A demand for the swampiest swamp may not quite seem like the familiar foot-stomping chant from Trump supporters at his running series of mini-Nuremberg rallies, but it’s certainly one of those “promises kept” that Donald Trump keeps delivering. Despite campaigning against lobbyists and promising to keep lobbyists out of his White House, Trump loaded up his transition team with lobbyists within days after the election, and the swamp just … keeps … getting … swampier.
The Environmental Protection Agency is being systematically dismantled by a registered coal lobbyist. Health and Human Services is under the thumb of a registered pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist. And, as of this week, the Department of the Interior will be run by David Bernhardt, an oil-industry lobbyist who has spent two decades in Washington sliding among the capital’s most powerful lobbying firms.
As The Hill reports, Bernhardt hasn’t exactly been a silent presence at Interior up to this point. And, conveniently for him, it seems like he could use every slide and pitch deck he assembled from his lobbying days without modification. Because while he’s been at Interior, he’s been the “point person on numerous major Interior initiatives, such as changes to the Endangered Species Act and efforts to start drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” On both of those points, Bernhardt has been successful, as Trump has popped the top off America’s last wilderness, and the Endangered Species Act is on the verge of being gutted.
And, as the Natural Resources Defense Council points out, Bernhardt is also likely the man behind one of those other points on which Trump offers up genuinely bizarre statements.
Bernhardt’s client list was heavy on fossil fuel interests, but one of his biggest lobbying jobs was for the Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural water district in the country and the chief provider of water to farmers in California’s Central Valley.
One of the tasks that Bernhardt has taken on at Interior is “maximizing water supply deliveries” to big agriculture in California’s Central Valley. That includes plans that would violate the Endangered Species Act by diverting ever more water to big inland farms, leaving riverbeds dry and wetlands not. Or, in the words of Donald Trump, he will stop water in California from “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.”
Western water rights have been a regular feature of Trump’s speeches and tweets—with results that are 10 percent hilarious, 90 percent horrifying—since Trump doesn’t seem to understand that water falls and flows in places naturally, and doesn’t start its journey inside a pipe. Trump’s idea that allowing some portion of water to follow its normal path down a river involves “diverting it” into the sea is likely based on ideas that Bernhardt has been whispering into his ear.
Which is the biggest problem with having lobbyists in the Trump White House: Donald Trump is the most easily lobbied man on the planet. His tendency to believe the last person who spoke with him is legendary—particularly if that person throws in a compliment. Or an insult. It doesn’t have to be Vladimir Putin saying very nice things. Trump would easily surrender every drop of water in the West for a few suggestions that he was having a good-hair day.
Leaving trained, professional lobbyists near Donald Trump is like challenging professional boxers with one of those inflatable clowns. It’s just too easy.
In the case of Bernhardt, the plan he’s now pushing to steal more water from rivers and push it to big agriculture is identical to the plan he created while lobbying. Which is another reason that it’s inaccurate to say that Trump is filling his cabinet with “former” lobbyists. There’s nothing former about them. Whether it’s the EPA, HHS, or Interior, or the defense industry executive now running the Defense Department, they’re all free to just keep on lobbying with the same plans they had before stepping into the White House. It’s just that now they have an audience of one—and he goes down with just the slightest tap.