Karen Budd-Falen, a self-described “cowboy lawyer,” was in line to run the Bureau of Land Management in Trump 1.0. But ethics officials told her she’d have to sell off her family’s ranches first.
No way.
So, All Glory to Trump 2.0: This time she was offered associate deputy secretary of the Interior, the No. 3 job at the agency that runs a fifth of the nation’s land. It needs no Senate confirmation and she didn’t have to sell a single cow.
And there’re a lot of cows. Budd-Falen and her husband own at least five ranch-related operations, each worth more than $1 million, with permits to graze on about a quarter-million acres of federal land. Land her department manages.
Back when she dabbled with joining Trump 1.0, she’d pledged to “recuse myself from any discussion of grazing matters.” But now she was adding exemptions so ranchers could move cattle into places “like northern Nevada where my father-in-law’s place is.”
When a reporter asked about that, Interior’s ethics office handed Budd-Falen a waiver to work on grazing. That same day.
Afterall, for Karen, grazing rules were “the thing that probably was the closest to my heart.”
Touching.
Soon, she vowed, “every single vacant allotment will be filled by a rancher.”
Besides, who’s going to stop her? Trump fired the government’s top ethics official less than two months into the watchdog’s term.
So Budd-Falen got to work on the first rewrite of federal grazing rules since 1995, covering 155 million acres while curbing public input from those nattering nabobs of negativism.
While grazing may be closest to her heart, extraction comes a close second. Weeks after she first joined Trump’s team, her husband sold water rights from the family’s Home Ranch to the developer of the Thacker Pass lithium mine, a deal the company could walk away from if Interior didn’t approve the mine.
Sure enough, the department fast-tracked it through environmental review. Mining executives even dropped by the Interior cafeteria to have lunch with Karen. Strictly social, right?
What’s weird is that Budd-Falen’s financial disclosures listed that ranch’s income at about $200 a year. The $3.5 million they got for the water rights must not be “income.”
