Ranking Member Huffman Opening Remarks at the Interior Budget Hearing
Washington, D.C. – Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) delivered the following remarks at the full committee hearing of the FY2026 Interior budget:
Mr. Secretary, welcome. Thanks for being here. I don't have to tell you, Mr. Secretary, that your department has enormous responsibilities, managing one-fifth of all U.S. lands, helping fulfill trust obligations to tribal nations, managing national parks, water systems, protecting our native fish and wildlife, and, of course, playing a role in wildfire prevention and response.
Across every region and state in this country, for many years, people have been able to rely on Interior to discharge these responsibilities. And then DOGE came along with its directive to cut, fire, eliminate, to literally go fast and break things. And DOGE has been allowed to take a wrecking ball to every part of Interior. The consequences could be devastating for millions of everyday Americans.
So just take wildfire. Our country is heading into another brutal fire season, and yet Interior's capacity to prepare for and respond to wildfire has been gutted.
Now, you testified in the Senate, Mr. Secretary, only about the number of wildland firefighters between your agency and the Department of Agriculture. But it takes a lot more than that, as anyone who has visited a fire camp understands all too clearly. And those people, those thousands of support personnel, including certified wildfire personnel, are gone.
It also takes money. Congress appropriated a lot of that for fuel treatment and other much-needed prevention work, and it has been inexplicably delayed setting us back. So, these decisions pose real and immediate threats to homes, lives, and livelihoods.
At a minimum, Mr. Secretary, I hope your testimony will acknowledge this reality and this problem.
Ideally, I would like to hear you not only acknowledge what DOGE cuts have done to our fire preparedness, but commit to fix it.
Now, we hear the same problematic story across Interior. In tribal communities, the BIA firings and funding freezes are stalling or stopping everything from housing construction to public safety projects. At our national parks, millions of Americans are visiting these parks and public lands and already starting to find parks understaffed, services cut, maintenance work delayed following massive staff losses. Across the board, we're seeing an erosion of public services, and yet this administration and this Republican Congress doesn't seem to want to talk about, much less fix, these problems.
Indeed, they seem to want to exploit this moment.
Now, in the Republican reconciliation bill, there is nothing to improve the way the Department of Interior serves people and communities. The singular focus seems to be, and the priority, giving things away to industry. New oil and gas and coal leasing on millions of acres of public lands, slashing fossil fuel royalty rates, gutting environmental review, creating a new pay-to-play permitting scheme for wealthy polluters to dodge legal challenges. And so, while everyday Americans are losing public services they count on, from wildfire readiness to water infrastructure and park access, billionaires are getting big tax breaks, and polluters are getting our public lands and sweetheart deals. Mr. Secretary, your comments have added to this disturbing picture.
You've often described public lands as part of a federal balance sheet, as if they are assets to be liquidated and sold off to please investors and creditors instead of stewarded for current and future generations. And frankly, your talk about balance sheets sounds more like the vulture capitalist approach that has hollowed out the American economy. Strip the asset, extract the value, and move on. I hope today you will assure us that you value more than just monetary interests and fossil fuel development, that healthy ecosystems and recreation, long-term sustainability, our obligation to conserve public lands for future generations, that these are core values and that you're doing something about it.
As Theodore Roosevelt said, we should turn our natural resources over to the next generation increased and not impaired. So, Mr. Secretary, we will ask some hard questions today. We have to do that because the stakes are huge for millions of Americans, but this is not the first time I've asked questions since February.
I have signed seven letters to the Department of Interior to get answers to many of the concerns I've outlined this morning. We got our first response late last night. I will read it, but for the most part, our letters have been ignored.
And by this point in 2021, Secretary Haaland had already provided multiple responses to committee Republicans. I'm asking you, Mr. Secretary, to commit to replying to our pending oversight letters by the end of this month.
Will you agree to do that?
Thank you very much. Mr. Secretary, I look forward to your testimony. There is nothing normal about what is happening in Interior and other agencies right now, breaking down of public services affecting millions of Americans. We deserve real answers, and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, sir.
I yield back.
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