A resolution notifying the House of Representatives of the election of a Secretary of the Senate.

— 163 — Department of Homeland Security The old practice of relying on Executive Secretary taskings to pull documents for congressional requests does not work: It is slow, the metrics for what documents are gathered and how are unclear, and the components do not gather responsive material in an efficient manner. Document gathering should come from the Office of the Chief Information Officer or a relevant technological element within the department that can pull responsive communications quickly. OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS (OLA); OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS (OPA); AND OFFICE OF PARTNERSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT (OPE) DHS’s external communications function should be consolidated and reformed so that the President’s agenda can be implemented more effectively. The Office of Partnership and Engagement should be merged into the Office of Public Affairs. In many Cabinet agencies, outreach to companies and partner organizations is similarly performed by the Office of Public Affairs. This would also accomplish a needed DHS organizational and management reform to decrease the number of direct reports to the Secretary. Both public and legislative affairs staff in the components should report directly to their respective headquarters equivalent. This would help to avoid a failure by the department to speak with one voice. It would also allow the component staff to perform more efficiently, overseen by expert managers in their trade. This would also allow DHS to respond to crises effectively by shifting staff as needed to the most pressing issues and better use underutilized staff at less active components. Only political appointees in OLA should interact directly with congressional staff on all inquiries, including budget and appropriations matters. To prevent congres- sional staff from answer shopping among HQ OLA, the DHS OCFO, and components, DHS legislative affairs appropriations staff should be moved from MGMT OCFO into OLA. Regarding components, budget/appropriations staff should move from component budget offices into component legislative affairs offices. Because dozens of congressional committees and subcommittees either have or claim to have jurisdiction over some DHS function, DHS staff from the Secretary on down spend so much time responding to congressional hearing and briefing requests, letters, and questions for the record that they are left with little time to do their assigned job of protecting the homeland. The next President should reach an agreement with congressional leadership to limit committee jurisdiction to one authorizing committee and one appropriations committee in each cham- ber. If congressional leadership will not limit their committees’ jurisdiction over DHS, DHS should identify one authorizing and appropriations committee in each chamber and answer only to it. To focus more precisely on the DHS mission, OLA staff should also identify outdated and needless congressional reporting requirements and notify Congress — 164 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise that DHS will cease reporting on such matters. For other congressional reports, OLA should implement a sunset date so that Congress must regularly demonstrate the need for specific data. In both OPA and OLA, a change in mission and culture is needed. The clients of both components are the President and the Secretary, not the media, external organizations, or Congress. OPA and OLA should change from being compliance correspondents for outside entities airing grievances to serving as messengers and advocates for the President and the Secretary. OFFICE OF OPERATIONS COORDINATION (OPS) OPS was originally conceived by then-Secretary Jeh Johnson as an entity tasked with coordinating cross-DHS assets on an as-needed basis using a joint operations approach. This role is particularly challenging because of the disparate nature of mission sets across DHS. OPS should absorb a very small number of tactical intelligence professionals from I&A as the rest of I&A is shut down. Such intelligence officers would be a subordinate element within OPS placed within the National Operations Center. The intelligence officers would provide tactical intelligence support for upcoming or ongoing opera- tions in addition to liaising with their agency/component counterparts. There would be no strategic intelligence analysis done as part of OPS or its new I&A sub-element. In addition to facilitating all-of-DHS coordination on a task-by-task basis, OPS would be responsible for ongoing situational awareness for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary. In addition to long-term staffing, OPS would have cycling billets from each of the major agencies and components to facilitate its most effective working rela- tionships across DHS. OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES (CRCL) AND PRIVACY OFFICE (PRIV) The Homeland Security Act established only an Officer of CRCL, not an office. The only substantive function Congress then assigned to the officer was to review and assess information alleging abuses of civil rights. Since then, Congress and CRCL itself have significantly expanded CRCL’s scope and size well beyond its original intent or helpful purpose. CRCL now operates and views itself as a quasi- DHS Office of Inspector General. This results in a considerable waste of limited component resources, which are routinely tasked to address redundant, overly burdensome, and uninformed demands from CRCL. It is therefore important to recalibrate CRCL’s scope and reach. The organizational structure of both CRCL and the Privacy Office should be changed to ensure proper alignment with the department’s mission. The Office of General Counsel should absorb both CRCL’s and PRIV’s necessary functions

— 533 — Department of the Interior order to fulfill the yet-unaltered congressional mandate contained in federal law, to provide for jobs and well-paying employment opportunities in rural Oregon, and to ameliorate the effects of wildfires, the new Administration must immedi- ately fulfill its responsibilities and manage the O&C lands for “permanent forest production” to ensure that the timber is “sold, cut, and removed.”79 NEPA Reforms. Congress never intended for the National Environmental Policy Act to grow into the tree-killing, project-dooming, decade-spanning mon- strosity that it has become. Instead, in 1970, Congress intended a short, succinct, timely presentation of information regarding major federal action that signifi- cantly affects the quality of the human environment so that decisionmakers can make informed decisions to benefit the American people. The Trump Administration adopted common-sense NEPA reform that must be restored immediately. Meanwhile, DOI should reinstate the secretarial orders adopted by the Trump Administration, such as placing time and page limits on NEPA documents and setting forth—on page one—the costs of the document itself. Meanwhile, the new Administration should call upon Congress to reform NEPA to meet its original goal. Consideration should be given, for example, to eliminat- ing judicial review of the adequacy of NEPA documents or the rectitude of NEPA decisions. This would allow Congress to engage in effective oversight of federal agencies when prudent. Settlement Transparency. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt required DOI to prominently display and provide open access to any and all litigation settlements into which DOI or its agencies entered, and any attorneys’ fees paid for ending the litigation.80 Biden’s DOI, aware that the settlements into which it planned to enter and the attorneys’ fees it was likely to pay would cause controversy, ended this policy.81 A new Administration should reinstate it. The Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act was intended to bring endangered and threatened species back from the brink of extinction and, when appropriate, to restore real habitat critical to the survival of the spe- cies. The act’s success rate, however, is dismal. Its greatest deficiency, according to one renowned expert, is “conflict of interest.”82 Specifically, the work of the Fish and Wildlife Service is the product of “species cartels” afflicted with group- think, confirmation bias, and a common desire to preserve the prestige, power, and appropriations of the agency that pays or employs them. For example, in one highly influential sage-grouse monograph, 41 percent of the authors were federal workers. The editor, a federal bureaucrat, had authored one-third of the paper.83 Meaningful reform of the Endangered Species Act requires that Congress take action to restore its original purpose and end its use to seize private prop- erty, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states over their wildlife populations. In the meantime, a new Administration should take the following immediate action:

— 533 — Department of the Interior order to fulfill the yet-unaltered congressional mandate contained in federal law, to provide for jobs and well-paying employment opportunities in rural Oregon, and to ameliorate the effects of wildfires, the new Administration must immedi- ately fulfill its responsibilities and manage the O&C lands for “permanent forest production” to ensure that the timber is “sold, cut, and removed.”79 NEPA Reforms. Congress never intended for the National Environmental Policy Act to grow into the tree-killing, project-dooming, decade-spanning mon- strosity that it has become. Instead, in 1970, Congress intended a short, succinct, timely presentation of information regarding major federal action that signifi- cantly affects the quality of the human environment so that decisionmakers can make informed decisions to benefit the American people. The Trump Administration adopted common-sense NEPA reform that must be restored immediately. Meanwhile, DOI should reinstate the secretarial orders adopted by the Trump Administration, such as placing time and page limits on NEPA documents and setting forth—on page one—the costs of the document itself. Meanwhile, the new Administration should call upon Congress to reform NEPA to meet its original goal. Consideration should be given, for example, to eliminat- ing judicial review of the adequacy of NEPA documents or the rectitude of NEPA decisions. This would allow Congress to engage in effective oversight of federal agencies when prudent. Settlement Transparency. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt required DOI to prominently display and provide open access to any and all litigation settlements into which DOI or its agencies entered, and any attorneys’ fees paid for ending the litigation.80 Biden’s DOI, aware that the settlements into which it planned to enter and the attorneys’ fees it was likely to pay would cause controversy, ended this policy.81 A new Administration should reinstate it. The Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act was intended to bring endangered and threatened species back from the brink of extinction and, when appropriate, to restore real habitat critical to the survival of the spe- cies. The act’s success rate, however, is dismal. Its greatest deficiency, according to one renowned expert, is “conflict of interest.”82 Specifically, the work of the Fish and Wildlife Service is the product of “species cartels” afflicted with group- think, confirmation bias, and a common desire to preserve the prestige, power, and appropriations of the agency that pays or employs them. For example, in one highly influential sage-grouse monograph, 41 percent of the authors were federal workers. The editor, a federal bureaucrat, had authored one-third of the paper.83 Meaningful reform of the Endangered Species Act requires that Congress take action to restore its original purpose and end its use to seize private prop- erty, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states over their wildlife populations. In the meantime, a new Administration should take the following immediate action: — 534 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Delist the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems and defend to the Supreme Court of the United States the agency’s fact-based decision to do so.84 l Delist the gray wolf in the lower 48 states in light of its full recovery under the ESA.85 l Cede to western states jurisdiction over the greater sage-grouse, recognizing the on-the-ground expertise of states and preventing use of the sage-grouse to interfere with public access to public land and economic activity. l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10(j) of the ESA by re-introducing so-called “experiment species” populations into areas that no longer qualify as habitat and lie outside the historic ranges of those species, which brings with it the full weight of the ESA in areas previously without federal government oversight.86 l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to design and implement an impartial conservation triage program by prioritizing the allocation of limited resources to maximize conservation returns, relative to the conservation goals, under a constrained budget.87 l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to make all data used in ESA decisions available to the public, with limited or no exceptions, to fulfill the public’s right to know and to prevent the agency’s previous opaque decision-making. l Abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey and obtain necessary scientific research about species of concern from universities via competitive requests for proposals. l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to: (1) design and implement an Endangered Species Act program that ensures independent decision- making by ending reliance on so-called species specialists who have obvious self-interest, ideological bias, and land-use agendas; and (2) ensure conformity with the Information Quality Act.88 Office of Surface Mining. The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) was created by the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA)89 to administer programs for controlling the impacts of surface coal mining operations. Although the coal industry is contracting, coal constitutes