Oil and Gas Deemed ‘Essential’ in Shutdown – By Alan Neuhauser (US News) / Jan 16 2019
After reports that some workers handling drilling and mining proposals had returned, the Bureau of Land Management confirms that all such employees are back on the job.
Following reports last week that certain federal workers were back on the job to review oil and gas drilling permits, the Bureau of Land Management is confirming that employees across the country have been ordered back to work to resume green-lighting fossil fuel development on federal lands.
They’re back on the job even as most food inspections remain halted, national parks remain closed and some 800,000 employees are still furloughed as a result of the ongoing partial government shutdown – and the workers are even receiving paychecks while the Coast Guard, Park Police, federal agents and airport screeners continue to go unpaid.
The “employees will be paid for their work as the plan outlines,” a bureau spokeswoman confirms.
U.S. News previously reported that bureau workers in Wyoming and New Mexico were expected to continue working amid the shutdown, a development first disclosed by The Casper Star-Tribune. However, a bureau spokeswoman this week said that workers in the oil and gas program nationwide – in field offices from Alaska to California to Colorado – were told to show up Monday.
Typically, only workers that are involved in public safety continue working during a government shutdown, with or without a paycheck – most often without.
During the most recent shutdown in 2013 under President Barack Obama, for example, the only employees in the oil and gas program required to continue working were those responsible for safety inspections and enforcement at well sites, as well as a half-dozen workers that patrolled tanks, pipelines and other infrastructure for theft.
That approach was in line with both the letter and the spirit of the Anti-Deficiency Act, which, among other things, prohibits federal employees from working for free “except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.”
Last March and again in January, though, the Trump administration signaled it would take a different approach – one that would make sure government stayed open for oil and gas companies: The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees energy development on federal lands, declared that certain employees “working on selected energy, minerals, rights of way, grazing, and associated activities” were now “exempt” and therefore expected to continue working during the shutdown, according to contingency plans for the shutdown.
Federal employees such as federal police officers, FBI special agents and Transportation Security Administration agents, by contrast, are considered “excepted” – as opposed to “exempt” – and, therefore, required to continue working without a paycheck.
The bureau employees are being paid through so-called “permanent appropriations” and unspent funds from previous fiscal years, a bureau spokeswoman says. For that reason, the move would appear to be legal, skirting the Anti-Deficiency Act’s restrictions on working for free.
Nonetheless, the move by the Bureau of Land Management has sparked outrage within the bureau, as well as among environmental and conservation groups.
“When you start picking who you’re going to start putting in front of the line, and it’s going to start being the millionaires and the oil and gas people, then I’m upset,” one bureau worker tells U.S. News, asking not to be named because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
Jeremy Nichols, director of the Climate and Energy Program at WildEarth Guardians, said the advocacy group is “weighing our options.”
“I’m stunned, and others are stunned that they would so blatantly put the industry’s interests above everything else,” he says. “It’s stunning to see them be so upfront and say, ‘All we’re going to do is accommodate the oil and gas industry.'”
