As Reagan's Interior secretary, Watt set the pattern of developing natural resources to benefit the chosen few and scoffing at ethics considerations.
My concept of stewardship is to invest in it. ... Do we have to buy enough land so that you can go backpacking and never see anyone else?I think not. They focused on his actions while in office from 1981 to 1983. What they missed, however, is his legacy as a Republican ideologue on environmental policy.
Watt came to office flaunting a born-again religious persona that he often exploited to justify treating political and environmental opponents with contempt, prefiguring the rise of the evangelical right wing in American politics. Asked at a House committee hearing in 1981 to give his view of his agency’s statutory responsibility to act as a steward of natural resources for future generations, he replied, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.
As he acknowledged in his 1985 memoir, “The Courage of a Conservative,” his concern was that musical acts such as the Beach Boys, who had appeared at previous Mall events, attracted drug and alcohol use — the “wrong element,” he said at the time of the ban. His approach finds an echo in the fixation by right-wing Republicans such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for president, onthat acknowledge America’s complicated racial history.
Perhaps David Bernhardt, Trump’s second Interior secretary, examined the Watt archives when facing similar conflicts — in his case, those arising from his pre-Cabinet work as a lawyer and lobbyist for farmers and water firms with matters before the agency. Among the up-is-down, night-is-day practices of the Trump administration, one of the most dangerous and disturbing is its habit of turning America’s leading science agencies into hives of anti-science policymaking.
“We cleaned every one of them out and then we started appointing good people,” he told a pro-business journal in an interview. Among other effects, the firings “essentially destroyed” the division tasked with policing coal strip-mining operations, the 1990 analysis observed — damage that still had not been repaired a decade later, if ever.
By provoking a concerted backlash in court, Watt’s crusade even made things rougher for his patrons. Legal challenges to his offshore drilling policy, for example, resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that strengthened the ability of states and the federal government to impose environmental regulations on offshore drillers even after they had obtained their leases — precisely the opposite outcome from what the drillers wished for.
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