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Trump Appointee Delayed Protection for an Endangered Species at Behest of Oil Group
Trump's swamp is full of appointees we will never hear anything about who are doing awful things everyday to harm our nation, our world, and our future. They do so on behalf of an evil ideology fed by money received from corporate interests. Sometimes figuring this out is not difficult - they actually publicly brag about what they're doing!
A top interior department official, Vincent DeVito, appears to take credit for helping to delay federal protections for the [Texas hornshell mussel] at the behest of fossil-fuel industry groups, one of several examples of his willingness to prioritize the needs of extractive industries with business before the government....
The Texas hornshell is a sleek green-grey mussel that once thrived in the Rio Grande watershed, its habitat stretching from southern New Mexico down into the arid Texas borderlands. Some of its habitat happens to overlap with rich deposits of oil and gas.
Amid a long-term decline in its range.... proposed to declare the mussel an endangered species. Upon taking office, however, the Trump administration changed tack.
DeVito is a long time Trump supporter and friend of the Koch brothers, working in the Department of Interior as a loyal minion of the oil industry and Ryan Zinke.
He is one of a host of political appointees hired by Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary whose department oversees well over 400m acres of public land and can determine the fate of species that inhabit them.
Yet DeVito is now emerging as a critical player. At a speech last summer to Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers, DeVito described his role at the department as “the office of energy dominance”. Officially, there is no such office, though “energy dominance” has become a slogan for the interior department’s fossil-fuel-first policy agenda.
So back to the Texas hornshell muscle. Here is exactly what happened when a powerful oil industry group told a government employee, who is supposed to work on our behalf, to ignore protections for a newly endangered species.
1) Matters for the Texas hornshell case came to a head in June 2017, when the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), an industry trade group, met with interior department officials, including Zinke and DeVito.
2) Two weeks later an IPAA staffer emailed DeVito to ask that the species listing be delayed for six months, citing industry opposition. “We really hope that you can intervene before this species gets listed next month,” Samantha McDonald, the IPAA’s government relations director, wrote to DeVito. In his reply, DeVito asked that McDonald keep him apprised of “what you may be hearing as this unfolds”.
3) Less than a month later, in August, the US Fish and Wildlife Service granted the delay that IPAA sought.
4) McDonald again wrote DeVito, as well as the acting director of the fish and wildlife service, in an email with the subject line “THANK YOU! On behalf of my members, I wanted to thank you for the 6-month delay on the Texas Hornshell,” she wrote, adding that it was “a good call”. DeVito responded to McDonald that same day. “No problem,” he wrote.
SICKENING