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KARTLAND, New Mexico — Interior Minister Deb Haaland took a cautious approach here on a Thursday in late August as she exited the black SUV that carried her down a long, dusty dirt road for a pop-up news conference in the middle of the desert.
Haaland, 61, who broke her leg on a hike in Shenandoah National Park in July, pointed out a brace on her left leg to Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk, who sat next to her on a small stage and asked about her injury.
Organizers had assembled a marquee with a stage and sound system at the site of a planned solar power plant in view of a huge coal-fired power plant slated for closure this month. Trays of carefully arranged fruit and dip were strewn across the tables.
“This is the best press conference I’ve ever been to, so thank you to whoever organized this,” she said. “It’s off the charts! In the middle of the New Mexico desert.
She’d ditched the orthopedic boot she’d been wearing lately and slipped into a pair of red sneakers more suited to rough terrain.
A broken fibula slowed Haaland, a runner who finished the Boston Marathon last year in a respectable 4 hours and 58 minutes.
The interior ministry declined to comment further on how Haaland broke her leg. “We don’t expect to release any further details,” her communications director, Melissa Schwartz, told E&E News in a July email. Schwartz said this week that “her injury, which occurred outside of work hours and while in a personal capacity, was announced in a press release.”
Haaland’s comments to Turk about her recovery were not heard by a reporter sitting in the front row of the press conference.
The interior secretary — now 18 months into her tenure — is not a fixture on cable news like some of her colleagues, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Under Haaland’s leadership, Schwartz said, Interior has “consciously sought to diversify its media engagement within the department, and specifically with the secretary, to give opportunities to reporters and outlets — and thus audiences — that have typically been ignored.” Schwartz added that Haaland has given more than 100 one-on-one interviews since taking office, including 62 percent with reporters who identify as women and 45 percent with reporters of color. Most of them, Schwartz said, were conducted with national media.
Covid-19 has affected Haaland’s ability to hold large in-person news conferences at Interior headquarters, Schwartz said, but the secretary has held dozens of media events in states across the country, nearly 20 news conferences and occasional meetings with reporters.
Still, some Democrats want to see Haaland take a greater role in publicly defending domestic policies.
“The Secretary of the Interior has a tremendous responsibility to be the Department’s biggest cheerleader and advocate, both in the press and among elected officials,” said a former senior Obama Interior Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their professional relationships.
“Whether it’s because her team is overly cautious or she’s just not yet comfortable in the spotlight, she probably needs to be a little bolder when it comes to presenting the Department as she competes with others in the Cabinet who attract much more attention,” this person said.
Haaland’s office declined to make her available for a brief interview at her event in New Mexico last month, citing a “busy schedule and group travel.”
“I’m so happy to be here”
The Secretary of the Interior was not in New Mexico to mock reporters on the sidelines.
She returned to her home state — joined by other senior Biden administration officials — to take a victory lap after Democrats passed the largest climate and renewable energy bill in history.
Administration officials have been touring the country touting their legislative victories under Biden’s watch. Democrats hope to convince voters there’s more to it if they can hold onto both houses of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections.
Haaland beamed as she took the podium, which was a little too high for her.
“Twenty years ago I would have scratched my head and said, ‘No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ But anyway, I’m so happy to be here!” she told the small crowd gathered in the desert.
Twenty years ago, Haaland was a single mother of a young daughter struggling to make ends meet. She had not yet graduated from law school and had not yet begun her political career. She and her daughter often had to sleep at a friend’s house because Haaland couldn’t afford an apartment. she said Roll call in 2019
Her story helped endear her to New Mexico voters, said Brian Sanderoff, a New Mexico political analyst and president of Research & Polling Inc.
“It’s a biography that allowed her to connect with a lot of people in New Mexico, rather than being someone who was born with a silver spoon or someone who was more of the elite political class,” Sanderoff said.
The trappings that come with her new gig—the shiny black SUV, the security detail and the entourage of staff she travels with—mark a drastic change. Even in 2014, when he ran for lieutenant governor, Haaland drove around in a Honda Civic filled with flyers and signs, Albuquerque Gazette reported.
Haaland lost that race. But since then she has steadily climbed the political ranks. She manages a department of about 70,000 employees and is number 8 in the presidential line of succession.
“Impressive political rise”
Haaland was selected chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party in 2015, won her congressional seat in 2018 and re-election in 2020, and was sworn in as Biden’s interior secretary in 2021. She made history in all of these roles as the first or one of the first Indian women to serve in these positions.
“Deb Haaland really moved up the political chain pretty quickly,” Sanderoff said. “She’s had an impressive political rise in New Mexico politics and now, of course, nationally,” he added.
It’s possible she’ll run for public office someday, Sanderoff said. Democrats currently hold both New Mexico Senate seats, and Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is running for another four-year term this fall.
“You never know what opportunities arise,” Sanderoff said. Haaland, he added, “has the potential to do well in New Mexico for future office, whether it’s state or federal.”
Her rapid rise comes as no surprise to her allies.
“She’s really smart and very dedicated. She works; she’s a hard worker,” said Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma who became a professor at the University of New Mexico in the 1970s. Haaland, who graduated with an English degree in 1994, was one of his students.
Haaland worked as a baker to put himself through school, Harris said.
She was drawn to politics in large part by a desire to put a Native American voice in the room where decisions are made, said Harris and his wife, former New Mexico Democratic Party Chairwoman Margaret Elliston.
“Her slogan when she ran for Congress was, ‘They’ve never heard a voice like mine,'” Elliston said. “I think that was a great motivator.”
Haaland became emotional during an April 2021 interview with CBS’ Norah O’Donnell about the historic nature of her role as the first Native American cabinet secretary.
“You don’t know what this means for the Indian country,” Haaland recalled telling Biden when he offered her the job. “It’s significant, it’s historic, it’s meaningful,” she told O’Donnell. “We are all indebted to him.”
The issues Haaland’s department deals with are personal to her — and she’s proud to be able to change Interior’s policies.
The Secretary of the Interior, whose grandparents were forced in government-run Indian boarding schools, is now leading an investigation into the dark history of indigenous boarding schools. Many of these schools were run by the Home Office (GreenwireMay 11).
One of her first moves on the job was to announce the formation last year of a new missing and murdered unit at Interior to prioritize missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives, an issue Haaland has also championed on Capitol Hill hill (Greenwire2 April 2021).
And earlier this year, Interior announced it was proposing name changes to hundreds of federal sites that contain an offensive term for Native American women (GreenwireFebruary 22).
At the press conference in New Mexico, she announced that federal funds would go toward plugging abandoned oil and gas wells that can leak harmful chemicals into Native American communities like hers.
“Those of us from New Mexico are all too familiar with legacy pollution,” she said.
“I come from a community—Laguna Pueblo—that suffers from the effects of environmental injustice. Our health, our water, our seniors continue to feel the devastating effects of the nation’s largest open-pit uranium mine, even though that mine closed more than 40 years ago.
A difficult 2023?
Haaland’s political fortunes may soon change.
So far, the interior secretary is delighted with the administration’s recent string of legislative successes. But the outcome of November’s midterm elections could dramatically change her life.
A GOP takeover of either house of Congress could force it and its staff to take a defensive position. Republicans wielding sledgehammers can compel her to hand over documents and appear at regular oversight hearings.
Republicans have been critical of her tenure so far, particularly regarding the Biden administration’s oil and gas policies on public lands.
“Your department, Madam Secretary, is stopping, delaying and killing oil and natural gas lease sales. Your department is undermining domestic energy production, not accelerating it,” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told Haaland during a hearing in May.
Congresswoman Yvette Herrell, another New Mexican and the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reforms Environment Subcommittee, also wants Haaland to be in charge of the Biden administration’s energy policies.
“I would have hoped that she would have been more proactive in helping our energy producers, especially those in her state, jump over this hurdle of … discrimination from an administration that has come out and attacked the industry as a whole,” Herrell told E&E News in a recent interview.
John Leshey, who served as an Interior attorney during the Clinton administration, believes Haaland and the Interior Department may not bear the brunt of Republican ire if they win the House or Senate this fall. Domestic issues are “potentially hot buttons,” Leshi said, but they are also “quite complex, scientifically and politically,” which can make it harder to “awaken political interest” in them.
But, Leshy added, there’s no question that a GOP takeover of Congress would lead to “a lot of bullying attempts to throw them off balance and take them out of the game” domestically and throughout the Biden administration.
For now, Haaland continues his travels west. She visited public lands in the Mojave Desert this week that advocates are pushing for the Biden administration to designate as a national monument (E&Enews PMSeptember 7).
Her leg seems to be on the mend; a photo she tweeted of the event showed no sign of the boot.
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