Senior Interior Officials Unilaterally Take Over Idaho Land Appeals Cases In 11th-Hour Power Grab
- January 8, 2025
Tristan Justice, The Federalist
President Joe Biden’s acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, Laura Daniel-Davis, sent a memo to the agency’s Office of Hearings and Appeals this week appearing to assume sole authority over dozens of pending grazing cases in Idaho.
Davis sent the memo addressed to the director of the Office of Hearings and Appeals on Monday — the same day President-elect Donald Trump’s November election was certified and with just two weeks left in the incumbent administration. The document, however, says nothing about who will decide the cases pulled from the agency appeals boards, or why they were pulled by the acting deputy Interior secretary.
Davis, who has been acting deputy secretary since October 2023, had previously been accused of crossing ethical lines to set agency policy as principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management. In September 2022, Davis became the subject of a complaint from the transparency nonprofit Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) over improper influence related to pulling oil and gas leases in the Arctic, as The Federalist previously reported. The complaint centered on Davis’ tenure as chief of policy at the National Wildlife Federation, which had sued the federal government over the leases under President Donald Trump.
“Within six months at Interior, Ms. Daniel-Davis had exercised her official authority to achieve practically all of the legal remedies sought by her former employer in court,” PPT said at the time. “Even worse, the legal arguments she relied on to do so were strikingly similar to those developed for and included in her former employer’s legal filings.”
“The Biden-Harris administration came into office promising to restore traditional norms,” PPT Director Michael Chamberlain told The Federalist. “But their behavior over the last four years has shown them to be focused on advancing anything but.”
The agency’s latest move to circumvent appeals boards, Chamberlain added, “could put the political leadership of the Department of the Interior in the position to be able to reward their ideological allies, at the expense of everyday Americans.”