Thursday, December 11, 2014

Close the US Department of Interior


The Government Owns Over 623 Million Acres. Why Does It Need More?
Posted on December 10, 2014 Written by dailysignal.com
Insa­tiable ­– that would seem to be the word that best describes the appetite of some in Con­gress and their friends in the envi­ron­men­tal community.
Con­gress has added over 450 pages to the defense autho­riza­tion bill to des­ig­nate wilder­ness, cre­ate new parks, des­ig­nate Wild and Scenic Rivers and fund National Her­itage areas – things that have noth­ing to do with national defense.
Yet for some, even this enor­mous help­ing of green pork is not enough. Sev­eral mem­bers of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives are push­ing for far more, seek­ing to gift the envi­ron­men­tal com­mu­nity with a reau­tho­riza­tion of the Land and Water Con­ser­va­tion Fund. The LWCF was enacted in 1965 to take off­shore energy devel­op­ment rev­enues and use them to buy pri­vate land and turn it into pub­lic parks.
After five decades of fund­ing, the LWCF will expire in 2015. When one exam­ines the scale and scope of fed­eral lands and fed­eral envi­ron­men­tal des­ig­na­tions, it is clear there is no longer any need to have a ded­i­cated fund to feed the insa­tiable appetite of Washington.
Between the four largest land­hold­ing agen­cies (the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment, the U.S. For­est Ser­vice, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice and the National Parks Ser­vice) the fed­eral gov­ern­ment owns over 623 mil­lion acres. To put that in per­spec­tive, it is larger than France, Spain, Ger­many, Poland, Italy, the United King­dom, Aus­tria, Switzer­land and the Nether­lands com­bined. The National Park Ser­vice – the small­est of the four major fed­eral land­hold­ers – has in its portfolio:
$2,750,000,000 annual bud­get
84,000,000 acres of land
4,502,644 acres of oceans, lakes, reser­voirs
85,049 miles of peren­nial rivers and streams
68,561 arche­o­log­i­cal sites
27,000 his­toric struc­tures
2,461 national his­toric land­marks
582 national nat­ural land­marks
401 national parks
49 national her­itage areas
Unsur­pris­ingly, the Depart­ment of Inte­rior, under which the NPS falls, has a huge main­te­nance back­log of between $13.5 bil­lion and $20 bil­lion for the land it already owns. In other words, NPS can’t man­age what it already has.
So the ques­tion is: Do we really need a per­ma­nent pot of money to con­tin­u­ally expand the fed­eral foot­print? If you are unsure as to the answer, below is more infor­ma­tion about the immense hold­ings of other fed­eral agen­cies. And, one should bear in mind that this does not include nearly 200 mil­lion acres of state owned lands. More impor­tantly, this does not con­tem­plate the fed­eral envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tory net cast over tens of mil­lions of acres of pri­vate lands through laws like the Endan­gered Species Act and the Clean Water Act’s wet­lands regulation.
The coali­tion pro­mot­ing the LWCF states that “…the pro­gram has been chron­i­cally under­funded lead­ing to a num­ber of missed oppor­tu­ni­ties for invest­ing in impor­tant areas. Now, a broad-based coali­tion of con­ser­va­tion, recre­ation, envi­ron­ment, busi­ness, his­toric and cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions as well as many oth­ers are work­ing together to secure full and ded­i­cated fund­ing of the LWCF. At the con­gres­sion­ally autho­rized level of $900 mil­lion annually…”
At time when we have $18 tril­lion in debt and 623 mil­lion acres already under fed­eral con­trol, hav­ing a spe­cial $900 mil­lion annual fund ded­i­cated to pur­chas­ing yet more land is unnecessary.
We need less, not more, fed­eral land. If there is any par­tic­u­lar area law­mak­ers decide must be set aside, Con­gress can appro­pri­ate money for that pur­pose, just as it appro­pri­ates money for the mil­i­tary, vet­er­ans and other con­cerns more impor­tant than grow­ing the vast fed­eral estate.
The Land and Water Con­ser­va­tion Fund is done. It is time to stick a fork in it.
US Fish and Wildlife Service: 150 mil­lion acres of land and water, 560 national wildlife refuges, 38 wet­land man­age­ment districts,
National Ocean Atmos­pheric Administration: 170,000 square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters, 13 national marine sanctuaries, 1 marine national monument
US For­est Service:193,000,000 acres, 154 national forests, 20 grass­lands encompassing, 439 wilder­ness areas total­ing over 36 mil­lion acres of land, 20 national recre­ation areas, 6 national scenic areas, 6 national mon­u­ment areas, 2 national vol­canic mon­u­ment areas, 2 national his­toric areas
Bureau of Land Management: 245 mil­lion sur­face acres, 700 mil­lion acres of sub-surface min­eral estate, 221 Wilder­ness Areas total­ing 8.7 mil­lion acres, 16 National Mon­u­ments com­pris­ing 4.8 mil­lion acres
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