President Biden’s choice to run the Bureau of Land Management will face a confirmation vote in the Senate without the committee endorsement given to nearly all nominees. After a heated debate that one senator called “a skunk fight,” the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee split, 10-10, along party lines on whether to recommend Senate approval of Tracy Stone-Manning as director of the Interior Department agency.
Energy chairman Joe Manchin of West Virginia said Stone-Manning had “built a solid reputation over the past three decades as a dedicated public servant and a problem solver.” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the Republican leader on the committee, had a different take, calling the nominee a radical environmentalist forever tainted by involvement in a logging sabotage episode in 1989, when she was 23.
The controversy over Stone-Manning was the latest fight over the direction of public lands policy. Most Senate Republicans opposed the nomination of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, saying they were concerned about oil, gas, and coal production on federal land. Similar concerns were raised about Stone-Manning. Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said Stone-Manning might raise grazing fees.
“This over-the-top opposition,” said Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington State, “is really about trying to stop her, stop the path of BLM land, basically the issues that are at stake here — oil, gas, coal, and mineral extraction — and where we’re going in the future.”
Stone-Manning, 55, has worked as an aide to Montana Sen. Jon Tester, as director of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, as chief of staff for former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, and most recently as a senior adviser for conservation policy at the National Wildlife Federation. Early in her career, she led a regional conservation group, the Clark Fork Coalition.
The Bureau of Land Management, with a budget of $1.6 billion and 10,000 employees, oversees 245 million acres — one of every 10 acres in the United States — mainly in the West, and approximately 30 percent of the nation’s minerals. Among the agency’s duties is supervising livestock grazing on 155 million acres.
To stage a floor vote on the nomination, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would need Senate approval to “discharge” the nomination from the Energy Committee. Manchin mentioned the availability of the parliamentary technique immediately after the tie vote. The Biden administration has stood behind Stone-Manning for weeks. Republicans on the Energy Committee unanimously asked the White House last week to withdraw the nomination.
“I look forward to moving her nomination to the floor,” said Schumer. The Republican accusation that Stone-Manning was an “ecoterrorist” was “just as hysterical as it sounds,” he said.
Barrasso and other GOP senators from the West say Stone-Manning should be disqualified from federal office because she retyped and sent a letter to the Forest Service in 1989 warning that environmental activists had hammered spikes into trees in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho to prevent logging. She eventually testified, under a limited grant of immunity, in a trial that led to the conviction of two friends for the spiking. Barrasso and Idaho Sen. Jim Risch said the letter was proof that Stone-Manning had collaborated with ecoterrorists. They said she lied to the committee in answering questions about the incident.
Manchin disputed their description of Stone-Manning and said there was no credible evidence that she lied to the committee. Stone-Manning was not charged in the tree spiking.
To watch a video of the committee debate on Stone-Manning, click here.