By Dino Grandoni

June 23, 2018 - The White House on Thursday unveiled a radical overhaul of the federal bureaucracy, including many of the agencies managing energy and natural resources.

The Trump administration's ideas for revamping which agencies are tasked with certain energy and environmental responsibilities -- such as managing the nation's fisheries and flood infrastructure -- are part of a broader reorganization plan that calls for sweeping changes such as merging the Labor and Education departments.

But the reorganization effort calls for a level of consolidation that Congress, which would need to approve the plan, is unlikely to sign off on.

It has long been the goal of many conservatives to streamline federal work on energy and environmental issues. Many Republican candidates for president have even promised to eliminate entire departments, such as when Rick Perry suggested during the 2012 race to shutter the Energy Department, which he now runs, and when Donald Trump in 2016 once called for closing the Environmental Protection Agency. 

But President Trump's latest plan is much smaller in scale than any of those campaign-trail promises.

In fact, instead of asking for the eradication of the EPA, the president's proposal calls upon the agency to take on even more work. Under the plan, the EPA's Superfund program would absorb portions of hazardous site cleanup programs run by the Interior and Agriculture departments. However, at the same time the EPA would also reduce or otherwise “recalibrate” its oversight of state-run pollution-control programs. 

Likewise, the Interior Department would take on a higher profile, too, by taking over part of the Army Corps of Engineers. The administration wants to shift from the military to Interior responsibility for water resources infrastructure such as flood control and aquatic ecosystem restoration. The latter type of project is often built to benefit fish and bird populations protected under the Endangered Species Act or the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Interior is the chief department for administering those laws.

The Trump administration also recommended merging the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, which manages ocean fisheries in U.S. coastal waters, with Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service, which stewards river habitat for fish.

“If you have a salmon, and it’s in the ocean, it’s governed by the Department of Commerce. Once it swims upriver, it’s governed by the Department of Interior,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a Cabinet meeting Thursday afternoon.

“This is stupid,” Mulvaney then deadpanned, drawing laughs in the Cabinet Room.

“I think you should put that on television,” Trump said in response.

But history shows how hard it is for Congress to swallow such a shakeup. An similar effort in 2012 by President Barack Obama to move the entire National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the fisheries agency is a part, to Interior was derailed by political opposition.

Unlike its cousins, the Energy Department would shrink if Congress approved the reorganization. The administration wants to combine applied energy programs researching fossil-fuel, nuclear and renewable energy into a single new office.

The White House argued that scientists and engineers would be better able to collaborate under a single roof. But at least one former worker at the department called the idea a veiled attempt to rein in alternative-energy research. The three offices for fossil, nuclear and renewable energy were each targeted with severe cuts in back-to-back White House budget proposals.

“Congressional leaders will rightly see this as a back-door attempt to cut energy innovation funding,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser who did consulting work for the Energy Department under Obama.

The Trump administration also floated having that department, along with the independent Tennessee Valley Authority, sell some federally controlled electricity transmission assets in the South and West to private operators.

The reorganization document is silent on one perennial idea: having the Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of forests and grassland, join its bureaucratic cousins such as the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management in Interior. The forestry agency, once chiefly committed to managing timber harvests, is housed in the USDA even as its role has expanded to supervising recreational and conservation areas.

But plans to move the Forest Service have never gotten very far off the ground. Politically independent investigators at the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2009 that moving the agency to Interior “could potentially improve federal land management,” but that political resistance among members of Congress and federal bureaucrats halted past efforts.

The Trump administration decided not to even resurface the issue in this latest reorganization effort. Last year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) abstained from voting on Ryan Zinke's nomination as interior secretary in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee over concerns that “Zinke was interested in transferring federal forest management” from the Forest Service to the Interior Department, his office said at the time. 

Zinke assured Wyden he would not pursue the plan, and the senator ultimately voted in favor of his nomination.