Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024
Floor Speech
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment that redirects $5 million from government bureaucracy to hazardous fuels reduction activities within the Bureau of Land Management to prevent catastrophic wildfires and save lives.
The year I was elected to office, Colorado suffered the worst fire season in Colorado history with the three largest recorded wildfires we have ever had. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and evacuated as Coloradans endured more than 100 days of fire.
The Cameron Peak fire burned more than 208,000 acres and more than 460 structures to the tune of $6 million in property losses. The East Troublesome fire, on the border of my district, killed two people.
Coloradans also suffered severe health issues resulting from significant smoke from these fires. Wildfire smoke causes serious disorders including eye and respiratory tract infections, reduction of lung function, bronchitis, exacerbation of asthma, and even premature death.
Catastrophic wildfires also cause significant damage to the environment. A few years ago, NASA concluded that one catastrophic wildfire can emit more carbon emissions in just a few days than all vehicle emissions in an entire State over the course of an entire year.
Decades of mismanagement have left our Nation's Federal lands vulnerable to insects and disease and ripe for a catastrophic wildfires. The good news is that there is finally significant bipartisan support throughout the country to prevent wildfires, and the Forest Service is seeking to treat 20 million acres of national forests and grasslands and 30 million acres of State, local, Tribal, and private lands over the next 10 years.
However, we need to do more, as Federal agencies have stated that more than 1 billion acres throughout the country are currently at risk of catastrophic wildfires. Our Federal lands are overgrown and poorly managed, making them more susceptible to wildfire, disease, and bark beetle attacks.
There are Federal lands in Colorado and in the West where we once had 50 to 100 trees per acre but now we see 500 to 1,000 trees per acre. This is a massive overgrowth in our forests that we need to manage. There are also 6 billion standing dead trees in the Western United States. Some people call that a problem. I call it a tinderbox waiting to ignite.
Fuel treatments are effective, and Federal agencies have made clear that ``over 90 percent of fuel treatments are effective in changing fire behavior and/or helping with control of the wildfire.''
Let's put the lives of the American people first and take significant action to benefit our environment by passing my hazardous fuels reduction amendment.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I don't think that this is something that should be opposed. Redirecting $5 million from government bureaucracies to hazardous fuels reduction activities is very common sense. We are to be good stewards of our land, and part of that is being proactive rather than reactive.
Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise to offer my amendment that redirects $5 million from government bureaucracy to active forest management activities at the U.S. Forest Service to prevent catastrophic wildfires and save lives.
Each year in the United States, about 65,000 wildfires burn more than 10 million acres. Wildfires kill people and destroy everything they own, including their homes and sentimental family heirlooms that can never be replaced. Some of the stories of loss I have heard from people in my district are truly heartbreaking.
Our forests are overgrown and poorly managed, making them more susceptible to catastrophic wildfires. We can reduce the size and severity of wildfires through active forest management, which will also protect our watersheds and municipal water supplies. A healthy forest means healthy watersheds.
According to the Colorado State Forest Service, more than 24.4 million acres of Colorado forestland impact Colorado's water supply, where 80 percent of the State's population relies on those forested watersheds for municipal water supplies.
Healthy forests act as a natural water filter and storage system and are critical to maintaining healthy watersheds. In the United States, forests are a source of drinking water for over 180 million people.
Historically, wildfire suppression has consumed more than 50 percent of the Forest Service's budget. The Forest Service only harvested 3.2 billion board feet in 2020 compared to over 10 billion board feet in 1990.
The current flawed approach causes us to spend billions of dollars on the back end to suppress fire, neglecting fire prevention and putting our communities at increasing risk of catastrophic fires.
The Forest Service's own fuel treatment effectiveness database reports that over 90 percent of the fuel treatments were effective in changing fire behavior and/or helping with control of wildfire.
Wildfires are also getting more intense, and we are seeing more crown fires that burn hotter and cause increased ecological damage to soil and watersheds. Unfortunately, Federal agencies have failed to recognize this correlation and timber harvests being down nearly 80 percent over the past 30 years.
This also negatively impacts education and local communities as, historically, 25 percent of the receipts from timber harvests went toward schools and important infrastructure projects for the communities that we all serve and love.
Let's pass my active forest management amendment that will help prevent catastrophic wildfires and save lives.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer my amendment that utilizes the Holman rule to reduce the salary of the Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Elizabeth Klein, to $1.
Ms. Klein is a radical environmentalist and a partisan hack compromised by special interests and mired in ethical conflict. Her conflicts of interest were so severe that even Senator Manchin voted to block her nomination as Deputy Secretary of the Interior.
As deputy director at the New York University School of Law's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, Klein placed and paid the salaries of legal fellows in State attorneys general offices to advance Michael Bloomberg's radical environmental agenda.
The use of private money to conduct public business is ethically flawed. An Indiana attorney general categorized Ms. Klein's program as an ``arrangement through which a private organization or individual can promote an overtly political agenda by paying the salaries of government employees.''
In just the first year of the program, SEEIC fellows participated in filing at least 130 regulatory, legal, and other challenges to President Trump's policies.
Now, Ms. Klein is working for the Federal Government and on the other side of lawsuits that she helped file. Under President Biden's own ethics rules, she should be prohibited from participating in matters involving her former employer.
During her testimony to the House Committee on Natural Resources, I questioned Ms. Klein about her failed nomination to become Deputy Secretary of the Interior. I asked if she had been provided with a recusal list and formally requested that she provide this list to the committee. Ms. Klein told the committee that she was happy to provide the list.
Shamefully, it took a letter from the committee and this aggressive committee questioning for Ms. Klein to send the committee a very delayed recusal list that should have been in place almost immediately after her hiring.
Ms. Klein spent several years funneling money from Michael Bloomberg to sue the Trump administration and pay for the Green New Deal lawyers she had placed in attorneys general offices across the country.
Given her myriad of Federal lawsuits and conflicts, there should be little to nothing that Ms. Klein is allowed to work on at any subagency within the Department of the Interior.
Senior Federal employees are required to be transparent in their ethical obligations and act impartially, placing their sole loyalty to the Constitution and the laws of the United States.
Ms. Klein's history of infiltrating State governments with Michael Bloomberg minions and supporting lawsuits against the Federal Government makes it impossible for her to meet the ethical obligations that her position of public trust requires.
Ms. Klein's continued employment as Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has been riddled with a controversial and extensive history of ethical conflicts and is a stain on the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Radical, partisan extremists have no place in the Federal Government, especially those in charge of our energy industry.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to restore integrity to the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise to offer my amendment that prohibits the Biden administration from taking any action to finalize, implement, or enforce their proposed Endangered Species Act rule proposed on June 22, 2023.
For far too long, radical environmentalists have weaponized the ESA against farmers, ranchers, landowners, and our rural communities. The proposed rule abandons clear and well-functioning Trump-era reforms in favor of one-size-fits-all mandates from disconnected Washington bureaucrats. These new regulations will only make it more difficult for true conservationists to assist with species recovery.
In 2019, the Trump administration modernized the Endangered Species Act for the first time in nearly 40 years. The Trump administration added more flexibility for affected stakeholders while also ensuring species recovery plans take a tailored and targeted approach.
With these proposed rules, the Biden administration moved to repeal and replace these changes with more mandates that don't work for the people on the ground.
In 2019, President Trump and his administration recognized the differences between threatened and endangered species. In doing so, FWS rescinded the prior blanket rule that automatically granted endangered- level protections to species listed as threatened.
Joe Biden's plan to restore this blanket rule will lead to more red tape and burdensome regulations on rural communities, and they simply can't afford that.
Similarly, the 2019 reforms to section 4 regarding listing and delisting of species and designations of critical habitat were a welcome change. These reforms removed constraints that previously prohibited agencies from researching and sharing the economic impact of a listing determination under the ESA.
Joe Biden's proposal removes those flexibilities and includes a mandate that the agencies must designate unoccupied areas as critical habitat.
The 2019 modernization efforts also updated section 7 to clarify the interagency consultation process and codify alternative consultation mechanisms to provide greater efficiency.
The rule established standards to ensure that effects analysis for proposed actions is limited only to activities that are reasonably certain to occur and must be backed by clear and substantial information.
Eliminating these important modernizations made by President Trump and his administration will only result in further one-size-fits-all responses to threatened and endangered species that will benefit absolutely nobody, including the species.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of my amendment to prevent these egregious new rules from taking effect and steer the ESA back to its intended purpose of actually helping species recover without being a barrier to prosperity for our rural communities.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I just would note that we understand how the comment periods work under the Biden administration. Typically, they are for a topic that impacts our rural communities. In the West, there is a real rural and urban divide, and it is always my effort to highlight that and give our rural communities a strong voice in the efforts that we are promoting.
Unfortunately, usually for the topics at hand that are impacting our rural communities, the comment period meetings are often held in urban areas where it is difficult for our farmers and ranchers to even travel to so they can have their comments heard.
Also, these bureaucrats already have their minds made up. They don't care what they are reading in the comments, they don't care what is being said during the comment time.
Their position is solid, and the American people do not want more red tape.
Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment that prohibits the Bureau of Land Management from taking any action to finalize, implement, or enforce a Draft Resource Management Plan and Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to end new oil leases on 1.6 million acres in Colorado.
Colorado's West Slope used to have a booming energy production economy. Unfortunately, we have been regulated into poverty in Colorado's Third District.
I remember when I owned a small business, roughnecks used to come into my restaurant, and I knew that it was going to be a good, successful, and profitable day because I had mud on my floors to clean up. However, through regulations, there was no more mud to clean up on nearly any of our business floors, and many businesses shuttered forever.
There used to be 112 rigs on the West Slope, but now we have 4 drilling rigs. Now not-in-my-backyard extremists and job-killing Federal policies have driven away these good-paying jobs. The Bureau of Land Management's Draft Resource Management Plan for the Colorado River Valley field office and Grand Junction field office is the latest fossil fuel attack.
This proposed land grab could remove over 1.6 million acres of public lands in Colorado from future oil and gas leasing and establish nine different areas of critical environmental concern and over 100,000 acres of BLM land.
If this proposal is finalized, the United States will lose access to vital energy resources, many more than 600 fewer wells projected by the agency to be lost by 2043.
The consequences will be felt far beyond the State of Colorado where the residents will lose their livelihoods and see increased gas and energy prices. BLM is proposing to close all areas with no known, low, and moderate oil and gas development potential and is basing its analysis of the oil and gas potential on out-of-date information that does not take into consideration modern technology.
The Permian Basin was once thought to be low to medium, and now it is the highest producing oil field in the world. As a result, the Permian Basin would be closed if this proposal had been in place in New Mexico and Texas prior to the significant amount of production that is now occurring.
This proposed land grab is nothing short of partisan politics meant to further restrict access to the oil and natural gas development that could reinvigorate the economy of the West Slope of Colorado and help ensure energy security for all Americans.
There are already stringent standards and requirements in place for all oil and gas producers that aim at reducing environmental and cultural impacts. This proposed rule is yet another blatant land grab designed to dismantle the fossil fuel industry and force a green transition.
Closing the door to over 1.6 million acres of vital public lands for energy development is not just an issue of economics, it is a threat to our Nation's energy independence and security. This proposal goes beyond necessary environmental consideration and instead seeks to restrict access to promising resources hindering the potential for economic growth and prosperity, particularly on the West Slope of Colorado.
Rogue bureaucrats at the BLM shouldn't be unilaterally locking up more land in Colorado. It is urgent that we block this overreach and prioritize responsible energy production that will help reduce gas prices during these challenging times.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, from day one in his administration, Joe Biden declared an all-out war on American energy production and exploration. He made it clear that he cares more about appeasing the radical climate change activists than protecting the millions of oil and gas workers and producers in America.
I was disappointed but not surprised this July when the Biden administration filed this proposed rule entitled fluid mineral leases and the leasing process, which mandates provisions from the partisan so-called Inflation Reduction Act, better known as the Green New Deal in disguise, which increased the royalty rate for production on Federal lands while also increasing and creating new fees for domestic energy producers.
This new fluid mineral leasing rule is further proof that Joe Biden is using every tool in his administration to dismantle American energy production. It increases bonding levels for the production on Federal lands and proposes ending nationwide bonding and increasing the minimum bond amounts for individual lease bonds and statewide lease bonds from $10,000 to $150,000 and from $25,000 to $500,000 respectively.
This significant increase will tie up capital that would otherwise be put back into production and is unjustifiable as there are only 37 orphaned oil and gas wells on BLM-managed land.
These increases will impact smaller producers who can't afford to operate in the market. These additional fees will ultimately harm returns and reduce revenues to State and local governments by disincentivizing development on Federal lands.
The proposed rule also introduces the idea of using preference criteria to inform the BLM's selection of lands for lease sales. BLM's rationale for this change is to avoid conflict areas with sensitive cultural wildlife and recreation resources. This means that the BLM field offices could avoid leasing in all areas with endangered or threatened species--maybe that is their goal--critical habitat or even nearby recreation areas, a move that would greatly limit leasing on Federal lands.
With the wars happening in the Middle East and in Europe, and with OPEC significantly lowering oil production, we cannot rely on foreign nations to control our energy supply.
America makes the cleanest energy in the world. American innovation-- in particular, fracking--has allowed America to be the global leader in reducing emissions since 2000. We need to stop buying oil and gas from Russia, stop begging OPEC, Venezuela, and even Iran to produce energy for us, and start producing more clean, reliable, affordable energy responsibly here in America.
We must restore American energy dominance and produce clean, reliable energy right here at home.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment to prohibit funding for the Bicycle Subsidy Benefit Program at the Department of the Interior. I wish I were kidding.
The DOI Bicycle Subsidy Benefit Program provides taxpayer dollars to DOI employees and paid student interns or unpaid student volunteers for the purchase, improvements, repair, storage, and/or maintenance of a nonmotorized bicycle that is used as a primary means of commuting to and from work, as well as a monthly stipend. You can't make this up.
American taxpayers' hard-earned money is being wasted on covering bicycle commuting expenses such as bicycles, bicycle locks, bicycle parking storage, bicycle safety equipment, bicycle improvements or accessories, including reflective lights, racks, bicycle repairs, and general maintenance, personal safety and protective equipment, including high-visibility safety apparel, headwear, bicycle gloves, and bicycle share memberships, as well as getting paid to bike to work.
DOI employees are going to bike to work because they want to bike to work, not because taxpayers are being forced to shell out $20 a month to Federal bureaucrats that participate in this absurd and ridiculous program.
Coloradans across my district are struggling right now as they deal with the disastrous effects of Joe Biden's destructive economic policies. The Biden administration has unleashed record inflation on Americans that has decimated our bank and retirement accounts, increased gas prices to record levels, raised utility bills, driven up grocery prices, and made it harder to live for all American people.
The primary root cause of this record-breaking inflation was trillions of dollars of wasteful Federal spending. This excessive spending has real life consequences. American families will pay a $8,581 inflation tax over the next year. Currently 20 million Americans can't even afford to pay their utility bill.
We have seen a 4.3 percent decline in real wages since Biden took office. Americans have lost more than $2 trillion in retirement savings. America is $33 trillion in debt, with a $2 trillion a year deficit, and Democrats want us to continue to print money and pay bureaucrats to bike to work when our so-called Commander in Chief doesn't even know how to properly ride one. Maybe we should subsidize some bicycle lessons for the President while we are at it.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to cut wasteful Federal spending by prohibiting funding for the Bicycle Subsidy Benefit Program at the Department of the Interior. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Ms. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, riding a bicycle is great. It is wonderful. Sure, we want fresh air. Sure, we want exercise. It is great for our health, but it is not great for the American taxpayer to subsidize this to bureaucrats.
What about western Colorado? Are we going to subsidize our Bureau of Land Management personnel to ride horses into work? Do we pay for their feed, their lot storage? Do we get to pay for all that as well? It is never ending.
The gentlewoman pointed out that this unfairly targets DOI. I am happy to defund this program in every agency across the Federal Government. We just happen to be speaking about the Department of the Interior right now.
Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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