Comment: The struggle over the Department of Everything Else

By Emily Wakild / For The Conversation

The U.S. Department of the Interior was created in 1849 as the United States was rapidly expanding and acquiring territory. It became known as “the department of everything else” for its enormous portfolio of missions, which ranged from western expansion to oversight of the District of Columbia jail.

Interior handles natural resources and domestic affairs; primarily managing 480 million acres of federal lands and developing the assets that they hold. Many of these lands are officially open for multiple uses, including energy development, mining, logging, livestock grazing and recreation. Those activities have numerous constituencies, whose interests can clash.

The Interior secretary’s main job is to promote thoughtful planning that balances resource development and conservation. One strategic role has been expanding energy production — including oil, natural gas, wind and solar power — on federal lands.

Under Republican administrations, the focus often swings toward resource development. Democratic administrations often put greater emphasis on conservation and nonextractive land uses, such as recreation. The secretary’s actions can play a big role in setting direction for the agency.

Since Interior controls access to valuable natural resources, secretaries also get sued a lot over issues ranging from endangered species protection to water rights.

A motley collection of bureaus: Interior has about 70,000 employees whose missions fall largely into three buckets: managing public lands and wildlife; meeting U.S. trust responsibilities to Native American communities; and regulating energy, water and mining resources on federal lands and in federal waters offshore.

These functions are spread among 11 bureaus whose activities can conflict. For example, there has been heated debate within Interior about how to manage the scenic Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. This site was designated as a monument by President Barack Obama in 2016, drastically reduced by President Donald Trump in 2017, then restored to its original size by President Joe Biden in 2021. Reflecting these shifts, Interior’s priorities for Bears Ears have toggled between opening it for mining, co-managing it with area tribes and preserving it for public enjoyment.

Many of Interior’s offices have changed dramatically over time in response to evolving environmental and cultural values. For example, the Bureau of Land Management was widely known for years as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” because its decisions closely reflected the interests of those industries.

Even now, ranchers can graze sheep and cattle on public lands at rates generally lower than comparable fees on state or private ranges. And mining companies don’t pay royalties to the Treasury for producing gold, silver, copper and other valuable minerals on federal lands.

However, today the bureau also manages land for conservation; including a 35 million-acre (14 million-hectare) system of National Conservation Lands. In 2024, the agency adopted a public lands rule that explicitly recognizes the importance of protecting clean water, managing for land health and restoring degraded lands.

Filling up the West: When Congress created the Interior Department, the young United States was in the process of nearly doubling its size after the U.S.-Mexican War. Gold had just been discovered in California, triggering a huge migration west. The scramble to occupy these lands and convert them into stable revenue sources drove Interior’s early activities.

As the U.S. government removed Native peoples from their ancestral homes and folded largely arid and unsettled lands into the public domain, Interior became a landlord and an agent of development in the West. The federal government gave millions of acres to white settlers in an effort to populate these new territories.

But not all lands met settlers’ needs, especially in dry zones. As a result, much of the arid West remained under federal control. Given this legacy, it is not surprising that most senior officials at Interior have come from western states.

U.S. national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges and other Interior lands have become economic engines for many western towns, attracting private ranches, hotels, restaurants and businesses. In this way, federal lands return tremendous wealth to adjacent communities, particularly with the growth of the outdoor recreation industry.

Nonetheless, many western states resent federal control over broad swaths of territory within their borders and periodically make claims to these lands. Since states don’t have the financial resources to manage roads or fight fires on such large expanses, it is likely that they would sell off large portions of these lands, privatizing them.

For this reason, many conservation groups and outdoor sporting organizations oppose transferring federal lands to the states. Interior secretaries may be called on to mediate these disputes or defend federal interests in court.

Over the past half-century, there has been ongoing debate about whether the royalties and fees the agency charges for federal land use return fair value to taxpayers, or if the agency has been “captured” by extractive industries such as mining, ranching, logging, and oil and gas production. The secretary can send important signals about which way an administration tilts.

Indian Affairs and trust responsibilities: Another central Interior role is managing U.S. government relations with American Indian and Alaska native tribes. The department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, created in 1824, works with 574 federally recognized tribes with more than 2 million enrolled members.

Interior manages 55 million acres of land and 57 million acres of subsurface mineral rights in trust for the tribes. This essentially means that Interior agencies earn revenue and disperse funds to tribal members, in part to make up for depriving Native Americans of their rightfully held resources over 150 years of displacement.

Even after federal policy became more supportive of Tribal governance and self-determination in the 1970s, Interior did a poor job of fulfilling its key trust responsibilities. In 2009 the agency settled a $3.4 billion class-action lawsuit, acknowledging that for decades the federal government had mismanaged tribal resources and failed to pay revenues to Indian landowners for resources produced from their lands.

Well into the 1970s, Interior also was charged with trying to assimilate Native Americans into U.S. society by forcibly removing children from their homes and families and placing them in boarding schools. These institutions punished children for speaking native languages and separated them from their cultural traditions.

Starting in 2021, under Secretary Deb Haaland — the first Native American to lead the Interior Department — the agency launched an initiative to document and interpret the experiences of survivors and the intergenerational effects of this policy on Native Americans whose ancestors were sent to the schools.

This land is your land: Interior’s reach is vast, but the resources that it controls and the investments it makes in keeping large landscapes connected provide tremendous services. Debate about the merits of public versus private management of these lands is likely to continue.

Growing interest in outdoor recreation and the rise of remote work are putting new pressure on public lands. Finding solutions will require many different land users, as well as state governments and gateway towns, to collaborate. The Interior secretary can play an important role in helping strike those balances.

Emily Wakild is a professor of history and environmental studies at Boise State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.