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For Immediate Release
April, 23 2009, 10:13am EDT
Contact:
Luke Eshleman (202) 265-7337
Obama Taps Bush Appointee to Run Surface Mining Agency
Choice May Signal Administration Cave-In on Opposition to Mountain Top Removal
WASHINGTON
Agency insiders report that President Obama has asked
a Bush holdover to remain in charge of the troubled Office of Surface Mining
Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM), according to Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility (PEER). Glenda Owens has a long record of defending mountain
top removal, a controversial form of coal mining. In 2001, President George
W. Bush named her OSM Deputy Director, after she had served several years
as the lead agency lawyer defending OSM.
During her federal service, Glenda Owens has been one of the top officials
fighting legal efforts by conservationists to limit valley fills, delaying
reclamation standards and defending Bush cutbacks in clean-ups for abandoned
mines. Owens also worked closely with former Deputy Interior Secretary Steven
Griles (a mining lobbyist now serving a prison sentence on corruption charges)
to "streamline" strip mining permits by allowing operators to shortcut
environmental reviews.
The choice is also somewhat surprising in that presidential candidate Obama
spoke out against mountain top removal, saying "We're tearing up the
Appalachian Mountains because of our dependence on fossil fuels", and "We
have to find more environmentally sound ways of mining coal, than simply blowing
the tops off mountains." In March, the Obama administration signaled
that it might take action to curb mountain top removals but under pressure
appears to have backed off.
In tapping Owens, administration officials have passed over two candidates
backed by conservation and coalfield citizen groups: Joe Childers, a Lexington,
Kentucky, environmental lawyer and .Pat McGinley, a West Virginia University
law professor with long experience with coal mining health and safety as well
as coalfield reclamation laws.
Even strip mining proponents, such as Natural Resources Committee Chair Nick
Rahall (D-WV), concede that OSM is at low ebb. Rep. Rahall was quoted in the
April 11th Charleston Gazette as stating:
"The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement has lacked strong
leadership for a long time. It has abdicated its responsibility to enforce
the surface mining law, to dovetail environmental protection with coal production
and jobs. So I think we are at a crossroads here. We can either have
a strong leader at the helm who will conduct necessary oversight and enforcement
or watch the agency continue to sink in a quagmire of ineptitude."
"It is hard to imagine a poorer choice to lead this troubled agency," stated
PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whose organization backs McGinley for the
post. "Glenda Owens in no way resembles the type of change that Barack
Obama promised to bring."
###
Read 2007 congressional testimony by Glenda Owens
View Owens defense of FY 2003 Bush budget proposal cutting OSM by one-fifth
See Obama administration retreat on mountain top removal
Look
at PEER white paper "Empty Promises" tracing the decline
of OSM
at PEER white paper "Empty Promises" tracing the decline
of OSM
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals. PEER's environmental work is solely directed by the needs of its members. As a consequence, we have the distinct honor of serving resource professionals who daily cast profiles in courage in cubicles across the country.
LATEST NEWS
'Unforgivable': FEMA Missed Thousands of Calls from Texas Flood Victims After Noem Fired Contractors
"They are intentionally breaking government—even the parts that help us when we are deep in crisis," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jul 12, 2025
Outrage continues to grow against U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem over her response to the deadly floods that ravaged Texas last week.
According to a Friday report from The New York Times, more than two-thirds of phone calls to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from flood victims went unanswered after Noem allowed hundreds of contractors to be laid off on July 5, just a day after the nightmare storm.
According to The Times, this dramatically hampered the ability of the agency to respond to calls from survivors in the following days:
On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
That evening, however, Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies, and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
Calling is one of the primary ways that flood victims apply for aid from the disaster relief agency. But Noem would wait until July 10—five days later—to renew the contracts of the people who took those phone calls.
"Responding to less than half of the inquiries is pretty horrific," Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told The Times.
"Put yourself in the shoes of a survivor: You've lost everything, you're trying to find out what's insured and what's not, and you’re navigating multiple aid programs," he added. "One of the most important services in disaster recovery is being able to call someone and walk through these processes and paperwork."
The lapse is a direct result of a policy introduced by Noem last month, which required any payments made by FEMA above $100,000 to be directly approved by her before taking effect. Noem, who has said she wants to eliminate FEMA entirely, described it as a way of limiting "waste, fraud, and abuse."
Under this policy, Noem allowed other critical parts of the flood response to wait for days as well. Earlier this week, multiple officials within FEMA told CNN that she waited more than 72 hours to authorize the deployment of search and rescue teams and aerial imaging.
Following The Times' piece, DHS put out a statement claiming that "NO ONE was left without assistance, and every call was responded to urgently."
"When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase," DHS said. "Despite this expected influx, FEMA's disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance. No call center operators were laid off or fired."
This is undercut, however, by internal emails also obtained by The Times, which showed FEMA officials becoming frustrated and blaming the DHS Secretary for the lack of contracts. One official wrote in a July 8 email to colleagues: "We still do not have a decision, waiver, or signature from the DHS Secretary."
Democratic lawmakers were already calling for investigations into Noem's response to the floods before Friday. They also sought to look into how the Trump administration's mass firings of FEMA employees, as well as employees of the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may have hampered the response.
Following The Times' revelations, outrage has reached a greater fever pitch.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called it "unforgivable and unforgettable" and an "inexcusable lapse in top leadership."
"Sec. Noem shows that dismantling FEMA impacts real people in real time," he said. "It hurts countless survivors & increases recovery costs."
In response to the news, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) simply wrote that "Kristi Noem must resign now."
Others pointed out that Noem has often sought to justify abolishing FEMA by characterizing it as slow and ineffectual. They suggested her dithering response was deliberate.
"She broke it on purpose," said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in an interview on MSNBC. "So that when it fails this summer, she can say, 'Oh, see, we told you—FEMA doesn't work.'"
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The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other local legal organizations on behalf of five plaintiffs who said their rights were violated by immigration agents.
According to the complaint:
The raids in this district follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody.
In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind. If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained. Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.
Two of the plaintiffs were U.S. citizens.
One of them, a dual U.S. and Mexican citizen, said he was questioned and detained by unidentified officers on three separate occasions while working at a car wash in Orange County. Agents insisted that his passport was fake and repeatedly asked if he was American.
Another U.S. citizen was told he was arrested because he "looked like an illegal alien." Agents with military-style rifles and handguns repeatedly asked him, "What hospital were you born at?" When he could not answer the question, an officer grabbed him and shoved him against a metal fence. After he showed the officers his Real ID, he says they took it and never returned it to him.
"No matter the color of their skin, what language they speak, or where they work, everyone is guaranteed constitutional rights to protect them from unlawful stops," said Mohammad Tajsar, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.
"While it does not take a federal judge to recognize that marauding bands of masked, rifle-toting goons have been violating ordinary people’s rights throughout Southern California, we are hopeful that today’s ruling will be a step toward accountability for the federal government’s flagrant lawlessness that we have all been witnessing," he added.
Since early June, Southern California has been the epicenter of the Trump administration's "mass deportation" push, with thousands of immigrants detained—often by unidentified, masked agents—in sweeping raids that have traumatized Latino communities across the state.
Despite the administration publicizing the arrests of violent criminals, the vast majority of those arrested have no criminal history. More than 1,500 people have been disappeared, the ACLU said last week, "in order to meet arbitrary arrest quotas set by the Trump administration."
"Due process, access to counsel, dignity, and respect were not afforded to our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors as ICE plowed through our community in their obsessive, racially motivated quest for quotas," said Angelica Salas, executive director at Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). "No one is above the law, and today’s decision reaffirms that President Trump and all its immigration enforcement apparatus must follow the Constitution."
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The Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Health and cousins of Sayfollah Musallat—also known as Saif al-Din Kamel Abdul Karim Musallat—said Friday that Israeli settlers beat the dual U.S.-Palestinian citizen to death while he was visiting family in the illegally occupied West Bank.
A spokesperson for the ministry, Annas Abu El Ezz, told Agence France-Press that 23-year-old Musallat "died after being severely beaten all over his body by settlers in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah, this afternoon."
Abdul Samad Abdul Aziz, from the nearby village of Al-Mazraa Al-Sharqiya, said that "the young man was injured and remained so for four hours. The [Israeli] army prevented us from reaching him and did not allow us to take him away."
"When we finally managed to reach him, he was taking his last breath," he added.
The Times of Israel reported that the "ministry later said a second man, 23-year-old Mohammad Shalabi, was fatally shot by settlers," and "there have been no arrests yet."
According to the Tel Aviv-based newspaper Haaretz, "The Israeli army said it was 'aware of reports' of the incident and that it was 'being looked into by the Shin Bet security service and Israel Police.'"
Zeteo's Prem Thakker spoke with two of Musallat's cousins, Fatmah Muhammad and another granted anonymity due to safety concerns. They said that he grew up in Port Charlotte, Florida, and arrived in June to visit family in the Palestinian town of al-Mazra'a ash-Sharqiya.
As Thakker detailed:
Muhammad described Musallat as "one of those kids that everyone loves" with a "beautiful heart," a "sweet, gentle kid, very genuine," everyone attests as funny and bright.
In Florida, he helped run a family ice cream shop, a place where his personality shone through, his family members said.
Muhammad and the other family source said that the entire Palestinian town where the family is from is devastated.
"There's no justice there. You can't call the police. You can't call the Israeli government. The murderers just get to walk away," Muhammad said.
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack, the Israel Defense Forces have killed over 57,800 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—which has led to a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). During that time, IDF soldiers and Israeli settlers' sometimes deadly violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has also surged.
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Musallat's death came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court accused of continuing the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza to stay in power—returned to Israel after meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional leaders in Washington, D.C. this week.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the United States, said in a Friday statement that "we strongly condemn these racist Israeli settlers, backed and enabled by the Netanyahu government, for beating an American citizen to death in the occupied West Bank."
"This murder is only the latest killing of an American citizen by illegal Israeli settlers or soldiers," he noted. "Every other murder of an American citizen has gone unpunished by the American government, which is why the Israeli government keeps wantonly killing American Palestinians and, of course, other Palestinians. If President Trump will not even put America first when Israel murders American citizens, then this is truly an Israel First administration."
According to Thakker: "Musallat is at least the seventh American killed in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon since October 7, 2023, including six killed by Israeli forces. Earlier this week, Zeteo asked several Republican senators if they knew how many Americans had been killed by Israel in the last 21 months. None of them could answer."
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