As part of that, I noted that Combs was being sued by two of the more
activist, non-Gang Green environmental agencies, with Center for
Biological Diversity in the lead, because the people and groups
overseeing her voluntary "conservation" were about as transparent as
most things involving Texas government.
Unfortunately,
as I noted next,
Combs got a federal judge to agree with her that the oversight agency,
officially a private entity and therefore exempt from the state's Public
Information Act, should stay that way and remain non-transparent.
And then, CBD and Defenders of Wildlife, a few months ago, lost in
federal district court their attempt to reverse the Fish and Wildlife +
Combs + oilmen agreement, discussed
here with links.
Well, there's a backstory to this.
At about the time CBD and Defenders were losing their case in district court, Fish and Wildlife,
documented here, was entering into a legal settlement with the former top official in Texas, who sued after being pushed out of his job.
And, why was he pushed out of his job?
Because he was fighting Kenny Boy Salazar and Susan Combs on the dunes
sagebrush lizard, and saying everything about lack of enforcement and
lack of transparency that I and the environmental groups were saying.
One person, however, did lose his job: Fish and Wildlife's
top official in Texas, Gary Mowad, who ran afoul of his bosses after raising
concerns about the decision to place the long-term survival of the lizard in
the hands of those who opposed the listing.
Mowad had told internal investigators that the federally
approved plan to conserve habitat for the reptile through voluntary pacts
between the state and landowners was not legal, verifiable or enforceable under
the Endangered Species Act.
Oh, but wait, it gets better.
He has civil service protection, so he couldn't be fired. Instead, like a surplus Japanese salaryman, he got the risutora treatment:
Within three months, Mowad was removed from his job in
Austin and transferred to regional offices in New Mexico, where he had no
significant work to do, according to testimony by him and colleagues before a
judge in a whistleblower case. The power play, he said, forced him to retire
prematurely.
Fish and Wildlife has denied the allegations, but the agency
decided to settle with Mowad last October for an undisclosed amount in spite of
historically long odds against federal employees winning such cases. ...
(N)o phone, no computer and no housing awaited Mowad when he
arrived in Albuquerque in October 2012. And there was no significant work. He
helped put out cookies and drinks for a meeting and afterward collected comment
cards from the attendees.
With no end date for the assignment, Mowad filed a 19-page
request for a federal investigation, alleging reprisal for his claims of
scientific misconduct within the service.
Those claims of scientific misconduct?
Mowad had gone to FWS' Inspector General after it signed off on the
Combs plan. And, why did it do that, only a couple of years after Mowad
had been named top biologist in Texas for the agency and hired for his
specific skills?
Bigger backstory, involving financial/service favors ... and who knows what else.
First, the backstory to the lizard's needs.
It was first identified for ESA listing in
1982. But, as with many other species, through a mix of understaffing
and underfunding on one hand, and FWS foot-dragging on the other, it
wasn't actually brought up for consideration until 2010. However, with
the Permian Basin started to rebound from its latest, Great
Recession-caused bust, that looked problematic.
Our story picks up again:
The Fish and Wildlife Service needed to sign off on the
Texas plan, and Mowad was asked to assign someone to review it. But Mowad's
first two choices — two of his most experienced biologists — were rejected by
the agency's deputy regional director, Joy Nicholopoulos, a scientist who led
the Texas office before him.
The third choice?
(Mowad) asked if Nicholopoulos wanted a biologist named
Allison Arnold to lead the review and was told that she did.
Here’s the real backstory.
Mowad said he would not assign her without being ordered.
The biologists he offered "would just do the science, let the science take
'em where it takes 'em," he testified. But in addition to having less
experience, Arnold was living rent-free in a Driftwood house owned by Nicholopoulos,
leading him to question whether she had undue influence over the staffer.
Then, Nicholopoulos’ boss, Bemjamin Tuggle, who had touted
Mowad’s hiring for the Texas spot, upped the political ante.
"There was no way we were going to list a lizard in the
middle of oil country during an election year," Tuggle said.
That comment, although Tuggle (a Shrub Bush appointee to his
position) later claimed he was joking, is what led Mowad to talk to Fish and
Wildlife’s inspector general.
So, it's clear that FWS higher-ups, however high the chain of higher-ups
goes past Tuggle, had the fix in. And, because of this financial/rental
arrangement, they knew who to pick to sign off on Combs' plan.
The rest of the story is worth a read in itself. It discusses
Mowad’s whistleblower hearing, including noting that federal employees rarely
win them, but that FWS had a documented history of retaliation against
employees like this.
It's also an illustration of the bad ethics there, vis-a-vis the rental
situation. If anybody should have been disciplined by FWS, both
Nicholopoulos and Arnold should have been suspended without pay.
OK, that's largely from back in 2015, but you need to know just how oily FWS is.
Oily on the management side? Mowad is not the only person to face retaliation from USFWS management. More on that
in this piece.
FWS finally gave an Endangered Species Act listing to the lizard in 2024, relatively late in the Biden Administration, and possibly because they knew Trump 2.0 would kill it.
It was
a punch-pulling listing, anyway, as I noted at the time. Why? It did not list a critical habitat for the lizard. It's pretty basic that you need to say what habitat of an endangered species is most important to it, right?
Well, that's all academic now. Last week, which I didn't notice until this week, Fish and Wildlife officially did another political cave-in, in response to a suit by the oily Ken Paxton, and
agreed to delist it again as part of settling the suit.
Here's the official tanking language:
But the service now believes it made a "serious and fundamental" error by improperly assuming that habitat restoration could not occur, and by discounting experimental efforts that "showed promise," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a Wednesday court filing accompanying the settlement.
That error "led to an incomplete and potentially inaccurate assessment of the potential and ongoing conservation efforts in New Mexico and Texas," the Justice Department said.
What lies.
Above all, how can you assume that habitat restoration could not occur when per your 2024 press release:
The designation of critical habitat was found to be prudent but not determinable at this time. The Service has up to one year from the time of listing to propose critical habitat.
You never determined critical habitat! And, per Center for Biological Diversity and others, you were likely playing a stall game there, too.
What liars.
Lewis notes the push from this surely comes from above USFWS' head, as in somewhere inside, near the top, of the Department of the Interior. (Doug Burgum's been as bad a Trump-tard as any other Cabinet member.)
That said, somebody at USFWS, even if an Anon Y Mous, holds for public consumption that it made a "serious and fundamental" error. In other words, Interior may be leading the push, but it has flunkies at Fish and Wildlife. It did 15 years ago, when Mowad called bullshit on management. Even if the push for his risotura came from higher up in Interior, somebody still wanted to do that. Look at other FWS people who have faced revenge.
Lewis notes that an Undersecretary at Interior reviews critical habitat designations.
Here's DOI on that, not on the big picture, but some specific issues. From the Dear Leader era, too, take note. Tis also true, but? In 2024, again, FWS never proposed anything. I presume then Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, from New Mexico, might know what the dunes sagebrush lizard is, even if 350 miles away from Laguna Pueblo.
That said, that top management at FWS proposed changes to the ESA cuz oil drilling
late last year.
And, not directed at Lyle, but at the general oversight. First, where's the Forest Service fit? Last I checked, it's not part of Interior.
A president with cojones would either make all of USFWS an individual stand-alone agency like EPA, or at least its core protective services, or else carve them out of FWS and add them to EPA.
Remember the timeline goes back to the 1980s. Democratic presidents since then include Clinton and Obama as well as Biden. It's amazing that Democratic presidents, or agencies under their control, can often wait until the last year of a presidential term to take action. Obama did this on increasing the pay cutoff for wage vs salary, and with an immediate near-doubling without phase-in, in 2016. It's like he figured it would be overturned anyway and he was being a pretendian.
==
And, per the various rulemaking changes to the ESA, how semi-toothless is it anyway? I may have to write something just on that.
