A key official in President Donald Trump’s Interior Department was captured on video revealing that she was involved in shaping public policy in ways that benefited farming and ranching businesses owned by her, her husband, and her relatives.
Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior Karen Budd-Falen’s revelation at a Congressional Western Caucus event in December has sparked calls for an investigation into her actions and other suspected conflicts of interest among federal officials.
“The thing that probably was the closest to my heart was grazing regulations,” Budd-Falen said in a featured interview at the event, noting that she was involved in shaping grazing policy.
Her talk was captured on video and posted on YouTube by Senate Western Caucus Chairwoman Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), and reported by The Washington Post.
Budd-Falen and her husband, Frank Falen, own at least five cattle or ranch operations in Nevada and Wyoming, each valued at more than $1 million, according to her federal financial disclosure records. Their companies also graze their cattle on some 250,000 acres of federal land supervised by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.
In the video, Budd-Falen discusses relaxing limits on private grazing on public land and refers to using an exemption to ease restrictions on land controlled by her husband. She vowed that every unused publicly owned Bureau of Land Management allotment would be leased by next year and emphasized that private grazing on public land is effective at fighting wildfires.
On Saturday, the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability said it planned to send a letter to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee, demanding that Congress investigate whether Budd-Falen’s holdings violated ethics laws.
“The situation with Karen Budd-Falen seems to be quite brazen in the scheme of conflicts of interest,” Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, told the Post. “She is, by her own admission, working on policy for grazing that will likely directly impact her own financial interests. And they’re not even trying to hide it.”
Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said that if Budd-Falen has received federal grazing rights from her agency while also creating grazing policy, “that would be a pretty slam-dunk financial conflict of interest.”
During Trump’s first administration, the Interior Department granted an ethics waiver for Budd-Falen, which allowed her family to retain their ranching holdings but prohibited her from working on or discussing grazing policy. Her current “waiver” allows her to work on grazing policy.
Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said Congress should launch a review of Budd-Falen’s actions.
“You don’t have to be an expert on land management to know that when she talks about how policy changes are going to benefit ‘private landowners,’ she’s talking about herself,” Blumenthal said in a statement to the Post.
Interior Department spokeswoman Aubrie Spady told the Post that Budd-Falen “has complied, and continues to comply, with any and all legal requirements, ethical standards and ethics guidelines” in her job.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Interior Department for comment.
