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Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke joined Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM where he downplayed a report that President Donald Trump has turned on him after his controversial decision to remove Florida from consideration for his agency’s offshore oil and gas leasing program. That report, from Axios, claimed Trump is “angry” about the move and described it as a “mistake.” A former Interior Department official is quoted calling Zinke’s decision “clumsy” and an “unforced error.” Zinke countered the unnamed source’s characterization of the incident, describing his relationship with President Trump as “great,” telling Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House,...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, following President Donald J. Trump's executive order to break America's dependence on foreign minerals, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke signed a secretarial order directing the initial steps to producing the first nationwide geological and topographical survey of the United States in modern history. The order also directs Interior bureaus to begin work on identifying immediate domestic sources for critical minerals. "Right now the United States is almost completely reliant on foreign adversaries and competitors for many of the minerals that are deemed critical for our national and economic security. As both a former military...

President Trump ordered the U.S. military and the Interior Department to take immediate action to "break" the nation's dependence on Russian and Chinese supplies of critical minerals as a matter of national security. "This dependency of the United States on foreign sources creates a strategic vulnerability for both its economy and military to adverse foreign government action, natural disaster, and other events that can disrupt supply of these key minerals," read an executive order signed by the president on Wednesday.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Thursday proposed a $9 billion plan to widen three of the state’s most congested highways — the Capital Beltway, Interstate 270 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — in what he said would include the largest public-private partnership for highways in North America. The projects would add four toll lanes each to Maryland’s portion of the Capital Beltway (I-495) and to I-270 from the Beltway to Frederick. It would also widen the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (MD 295) by four toll lanes after taking over ownership from the federal government. Because of private-sector involvement, Hogan said, the plan would...

On Fri., Sept. 15, Secretary of the Interior (SOI) Ryan Zinke signed Secretarial Order 3356, continuing the Department of Interior’s (DOI) efforts to support sportsmen and women and enhance conservation stewardship. The order seeks to improve wildlife management and conservation, increase access to public lands for hunting, shooting and fishing and puts a greater emphasis on the promoting outdoor activities among youth, veterans and minority communities. -----SNIP----- As noted in the DOI press release, SO 3356 directs bureaus within the department to: 1. Within 120 days produce a plan to expand access for hunting and fishing on BLM, USFWS and...

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended scaling back 10 of the 27 national monuments under a review directed by President Trump. The scale of the monument changes was disclosed in a draft memorandum obtained by several news services on Sunday night. The White House said in a statement that it does not comment on leaked documents. According to the memo, Zinke would shrink 4 of the monuments on the list, and significantly alter the rules of land use for the remaining six. The memo went to President Trump last month but the administration would not disclose which monuments would be...

The Interior Department won’t be removing monuments to Confederate soldiers at national battlefields that are “an important part of our country’s history,” according to a spokesman. “The National Park Service is committed to safeguarding these memorials while simultaneously educating visitors holistically and objectively about the actions, motivations and causes of the soldiers and states they commemorate,” spokesman Jeremy Barnum told E&E News. National Park statements come after a woman was killed counter-protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. The city voted to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Monday announced the federal government will relax Obama-era rules designed to protect the imperiled sage grouse, saying the administration will offer states flexibility in how they choose to protect the bird and also will loosen restrictions on energy development in sage grouse habitat. In a statement issued in response to a lengthy report from Interior’s sage grouse review team, Mr. Zinke said the recommendations will go into effect immediately.

Science centers that were supposed to be the “cornerstone” of the Department of the Interior’s “climate change response strategy” don’t have the proper controls in place to prevent wasteful spending, according to an internal audit. The inspector general’s office found Interior Department’s climate science centers (CSC) and landscape conservation cooperatives (LCC) could be wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on duplicative research grants. “We found that CSCs and LCCs had no formal process to coordinate the prevention of duplication in research grants, which could limit accessibility of information by Federal, State, local, and private-sector decisionmakers and place DOI at increased risk...

President Trump’s newly installed agency heads are starting to take a lead role unraveling a web of Obama-era regulations, acting alongside congressional Republicans and the president himself to roll back rules they claim hurt business or simply go too far. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was the latest to peel back red tape. On his first day of work, for which he arrived Teddy Roosevelt-style on horseback, Zinke ended a ban on lead bullets and fishing tackle on federal lands and water. The ban was imposed to protect animals from lead poisoning, but had been criticized by the National Rifle Association...

The Department of the Interior will include “all available” federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico that have not already been leased out for offshore oil drilling. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Monday 73 million acres off the coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida would be offered at a lease sale in August as part of the Interior Department’s five-year leasing plan. “Opening more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling is a pillar of President Trump’s plan to make the United States energy independent,” Zinke said in a statement. Interior finalized its current five-year offshore...

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed a Secretarial Order on Thursday repealing the lead ammunition ban issued the day before Barack Obama left office. It is interesting to note that Thursday was Zinke’s first day as Interior Secretary and repealing the onerous ban one of his first actions.

It all started last Friday following the swearing-in ceremony of President Donald J. Trump on the west steps of the Capitol.The official and verified Twitter account of the National Park Service retweeted a side-by-side comparison posted by Binyamin Applebaum of Friday’s crowd and the same shot — taken at the same time — of Barack Obama‘s ceremony eight years ago. The revelation was clear: Trump’s crowd sizes were, well, trumped by those of Obama’s. And the crowd sizes weren’t even close.Soon enough, the tweet was un-retweeted, and in its place an apology from the National Parks Service that read, “We regret...

Just days after The National Park Service (NPS) was forced to shut down its Twitter activity over two retweets the Department of the Interior deemed inconsistent with the agency’s mission, the Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota seems to have gone rogue, tweeting numerous scientific facts about climate change that have since been deleted. The first tweet about climate science came at 11:40 a.m. local time Tuesday. It said: “The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm.”

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service purposefully raised hell on its official government Twitter account last Friday during the Inauguration Ceremony when the NPS re-tweeted a tweet belittling the newly elected President. The original tweet, made by Binyamin Appelbaum, a New York Times correspondent, read, “Compare the crowds: 2009 inauguration at left, 2017 inauguration at right” and featured a biased split image of Obama’s 2009 Inauguration vs. Trump’s 2017 Inauguration. Compare the crowds: 2009 inauguration at left, 2017 inauguration at right.#Inauguration pic.twitter.com/y7RhIR2nfC — Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) January 20, 2017

As news organizations around the country proclaimed Cathy McMorris Rodgers a sure bet to be the next interior secretary and politicians in her Eastern Washington district quickly announced campaigns for her congressional seat, the person most in the dark was McMorris Rodgers herself. In her first extended remarks on the events of the last few weeks, the congresswoman said she never got a call from President-elect Donald Trump or his transition team saying she was going to be offered the Cabinet position before or after reports from unnamed sources said she was the likely pick. She also never got a...

President-elect Donald Trump has officially chosen Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke to serve as his interior secretary. Zinke was an early supporter of Trump's and publicly sought a Cabinet post when Trump visited Montana in May. Trump's decision to tap Zinke for interior upends Senate Republican plans of recruiting the congressman to challenge two-term Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in 2018.

<p>WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has offered the position of interior secretary to Representative Ryan Zinke, Republican of Montana and a former Navy SEAL commander, according to two officials familiar with Mr. Trump’s decision.</p> <p>As head of the agency that oversees energy exploration on the nation’s public lands and waters, Mr. Zinke would be charged with carrying out the aggressive pro-drilling agenda championed by Mr. Trump on the campaign trail.</p>

In what is being touted as further diversification of the president-elect administration, Donald Trump is expected to name Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) to lead the Interior Department, according to reports. McMorris Rodgers gets the nod ahead of Sarah Palin and Harold Hamm.The candidates mentioned for the Interior Secretary were...  * Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee* Jan Brewer, former Republican Arizona governor* Forrest Lucas, founder of oil products company Lucas Oil* Harold Hamm, Oklahoma oil and gas mogul, chief executive of Continental Resources Inc* Robert Grady, venture capitalist, partner in private equity firm Gryphon...

According to reports, President-elect Donald Trump will tap Washington Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers to serve as United States Secretary of the Interior. McMorris Rodgers currently represents Washington's 5th Congressional district. Before serving in the U.S. congress, McMorris Rodgers was a member of the Washington House of Representatives, serving as minority leader. McMorris Rodgers is currently the highest ranking Republican woman in congress.