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A Texas-based, Koch-funded nonprofit may be breaking lobbying laws, according to Accountable.US and the Texas Observer. The American Stewards of Liberty is run by Margaret Byfield, daughter of sagebrush rebel and public lands extremist Wayne Hage, and her husband Dan Byfield, a former registered lobbyist. The group has taken aim at President Joe Biden's America the Beautiful initiative to conserve 30 percent of U.S. land and waters by 2030, tying it to the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory that the United Nations is attempting to spread communism in the West.
At a recent event in north Texas, Margaret Byfield bragged about lobbying counties across Texas, Nebraska, and the Western U.S. to pass resolutions opposing 30x30. That's a straightforward violation of U.S. law, which prohibits most nonprofits from engaging in substantial lobbying, which is defined by the Internal Revenue Service as “attempting to influence legislation.” Resolutions passed by local governments are included in the IRS definition of legislation.
In May 2021, Accountable.US filed a complaint with the IRS alleging American Stewards has been lobbying in violation of its nonprofit status. But Margaret Byfield and her husband seem undeterred by the complaint. This spring, Accountable.US found that the number of counties that have passed American Stewards' form resolution has tripled since Accountable.US filed its complaint last year.
The last piece of federal drilling reform
The Inflation Reduction Act brought long overdue reforms to the majority of the federal oil and gas leasing program, but bonding was dropped at the last minute, leaving taxpayers holding the bag for abandoned oil and gas wells on federal public lands.
A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office found that only between 1 and 16 percent of federal bonds are sufficient to cover the cleanup of their wells, depending on the cost estimates used. And, unlike states, the Bureau of Land Management is unable to levy a tax or fee on the oil and gas industry to pay for orphan well cleanup.
Until bonding is fixed by Congress or the Interior Department, taxpayers will continue to foot the bill for cleaning up wells on public land. It’s time for politicians and public servants in D.C. to fix the last vestige of a system that was designed to benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of everyone else.
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America’s public lands belong to all of us, and we have a responsibility to ensure that these lands are accessible and welcoming to everyone. However, over the course of our history, many such lands were named using a hateful and derogatory term for Indigenous women. It’s a word that carries with it a history of brutality, misogyny and dehumanization. This month, we succeeded in removing it from the names of nearly 650 federal land units.”
