https://washingtonsun.com/technology/democrats-government-efficiency-post-doge Natalie Alms Rising stars in the Democratic Party are promoting their tech modernization teams in a post-DOGE political landscape. Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:15:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/technology/democrats-government-efficiency-post-doge

Mayor Zohran Mamdani went to Coney Island to announce the city's new Public Interest Technology Crew, or PIT Crew. (Katie Godowski/MediaPunch/IPx)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a big show of bringing his “pothole politics” online: He donned his sunglasses, lowered himself into a go-kart and took a lap around a track in Coney Island to sell his new Public Interest Technology Crew, or PIT Crew. (Get it?)

The team’s mission is to make the city’s clunky online systems easier to use and to help enact his agenda. It’s an initiative Democrats are adopting across the country. In Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, too, is setting up a crew of tech whizzes to bring government services into the 21st century.

Many of the people running those teams are alumni of the U.S. Digital Service, the relatively unknown Obama-era tech squad that President Donald Trump transformed into DOGE on Day 1 of his second administration.

Now, they’re out of Washington and working for some of the rising stars of the Democratic Party who want to use technology to enact the liberal agenda and show voters that they can get things done.

“What I heard along the campaign trail, and certainly now that I’ve been governor, is people have this sense that things don’t work,” Spanberger told NOTUS in an interview.

The Trump team and DOGE were “correct in identifying that people want things to work better,” she said. “Rather cynically, they used that sentiment to their electoral advantage, and then used it as a mandate to break things further.”

More than 10 blue states have digital services teams — many of them with former U.S. Digital Service staffers and several of them established before the second Trump administration. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro set up a digital team in 2023. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, in 2024. By comparison, only two red states have similar units.

The teams are an answer to what Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, calls a progressive “neuroses” that wants to prove liberals can govern effectively, part of a movement calling for “abundance” — more development, more ambitious policies, faster.

That, and the national focus on DOGE, have brought what was once a relatively behind-the-scenes administrative effort, like building a website, into the foreground.

“Doing the good work is the core of what we need to do every day,” said Luke Farrell, a deputy commissioner and senior adviser for New York City's chief technology officer. “But also, we then need to show people the work, and we need to get it into people’s hands.”

Mamdani’s PIT Crew has been tasked with making his administration’s “click-to-cancel” rule into a reality with an online portal for New Yorkers to file complaints. The consumer protection rule, which requires businesses to provide simple subscription cancellation, is projected to save New Yorkers millions of dollars once it goes into effect next month.

In Virginia, the digital team is being told to address the inefficiencies that disrupt the daily lives of residents; Virginians still have to write checks to the state because they can’t pay for some state services online, Spanberger said. Other parts of the state government still require traditional signatures.

“One of the ways that you can best ensure that you're correctly utilizing state taxpayer dollars is to make things actually work,” Spanberger said. “The state digital service is meant to be a part of that.”
Abigail Spanberger AP-23311573084272 (4411x2941, AR: 1.50)President Barack Obama set up the U.S. Digital Service in 2014 to fix HealthCare.gov after a botched rollout threatened to tank Obamacare, one of the Obama administration’s signature policies. The unit became a core part of a network of tech do-gooders in the federal government.

After the HealthCare.gov rescue, the team largely operated in the background of government. During the first Trump administration, the leadership of the U.S. Digital Service fashioned the team as a nonpartisan unit. In a shift, the Biden administration installed political leadership and tasked it with working on priorities like building a government program to file federal taxes for free.

Still, when Trump returned to office, few Americans were familiar with the tech team that the president and Elon Musk transformed into DOGE.

In the early months of the second Trump administration, many of the existing U.S. Digital Service staffers were laid off. Others resigned publicly, saying that DOGE’s work was antithetical to the mission of the original team. 18F, another Obama-era government tech team, was shuttered in March 2025, weeks after Musk tweeted that it had been “deleted.”

DOGE quickly departed from its nominal tech focus to overhaul of the federal workforce and slash government spending — moves that inspired nationwide protests and lawsuits. The backlash has given Democrats nationally an opportunity to reclaim the government efficiency mantle.

That conversation has already begun in Washington. Liberal think tanks and former federal officials are drafting plans for how future administrations could improve the government, as NOTUS has previously reported. The work could have an impact beyond political resonance: In New York, Virginia and the capital alike, these efforts to improve technology and government could help politicians actually implement their agendas.

“A policy without a way to enforce it isn’t really a policy at all,” Erie Meyer, who was previously the chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told NOTUS of the importance of the PIT Crew’s work implementing Mamdani’s click-to-cancel rule.

Mamdani’s team is still deciding on what other projects they’ll focus on, but the work will be “core to the Mamdani administration's agenda around affordability, housing, consumer and worker protection and more,” said Maya Israni, senior adviser to the city’s chief technology officer.

More than 4,000 people have submitted applications to join the New York City PIT crews, which will consist of five teams focusing on building services in-house instead of using contractors.

“We really want to have a direct impact on someone’s day-to-day life as a New Yorker and make their life on a day-to-day basis better and more affordable,” Israni said. “We’re here to deliver on core Mamdani administration priorities.”

At the state level, Democrats are also using the teams to respond to Trump’s agenda. Spanberger said Virginia’s tech push is especially relevant in light of the Republican budget law passed last year, which slashed federal funding in food assistance programs and Medicaid.

As the state implements Medicaid work requirements from that law, how well various state systems interface to validate eligibility becomes really important, said Spanberger, noting that “any of those gaps means loss of coverage or means loss of social safety net programs for people in a way that can really be harmful.”

The tension: Sometimes the work to enable policies isn’t flashy.

The goal of the new tech unit in Virginia is to “improve the services that the government provides for every Virginian,” Andrea Fletcher — who also previously worked in the U.S. Digital Service and just recently started as the new director of the Virginia Digital Service — told NOTUS.

To do that, the Virginia team will also be looking to tackle the “boring stuff” that often makes the government headache-inducing in the first place, like procurement and hiring, she said.

During DOGE’s heyday in Washington, some who had previously been on civic tech teams in Washington expressed envy at the political aircover Elon Musk’s team had to get things done.

The teams in New York and Virginia have that top-down investment, said Lynn Overmann, who worked as a senior adviser for the Biden administration as part of the U.S. Digital Service.

The real test, she said: “Can they actually get it done?”]]> Trump Is Proposing Cutting Protections for More Bodies of Water https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/trump-proposing-cut-protections-water Mara Hoplamazian The EPA proposal would limit protections to water that flows every day of the year, with limited exceptions. Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:31:42 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/trump-proposing-cut-protections-water Lee Zeldin of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Lee Zeldin of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency’s goal is a “durable” definition of “waters of the United States” that “follows the law and ends burdensome regulatory uncertainty.” Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP

Waters that dry up for more than 30 days a year could lose federal protections under a new proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The move comes as the Trump administration works to redefine which bodies of water are regulated under the Clean Water Act and would require federal permits for activities like dumping pollution.

The Biden administration excluded a majority of the country’s wetlands from protections after a 2023 Supreme Court decision, Sackett v. EPA, narrowed the definition of waters under federal jurisdiction. That decision said the federal government could only regulate wetlands with a continuous surface connection to a “relatively permanent” body of water.

Last winter, the Trump administration proposed going further, removing protections for waters based on whether they cross state lines, and only applying protections to waters that flow at least during the “wet season.”

In the document released Friday, the EPA is proposing an even stricter definition. A water body would only be “relatively permanent” if it had standing or flowing water every day of the year, with limited exceptions.

"The Trump Administration's initial proposal placed vast swaths of federal waters at risk of losing their federal protections, and this new proposal enormously increases that risk,” said Maggie Nivison, a senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation.

In the proposal, the EPA said it could not calculate how many miles of streams would lose federal protections, though the agency estimated that most of the nation’s roughly 3.5 million miles of “intermittent streams” would not be federally protected.

Most of the impact, the agency said, would be in regions where intermittent streams are important parts of the water system. The arid West would be expected to see a “significant reduction” in waters under federal jurisdiction.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency’s goal is a “durable” definition of “waters of the United States” that “follows the law and ends burdensome regulatory uncertainty.”

In the past, Zeldin has emphasized the importance of saving landowners from having to hire lawyers and consultants to understand whether federally protected waters are on their property.

Under Friday’s proposal, waters would not lose their federal protection if they dried up for a short period of time — 30 days in any given year. But if a stream or river dried up for longer than 30 days, it would no longer be considered a “water of the United States.”

Extreme or exceptional droughts would count as extenuating circumstances, but the supplemental proposal would kick water bodies out of federal jurisdiction after five continuous years of drought.

Nícola Ulibarrí, an urban planning and public policy professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the impact of the rule could be exacerbated by more drought as global temperatures heat up. That could affect not only small streams, but also major rivers.

“We’re starting to see parts of the Rio Grande drying out and no longer having continuously flowing water on a somewhat more regular basis,” she said. “Right now it would still meet the federal standard, but that could change, and that’s a river that supplies drinking water to many, many people.”

The agency said it could not quantify potential savings from easing permitting and compliance if fewer waters were protected — though it estimated that both would increase with this latest proposal.

In the supplemental proposal, the EPA argues that the change would simplify the implementation of the federal water rule, because members of the public could see a body of water drying up and make a determination based on observations, instead of requiring professional consultation.

But Nivison, with the Conservation Law Foundation, said determining whether individual bodies of water are running or not is complicated.

“Distinguishing between a damp creek bed and a dry creek bed is still a huge challenge for any layperson,” she said.

Waters that aren’t under federal protection are under state jurisdiction. State regulators are often resource-strained, or have more permissive systems than the federal government, Nivision said.

That could lead to more pollution in waters across the country. Requirements for disclosing which pollutants are flowing into bodies of water would also be dropped if they no longer qualify under federal jurisdiction, creating an “information blackout,” she said.

“We’re tying our future selves' hands behind our back,” Nivison said. “We’re going to be facing these water quality problems without even having access to the information as to what’s being added to these waters.”

After the supplemental notice is posted in the Federal Register, federal agencies will accept public comment for 30 days.]]> Pentagon Delays PFAS Cleanup at Over 200 Military Sites for the Third Time https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/pentagon-delays-pfas-cleanup-200-military-sites-third-time Joe Gould, Anna Kramer This time, the Defense Department is telling lawmakers ahead of time that it plans to push back the forever chemical cleanup timelines. Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:36:43 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/pentagon-delays-pfas-cleanup-200-military-sites-third-time

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to members of the media.

Senators have previously demanded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reverse delays to PFAS cleanups at military bases. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

The Pentagon is again delaying its timelines to clean up “forever chemicals” at hundreds of contaminated military sites across the United States, the third time in a year the department has extended estimates for completing a key phase of the cleanups.

The latest update will change the schedule at 243 installations, a senior Defense Department official told NOTUS on Wednesday. The official acknowledged that the dates at those installations are being pushed back, while arguing the changes should not be interpreted as a slowdown in the Pentagon’s effort to address contamination from the chemicals known as PFAS.

Instead, the official said the new dates reflect expanding investigations, evolving regulatory standards and additional work needed as the department learns more about contamination at individual sites.

“Every time we peel those things back, we find more work, and we continue to want to make sure that we get this right,” the official said.

The changes mark the latest setback in the Pentagon’s yearslong effort to address widespread PFAS contamination caused by decades of military use of firefighting foam at airfields and training facilities.

The new delays include more than 40 sites with PFAS contamination that has reached nearby drinking water. That’s three-quarters of all locations where the DOD has identified drinking water impacts. In those locations, the military provides alternative options like bottled water delivery to ensure people can access safe water.

Joint Base San Antonio in Texas and Fairchild Air Force Base in eastern Washington are among those dealing both with drinking water impacts and now the longest new delays. Joint Base San Antonio is seeing an additional 13 year delay and Fairchild Air Force Base is getting a 12 year delay. For both of those locations, the Defense Department indicated in its schedule that the delays were caused by the need for “additional testing and fieldwork.”

Lawmakers and communities complained that the Pentagon had previously published revised dates online without a public announcement. Between May and June, the Pentagon quietly pushed back cleanup schedules at nearly 200 sites, as NOTUS first reported. Those delays included 15 military sites where PFAS contamination had already spread into the drinking water of nearby communities.

Two dozen senators subsequently demanded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reverse the delays and provide more information about how the decisions were made.

This time, the department is taking a different approach. Pentagon officials notified lawmakers and reporters ahead of the update and said installations will be expected to communicate the changes locally through public meetings, restoration advisory boards, social media and fact sheets.

“I can always communicate more effectively,” the senior official said, acknowledging the concerns about the department’s previous handling of the schedule changes.

The department also plans to change how cleanup information is conveyed on its website in an effort to be “more plain, more spoken, more addressing the issues, so communities can see what's happening,” the official said. The department is planning to roll out a site redesign later this year.

Defense officials insist the later dates do not mean the cleanup work is stopping. The Pentagon says it’s using interim measures — such as contaminated soil removal, groundwater treatment, filtration systems for homes and work with municipal water supplies — while longer investigations continue.

“I want to reiterate: It's not a pause in our efforts. In fact, the ongoing efforts are increasing,” the official said. “But these adjustments that you're going to see are based upon both the interim actions that we're taking on the cleanup part of this. Right, so we're taking more interim actions.”

The official said that the schedules are driven mainly by the science and the amount of investigative work required. Asked whether additional money from Congress could shorten the cleanup timelines, the official did not identify a specific funding level or say how much faster the work could proceed.

The military is one of the country’s most significant sources of PFAS pollution. PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, can remain in the environment and the human body for decades. In large enough concentrations, the chemicals can cause health problems ranging from developmental issues to certain cancers.]]> Interior Department Staff Fear a Major Agency Shake-Up https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/interior-department-staff-fearing-agency-shakeup-reorganization Anna Kramer, Eric Katz Former National Park superintendents are cautioning the Interior’s top leadership against another reorganization. Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/interior-department-staff-fearing-agency-shakeup-reorganization

Interior has already reorganized its workforce once during Secretary Doug Burgum's tenure. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

With limited insight into the Trump administration’s plans for the Interior Department, and recent reassignments affecting some of the agency’s top experts, current and former staff are seeing signs of a dramatic shake-up on the horizon.

In the latest example, the superintendents of all of the country’s national parks have been called to unusual in-person meetings with National Park Service political leadership later this month, scheduled for just a few weeks before the end of the government fiscal year.

“Attendance is mandatory and expected. We will use this time to discuss agency priorities, our FY 2027 outlook, and other matters important to the work ahead,” wrote Frank Lands, the deputy director of operations for NPS, in communication to park leaders reviewed by NOTUS.

The meetings are all scheduled for the week of Sept. 14 at each regional office around the country, with agency leadership suggesting they may travel to attend each meeting.

The timing has alarmed current park service staff and former superintendents, who told NOTUS that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has until now largely prohibited travel for senior park service staff. They are anticipating a major reorganization of the agency that they fear could resurrect previously abandoned efforts to cut or consolidate NPS offices focused on science, wildlife monitoring and culture. Staff in other bureaus throughout the department echoed those concerns to NOTUS in recent days.

Employees said the coordinated rollout elevated their levels of panic. Individual park and headquarters staff — in D.C. and in Colorado — told NOTUS they have been left out of the discussions entirely.

These fears have reached former park service leaders. A coalition of 20 former park superintendents, including former leaders of Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Acadia, wrote to Burgum on Wednesday, warning that any reorganization of the park service would “make it all the more difficult” for the agency to serve the needs of the parks.

“Requiring attendance at a last minute meeting at the end of the fiscal year is unusual in this current environment, to say the least. And it is concerning, given the consolidation that has occurred since January 2025, and the efforts at reorganization we have seen at DOI and throughout other federal agencies,” the superintendents wrote in the letter, organized by the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and shared exclusively with NOTUS.

“Reorganizations can be useful when they are carefully planned, transparent and driven by the mission. They can also cause enormous damage when they are rushed through from the top, without understanding how a complex organization actually functions,” they wrote.

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In August, Interior reassigned about 30 of its most senior civil servants — known as senior executive service employees — to new roles, requiring many people to move into new jobs with limited relationship to their background and expertise, NOTUS previously reported. Those who were reassigned were given two weeks to accept the change or resign.

Those reassignments did not include regional staff, though some employees said they expect that to change in the coming weeks.

Interior has already reorganized its workforce once under Burgum’s tenure.

In 2025, the agency moved people specialized in human resources, information technology, contracting and other related areas from bureaus such as the park service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into a centralized organization within Burgum’s office.

While the agency carried out that reorganization, it simultaneously lost more than 10,000 employees across its many bureaus, largely through deferred resignation and retirement incentive programs designed by the Trump administration. The National Park Service has lost almost one-quarter of the permanent, full-time employees it had at the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management’s staffing database.

Federal spending law requires the Interior Department to get permission from Congress before it reorganizes its bureaus. The Republican leaders of the committees with jurisdiction over the department did not respond to requests for comment.]]> Want an Animal Shelter? A Lazy River? Cash? Data Centers Want to Know. https://washingtonsun.com/energy/data-center-deals-cash-donations Mara Hoplamazian How data center developers are spending their way into communities. Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:47:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/energy/data-center-deals-cash-donations Line of people pose in front of American flag

Line of people pose in front of American flag

Part of OpenAI’s Project Stargate is a 2.2 million-square-foot, $43 billion data center, in Saline Township, Michigan. (Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)

In a few years, the city of Saline, Michigan, will have renovated its recreation center’s locker rooms, tiled the pool deck, expanded the children's play area, installed a waterfall and constructed a lazy river. Down the road, part of OpenAI’s Project Stargate, a 2.2 million-square-foot, $43 billion data center, will hum away, churning out the next generation of artificial intelligence.

As public sentiment on data centers has soured, AI companies are leveling up their efforts to sweeten the deal for communities that host them. In Saline, that included a $10 million donation from OpenAI, Oracle and other companies for a new and improved recreation center.

In Richland Parish, Louisiana, teachers got $50,000 bonuses from Meta. Compass Datacenters forked over $15 million for a new animal shelter in Ellis County, Texas. In Florida, developers for the failed Project Tango offered to hide their building from view with a small forest of pines, palms and native shrubs. NorthPoint Development has proposed giving $10,000 to every household in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, if it’s allowed to build a massive data center for Amazon — a dangling carrot some residents have characterized as a bribe.

Politicians from both parties are pushing the deal sweeteners too. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s energy office told counties to make “wish lists” for data center developers, and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is pitching free electricity for towns willing to play host.

This summer’s data center backlash has underlined a glaring lack of guidance from federal and state leaders on what tech companies owe the communities they’re building in; in Washington, a growing slate of proposals range from requiring developers to procure and pay for their own power, and taxing data centers to prepare for potential AI-related job losses.

In the absence of comprehensive federal regulation, local officials are largely left to negotiate agreements with data center developers themselves. For many of the towns being targeted by developers, the scale of wealth AI companies can bring to the table could be transformative. The benefits they promise, though, rely on the success of a nascent industry that’s been met with fear and doubt. And as developers try to fight widespread distrust and opposition, even multimillion-dollar donations don’t seem to be moving public opinion.

In Michigan, Saline Township’s leadership had voted last year to block the data center development. The developer sued over the zoning decision soon after. The township settled, with officials negotiating several community benefits: a few million dollars for emergency services, farmland preservation and other community investments.

The recreation center revamp came up more casually, said Saline Mayor Brian Marl.

Once it was clear the data center would be built, Marl organized a lunch with Oracle and the other developers. He gave them a tour of the recreation center, and told them about all the work the city hoped to do on the building. Then, the Friday before the groundbreaking, he got a call at 8 p.m. — the companies wanted to give the city $10 million dollars to help with that project.

Marl says the move was an obvious attempt by the companies to ingratiate themselves in the Saline community. But it’s not clear that $10 million went very far toward that goal. Marl is still fielding calls and taking meetings with residents who are fervently trying to stop the project, even as construction moves forward.

“I don’t think it’s game-changing locally, in terms of people’s feelings toward this specific data center, or data center developments more broadly,” he said.

Some offers from developers have backfired.

In Osage County, Oklahoma, Google’s efforts to win support for a data center were thwarted when a local volunteer fire department rejected a $250,000 donation — a sum larger than the department’s annual budget — because of the community’s concerns. That project is the subject of three separate lawsuits, one involving attacks over a lack of government transparency.

City officials in Sand Springs, which annexed the land that would be used for the data center, have negotiated tax agreements and other contributions from Google for community projects. But Osage County Commissioner Steve Talburt hasn’t been impressed.

He’s refused to sign nondisclosure agreements related to the project, despite pressure from Google. The company offered the county a few hundred thousand dollars per year as a payment in lieu of taxes, Talburt said. When he and the other commissioners pushed back, the company cut the county out of the tax agreement completely.

A few weeks ago, a contractor for Google came to visit him, asking what the company could do to smooth things over. The contractor offered to put up extra money for county schools or infrastructure, Talburt said. He declined.

“Google’s just trying to throw money around to get everybody on board, and that’s not good enough,” he said. “It’s not going to make it right. And Osage County is not going to sell out.”

Many negotiations have revolved around similar informal donations or contributions from data center developers. Those aren’t always legally enforceable, said Daniel Metzger, a legal expert with Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Anti-bribery laws make it difficult for local governments to accept benefits explicitly in exchange for approving projects. Local officials can create binding agreements for benefits that are connected to the potential harms a project may cause, regulating water and electricity use, or forcing companies to pay to improve the emergency services they may rely on.

In one of the first formal benefit agreements for a data center in the U.S., the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, cut a deal with developers that requires them to use only clean energy, hire locally, make yearly reports and pay $20 million dollars into community development funds.

Agreements like those are filling a gap where coordinated federal or state legislation is absent, Metzger said, especially agreements that include transparency requirements around water and energy use.

The benefit agreements can be so lucrative that some state and local officials are banking on AI companies to fund their most pie-in-the-sky ambitions. St. Louis officials got a developer to pay roughly $15 million toward public Wi-Fi across the city, among other projects. In West Virginia, where Nvidia and Microsoft are building what could be the largest data center on earth, the state’s 20-year plan published last month aims to eliminate state income tax and boost funding for local schools by attracting massive hyperscale projects.

Still, evidence that community benefit agreements lead to better situations — especially in smaller towns — is mixed, said Devashree Saha, director of the U.S. Clean Energy Economy Program at the World Resources Institute.

“Typically it’s not an even playing field between communities and developers,” she said. “It becomes difficult for community coalitions to hold the developer accountable.”

If a company goes bankrupt or sells a development to another entity and those benefits dry up, it can leave a community that was banking on financial support scrambling, Saha said.

Even without formal agreements or massive donations, a new data center can fundamentally change a place.

In Ellendale, North Dakota, a data center development has more than tripled the town’s tax base. Mayor Don Flaherty says in the next three years, it’s projected to grow from $3.5 million to $37 million.

The data center has touched seemingly every part of life in Ellendale — for better and for worse, Flaherty says. Heavy trucks have torn up the roads. This summer, about 2,600 workers are in town to construct the buildings — more than doubling the town’s population of 1,100. Flaherty says it’s been fun to meet new people, though concerns about crime and traffic have increased.

Hundreds of jobs for locals in Ellendale are on the horizon. The full-time population could grow by up to 600. With all the new tax revenue, the town is planning to upgrade the senior center and ambulance hall, refresh the downtown and work on a walking trail. Down the road, Flaherty is eyeing a new fire department building and a law enforcement center.

Meanwhile, residents are saving money on energy bills as their utility company sells more power to the data center and its profits increase, South Dakota Searchlight reported. Applied Digital, the company behind the development, is helping to finance new housing.

But rent has in some cases doubled, pushing families out of town. And there’s a constant hum at the edge of town.

Flaherty didn’t do any formal negotiation with Applied Digital — which he acknowledges could have been naive. He says he has some concern about a data center bubble bursting, leaving Ellendale behind. Mostly, though, he’s seeing the benefits.

“This is what I believe is the answer for rural America, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be data centers, but some type of project of this nature that can stimulate your economy,” he said. “I guess those are the things that outweigh the worries.”]]> Yosemite Is Facing More Development. It's Already Overtaxed. https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/yosemite-private-developer-deal-overcrowding Anna Kramer With Yosemite overcrowded and understaffed, the Trump administration’s proposed deal with a private developer faces backlash. Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:47:24 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/yosemite-private-developer-deal-overcrowding Protesters march with signs at Yosemite National Park.

Protesters march with signs at Yosemite National Park.

Protesters against Trump administration's mass firing of National Park Service employees marched at Yosemite National Park. (Stephen Lam/AP)

In the summer months, Yosemite National Park bursts at its seams. Its trails are lined with crowds. Visitors wait in long bus lines to get around Yosemite Valley. Cars get snarled in traffic jams.

Managing that universal love for the park has only become more challenging. The Trump administration has overseen significant staff losses at the Interior Department, leaving Yosemite occasionally understaffed and at times partially unmanned.

For those whose job it is to protect Yosemite today and keep it unimpaired for future generations, news that the Trump administration is working on a plan that would give a developer private access to the park, as first reported by NOTUS, was yet another blow.

“The union is incredibly concerned about the implications of this private development for the working conditions of an already overwhelmed staff, who will have to address the cultural, resource and visitor safety ramifications of this area,” said a spokesperson for the National Federation of Federal Employees local that represents hundreds of Yosemite employees.

Nevada-based developer Kingsbarn Realty Capital wants to build a road that would connect a currently undeveloped private property (known as Hazel Green Ranch) just outside the park with one of the main access roads inside Yosemite’s boundaries. For more than a year, the Trump administration has been pressuring National Park Service staff to find a way to enable the project, sources told NOTUS.

Currently, the Park Service is exploring how to arrange a land swap that would give Kingsbarn a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite’s land in return for land of equivalent value somewhere else in California.

Former park officials, the park’s staff union, national park advocates and many everyday Americans have all come out in opposition to the proposal. Not only are Yosemite’s boundaries sacred, they say, but the plan flies in the face of a longheld consensus: The park needs to address overcrowding, not exacerbate it.

“Yosemite Valley is a mile wide and seven miles long. It’s incredibly narrow. It’s a small piece of land essentially that so many people want to visit, and so the overcrowding really denigrates from the experience,” said Cicely Muldoon, who served as the superintendent of the park for five years and stepped down just after President Donald Trump took office in 2025.

“Picking Yosemite apart piece by piece with commercial development that does nothing for the preservation of the park, that does resource damage, that introduces more and more crowding — it just makes it more difficult to preserve the park and ultimately takes away from the visitor experience,” Muldoon said.

“National parks are supposed to be the highest level of protection that we as a nation put on our land,” she said.

Yosemite is fairly difficult to access both for visitors and the staff who work there. The boundaries of the park are surrounded almost entirely by national forest lands, so most visitors and workers have to stay and live fairly far from the main entrances.

The park has dealt with such severe crowd problems that in 2020, in response to COVID-19, and then in later years to continue handling the crowds, it introduced a timed-entry reservation system. The system was highly effective at improving the visitor experience and got overwhelmingly positive public feedback, Muldoon said.

But the region’s hotel and tourism industry strongly opposed the system, because it required greater planning from visitors to the many resorts and hotels, creating a new barrier for those wishing to capitalize financially on growing enthusiasm for the park.

The Trump administration ended the timed-entry system for the 2026 summer visitor season. Visits to the park are up nearly 10% this year compared to last year, according to preliminary monthly use data from the Park Service.

“Yosemite is already facing an overcrowding crisis due to years of runaway lodging overdevelopment outside of the park and the terrible decision to get rid of this year’s vehicle reservation system,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “A massive commercial development that can only be accessed from inside the park’s gates will further exacerbate the chaos we’ve seen in Yosemite this year.”

The National Federation of Federal Employees pointed out that the development would give private residents or visitors better park access than what even some park employees have.

“Yosemite NPS employees, like other park units all around the country, have seen historically low morale due to inadequate housing, budget cuts and severe staffing issues,” the NFFE spokesperson said. “In housing specifically, employees struggle with housing availability, long commute times and high costs.”

Kingsbarn’s attorney, longtime lobbyist Lanny Davis, argued the land exchange will actually benefit the park because it is environmentally friendly. If Kingsbarn develops housing on Hazel Green Ranch and the Park Service doesn’t pursue the land exchange, visitors will need to drive an hour and a half to reach Yosemite Valley. If the land exchange goes through, a new road would cut that drive down to 30 minutes.

“This is environmentally sound, consistent with environmental values,” Davis said. “I am an environmentalist and a liberal Democrat, otherwise known as a progressive Democrat, and the way we’re doing it is to exchange land that we wish to use for environmental purposes for all of the pollution to be reduced from 11 miles from a 56-mile round trip.”

Davis once served as an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he has represented a list of controversial clients including Michael Cohen, Harvey Weinstein and the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Kingsbarn Realty Capital is not listed as a client in his lobbying disclosures.

Kingsbarn, through a web of limited liability companies, purchased the 83-acre parcel outside the boundaries of the park in 2024 from California developer Lewis Geyser, who tried and failed for years to force the National Park Service to allow construction of the connecting road through the park. The Bush and Obama administrations refused to pursue a land exchange, and the developer eventually lost in both district court and on appeal when he sued to force the issue.

Davis emphasized that Kingsbarn is not seeking an easement, but rather a complete land exchange: “It’s a land exchange; it’s not a give-up by the Park Service or a right of way, or an easement.”

“The only way it can legally be done, is there is a provision under the law that allows the Park Service to exchange land of equal value, as long as there are no adverse environmental effects, which there are not. So this is a land exchange. We purchase land. We donate it to the Park Service,” Davis said. “We exchange the value of that land that we’re giving to Yosemite for the value of the land to build the road.”

Those arguments haven’t won over the national park’s advocates.

“There is no logical reason, except to gain access for proposed new highly profitable development, for the property owner to desire access from the undeveloped parcel to the main paved road in Yosemite Park,” said John Buckley, executive director for the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. “There are no residents of this property.”

“We’ve watched this same proposal get rejected by three prior administrations and by the courts, and we don’t believe the underlying facts on the ground have changed — only the political willingness to entertain it,” said Patrick Koepele, executive director of the Yosemite Rivers Alliance. “Ceding any part of Yosemite National Park to enable private road access sets a precedent this region cannot afford, regardless of how the land swap is structured or valued.”

Trump’s Interior Department appears unfazed: “Hyperbolic garbage,” Interior Department spokesperson Cody Sargent wrote on X of reporting on the plan.

“There has been no political pressure to reach a predetermined outcome, and claims suggesting the Department is secretly working to hand over National Park Service land to a private developer are false,” Sargent said.

“If a proposal advances, the Department will follow established procedures to ensure appropriate coordination, transparency and public involvement consistent with federal law.”]]> Vance and Zeldin Push for a Probe Into Biden’s Handling of East Palestine https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/vance-zeldin-investigations-biden-handling-of-east-palestine Mara Hoplamazian The request comes after documents were made public showing federal officials’ concerns about contamination in the Ohio town following a train derailment in 2023. Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:29:31 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/vance-zeldin-investigations-biden-handling-of-east-palestine

Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.

A Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

Vice President JD Vance and Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin are calling for an independent investigation into the Biden administration’s response to the Norfolk Southern train derailment that released hazardous materials in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023.

In a letter to the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, Vance and Zeldin say ongoing concerns about federal decisions that may have affected human health warrant review.

Documents released this week by a government watchdog group show federal officials had concerns about the number of deaths that could result from burning some of the hazardous chemicals inside the train. The documents also included an unpublished analysis of contamination concerns from one month after the derailment, which showed hazardous contaminants lingering in East Palestine.

After train rail cars carrying hazardous chemicals crashed in February 2023, worries about a massive explosion led Norfolk Southern to propose draining the chemical vinyl chloride out of five of those cars and setting it on fire. Nearby residents were evacuated before the plan went into effect.

The newly released documents show early EPA modeling projected that more than 1,900 people could die and thousands could get sick from the burning of that chemical. Later modeling reduced those numbers to 29 potential deaths and 163 injuries.

The National Transportation Safety Board later found that Norfolk Southern misrepresented the risk of the train cars exploding, and that the decision to vent and burn the chemicals was unnecessary.

East Palestine residents have remained concerned about their health since the disaster.

“The people of East Palestine deserve certainty about their health and the safety of their community. They did not get it from the Biden EPA,” Zeldin said in a statement.  “The Trump EPA is committed to correcting the mistakes of the past administration. We have done everything in our power since day one to protect human health and the environment in East Palestine, and that work will continue, guided by our commitment to gold-standard science.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration opened an investigation into a subcontractor responsible for sampling groundwater at the train derailment site after it failed to meet data quality standards.]]> Trump Is Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-administration-yosemite-private-developer-deal Anna Kramer The National Park Service is under pressure to make an unprecedented deal that cedes a quarter-mile strip of the park. Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-administration-yosemite-private-developer-deal

Visitors take in the scenery from Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

For more than a year, the National Park Service has been quietly working to fulfill an unprecedented directive from Trump officials: Parcel off a corner of Yosemite National Park to give to a private developer.

National Park Service staff in California and Washington, D.C., are trying to arrange a land exchange between a Nevada-based company and the federal government, according to four people directly familiar with discussions, as well as agency documents reviewed by NOTUS.

Since the spring of 2025, the Trump administration has been looking into ways it could cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite to a company that, through a web of limited-liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital. Officials are proposing the Park Service give up the land or “interest” in the land in the form of an easement, and in return receive land of equal value somewhere in California that has yet to be decided.

The private developers own an 83-acre plot of land just outside the western boundaries of Yosemite, about five miles from one of the park’s defining ancient sequoia groves. Jeff Pori, the CEO of Kingsbarn, wants to build a short road connecting the property to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares. The new road would give the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests.

The property’s current access road is more than 10 miles from an entrance to the park, and much further from Yosemite’s most iconic sights. Without a new road, visitors to the property — whether it be developed into a hotel, resort or private residence — would need to drive an hour and a half in a circuitous route to reach the popular Yosemite Valley.

The planning process has created a tense environment inside the National Park Service for the people involved; Kingsbarn’s proposal is backed by the full weight of the Interior Department’s top political leadership, sources said.

“They want us to be responsive to the property owner and their lobbyists or people, and they want us to work with these folks,” said one person familiar with the conversations.

“The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual,” said another person familiar with the conversations and the park’s history.

If the deal goes through, the Trump administration would be breaking with 150 years of American precedent at the birthplace of the national park system. The federal government has historically strived to expand the crown-jewel national parks, not give up land within them.

“The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln’s preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias,” said Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service who served as Yosemite’s superintendent for about five years. Muldoon retired from Yosemite shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2025.
Yosemite Climate Change (6000x4000, AR: 1.50)“Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit,” she said.

Interior’s advocacy for the deal is a significant reversal of a pledge Secretary Doug Burgum made in his 2025 confirmation hearing: “The national parks, absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those,” he said.

It also contravenes the presidential message Trump shared on Aug. 24 of this year, to announce the beginning of National Park Week: “My Administration is committed to protecting every acre of our lands and preserving the cleanest air and water in the world."

And it goes against the agency’s past position on this specific piece of land. The Park Service has received this privatization request before, and it has rejected it repeatedly for over two decades.

In a statement to NOTUS, a spokesperson for the National Park Service said “no final decisions have been made,” but that any land exchange or access proposals “would be subject to all applicable federal laws, regulations, and Departmental policies, including required environmental review and public notification processes.”

“If a proposal advances, the Department would follow established procedures to ensure appropriate coordination, transparency, and public involvement, consistent with federal law,” the spokesperson said.

After publication, Lanny Davis, who is working as an attorney for Kingsbarn, confirmed the Nevada company was pursuing a land exchange with the Park Service.

"It wasn't Donald Trump; it was me, liberal Democrat Lanny Davis, former counsel to President Clinton, went to the Department of Interior, and we made the argument that this is a pro-environmental decision to allow this road to be directly built to allow the residents of this privately owned property to gain entrance or exit to the park," Davis said. "The road we're building is a direct pathway that does not endanger any endangered species, and is simply a road.”

It would be a "land exchange under the law,” Davis said.

A limited-liability company controlled by Kingsbarn purchased the undeveloped land outside Yosemite for $4 million in 2024, calling the property “Sanctuary at Yosemite” in records reviewed by NOTUS.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/42sjZ/1/Historically the land was called Hazel Green Ranch. Its previous owner was a California developer named Lewis Geyser, who had tried for years to persuade the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration, to let him build a short private road in Yosemite. He planned to develop Hazel Green Ranch as a resort.

In the early 2000s, the Park Service appeared interested in the possibility of working with Geyser as part of a broader plan to dramatically reduce the development pressure on the Yosemite Valley. But that plan quickly collapsed, and the National Park Service in turn refused to allow any further development within the boundaries of Yosemite.

Geyser eventually sued in 2007 to try to force the issue, losing first in district court and again on appeal in 2012.

Both times, the judges ruled that Geyser did not have a claim to a private road. While the federal government has an obligation to provide an exit for private properties completely enclosed by federal lands, it doesn’t have to allow for new roads when one already exists. The land’s existing access road — albeit old, long and winding — runs through Forest Service lands.

When Kingsbarn took over the land from Geyser in 2024, Pori’s company almost immediately approached Interior about again trying to build the private road.

“We got an email from the new owner, reopening this issue that we felt was long closed,” Muldoon said. “Whoever bought the land hadn't done their due diligence and realized that this was not a possibility by law, to build a new entrance essentially into Yosemite National Park for private purposes. So happily, when I left, it was still in that place.”

But whereas the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations said no, Trump’s Interior is pushing hard to say yes.
FL22212.jpg (4902x3672, AR: 1.33)Every few weeks, at the direction of their political superiors, staff at the Park Service have scheduled meetings with Kingsbarn, multiple sources said. Pori sometimes attends the meetings with his associates, including Davis, a lawyer and lobbyist who served as an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton and represented a list of controversial clients including Michael Cohen, Harvey Weinstein and the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Davis has not listed Kingsbarn or Pori as clients in his federal lobbying disclosures.

Staff are required to send regular updates on their progress to political appointees inside Burgum’s office, and they are occasionally berated by political staff for not moving fast enough, according to two people familiar with the process.

The current superintendent of Yosemite, Ray McPadden, has been pressured by people at the Interior Department and has tried to help move the land exchange along, according to two people familiar with his role.

Under the rules that govern public lands, any land that the Park Service chooses to surrender must be replaced by land of equivalent value.

While land exchanges are quite common for the federal government, they usually begin with an agency identifying a piece of land it wants to add to a park or forest. The Park Service trying to give a piece of a park to a private individual is an “unusual case,” said one former Park Service official, who added that the pursuit of this deal in secret makes it especially unprecedented.

For the exchange to happen, NPS has to appraise the land inside the park and identify land it wants somewhere else in California of equivalent value. The developer would then need to acquire the property and give it to the Park Service in the exchange.

The appraisal of the land within Yosemite is currently ongoing and is a difficult and lengthy task, sources said. How to value a piece of Yosemite is a hard question to answer — and likely cannot account for how the land is eventually developed, however lucrative that may be.

“Obviously this looks kind of unseemly, with the value of this property potentially exploding with the deal,” said one person familiar with the agency’s conversations. “They may give them acreage somewhere else to add to a national park unit that is ostensibly of equal value, but to the developer the value of the ultimate Hazel Green deal is incredible.”

“It kind of smells, you know. It’s not quite right,” they added.

Pori has had public business ties to people in Trump’s orbit.

In April 2025, Kingsbarn Realty Capital closed a deal to acquire the Los Angeles headquarters of Kim Kardashian’s lingerie company Skims, working with two companies with links to the Trump administration: the Newmark Group and Hankey Capital. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick chaired the Newmark Group before entering the Trump administration, and did not fully divest from the company until May 2025. Don Hankey, the chair of Hankey Capital, is also the chair of an insurance company that underwrote Trump’s $175 million bond in his appeal in 2024 of a New York civil fraud judgment.

Pori personally thanked both companies in the press release announcing the deal, which he said was made possible in part by Hankey Capital.

Between 2024 and 2025, Pori made monthly, largely small-dollar donations to the Republican Party committee, Trump’s campaign committee and associated PACs. Pori does not have a history of donating to national political campaign efforts before October 2024, according to a NOTUS analysis of the Federal Election Commission donor database.

Neither Pori nor the Interior Department have publicly expressed interest in the Yosemite land exchange.
America 250 Trump Roosevelt Library (8355x5570, AR: 1.50)Early this year, members of Congress were notified for the first time that the Park Service was considering the land exchange in Yosemite. The notification was vague. It implied that the Land and Water Conservation Fund would be used to enable the exchange but gave no details about the valuation of the land in Yosemite or what the Park Service might accept in return. It did not name the developer or indicate that the exchange was a high priority.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee with oversight of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, sent Interior a list of projects that they endorse for the fund; the proposal for Yosemite was not on the list.

“The Senate Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chair and Ranking Member told the Interior Department which projects they agreed on to go forward. That didn’t include the Yosemite project, which Senator Merkley objected to,” said Justin Krakoff, the deputy communications director for Merkley.

Murkowski’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

California’s two Democratic senators told NOTUS they opposed the proposed exchange.

“The Land and Water Conservation Fund exists to acquire land and interests in land in order to safeguard natural areas, water resources, and cultural heritage — and to provide recreation opportunities for all Americans,” Sen. Alex Padilla said. “Projects should be chosen on merit, not on an applicant's connections to high-ranking Trump Administration officials.”

“Yosemite is one of California’s natural wonders and must be protected from further development. The courts struck this project down once, but this administration appears hellbent on moving forward in the face of opposition from the public, Congress and the courts. But the only thing the administration cares about is whether there is money involved. We will fight this again,” said Sen. Adam Schiff.

The Park Service can likely move forward on a land exchange without any further congressional involvement.

If the land exchange eventually occurs as planned, it is likely that it will face a legal challenge from environmental and conservation groups.

The National Parks Conservation Association said it strongly opposes the plan.

“After a century of protecting Yosemite, the National Park Service is now working in overdrive to turn over land to a private developer in a secretive, backroom deal. This is an attack on the American people that own this national park. It would also be unlawful and a court previously rejected a road development proposal,” said Mark Rose, the group’s Sierra Nevada program manager.

He would not comment on the group’s legal strategy.

Update: This story has been updated with comments from Lanny Davis.]]>