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Should he return as the permanent head coach next season, St. Louis CITY SC’s interim boss believes he’ll have momentum at his back.

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is set to open the David Bowie Center next year, which will be the new home of the David Bowie Archive.The center, which…

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by Mark Olalde

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In 2019, the administration of then-President Donald Trump announced plans to relocate the federal government’s largest land management agency from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado, a city of about 65,000 people a four-hour drive from the nearest major airport.

Trump had campaigned on a vow to “drain the swamp” and throughout his time in office voiced suspicions about the federal bureaucracy. Moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters out of Washington, which officially happened in August 2020, was a step toward fulfilling that promise.

The bureau, known as the BLM, manages mining, hunting, recreation, timber harvesting, oil drilling and more across an area more than 50 times larger than New Jersey, nearly all of it in the West. Though most of the agency’s staffers were already in the West, the administration argued that the bureaucrats in the agency’s headquarters should also be closer to the land they oversee.

A total of 176 employees working in the BLM headquarters were told to move; 135 declined, with many leaving the agency to take positions elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal research agency. The office’s research also found that disruptions caused by the relocation delayed the BLM finalizing policies governing the use of federal public lands.

Looking to undo the previous administration’s “upheaval,” President Joe Biden’s administration quickly moved the headquarters back to Washington and proposed increasing the agency’s funding. The BLM’s fiscal year 2024 budget represented a more than 30% increase from fiscal year 2021, the last year the Trump administration prepared the budget request.

But if Trump wins in November, he has signaled he’ll pick up where he left off with the BLM as part of a broader strategy to shrink the federal government and create a bureaucracy more beholden to him.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 900-plus page blueprint for a potential second Trump term, recommends sending the BLM headquarters back to Colorado and relocating other agencies, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional offices to the Air Traffic Organization and the American Indian Environmental Office.

Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, and a senior campaign adviser told ProPublica in a statement that the document does not set policy for a potential second term. During the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said of the document: “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad.”

But scores of people who worked in the Trump administration helped draft Project 2025. They include William Perry Pendley, his former pick to helm the BLM. Pendley oversaw the headquarters relocation to Grand Junction and authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior, which includes the recommendation to move the BLM’s headquarters back to the West.

Separate from Project 2025, Trump has doubled down on his plan to take aim at the federal bureaucracy as part of Agenda47, his campaign’s outline for a second term. “Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado,” he said in March 2023, “as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out, and I mean immediately, of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America.”

BLM employees who watched the relocation told ProPublica that the 2020 move out of Washington felt like naked politicking and the latest swing of the pendulum between administrations that has pointed the agency in wildly different directions. Rather than move, many in leadership left the agency. Those who remained were scattered, making collaboration with other divisions of the federal government more difficult and disrupting the continuity of internal programs.

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“They ran the career people out,” said Steve Ellis, who spent nearly 40 years working for the federal government, rising to the level of BLM’s deputy director during the Obama administration. “This business about politicizing the civil service, that’s a problem. It’s something that should concern all Americans.”

Mick Mulvaney, then Trump’s acting chief of staff, insinuated during a 2019 speech that downsizing was the intent of the move, calling the relocation of agency offices “a wonderful way to streamline government.”

Employees in other bureaus and departments worry that what happened at the BLM will come to them in a second Trump administration.

Project 2025 advocates reinstituting the so-called Schedule F classification for federal employees that Trump created via a 2020 executive order to remove job protections and make such workers easier to fire. As part of Project 2025, backers created a database of potential replacement hires who share Trump’s mission.

Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser with the EPA, is concerned that such changes would undermine his ex-employer’s ability to protect the environment and public health, in part by relocating or entirely dissolving government offices.

“What they plan on doing this time around was learned from that BLM experience,” he said.

“The Reorganization Will Functionally Dismantle the BLM”

Months before the Trump administration moved the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction, James Caswell, the agency’s director during President George W. Bush’s administration, warned Congress that “the reorganization will functionally dismantle the BLM.” It would remove the agency from having a voice in major decisions made in the capital, he said, and “effectively take the BLM off the playing field.”

Indeed, an exodus followed from the roughly 500-person headquarters, with numerous employees taking jobs elsewhere in the federal government to avoid leaving the Washington area, where they had put down roots. Vacancies in the office jumped to 326 from 121, according to the GAO.

The administration imposed hiring restrictions, including a freeze on filling certain senior positions to gauge whether they were necessary. “All of the BLM staff we interviewed told us about challenges in completing their duties because of headquarters vacancies after 2016,” the GAO report found. Vacancies matter because the BLM oversees an estimated 30% of all the mineral value in the country.

Pendley, the man selected to oversee the agency at the time of its relocation, is a self-avowed “sagebrush rebel,” part of the anti-federal government movement that wants public lands handed to states or sold off. (While functioning as the agency head, Pendley only officially held the title of deputy director for policy and programs and was never confirmed by the Senate. A court eventually ordered him to step aside, finding he had served unlawfully for more than a year.)

Pendley argued in Project 2025 that the BLM’s relocation was necessary and still is because a vast majority of the bureau’s staff and its jurisdiction remain in the West.

In an interview with ProPublica, Pendley said, “It makes much more sense to have the top people who are managing those lands and managing those people closer to the lands and the people themselves.”

He called the move a success, pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason the Grand Junction office building — where the agency leased space and which also hosted oil and gas companies — was never fully used. He argued that the point was not to drive away career employees.

In a potential second Trump administration, he said, there would be a “clear carve-out that things that are budget-related remain in Washington, things that are Capitol Hill-related remain in Washington.”

But the bureau is already decentralized, according to former BLM leadership, with the headquarters — what staff refer to as the Washington Office — located there to collaborate with the rest of the federal government.

“Part of the goal” of relocating the BLM’s headquarters “is for it to be disruptive,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, who was the BLM’s Wyoming state director until her 2019 retirement and now serves as president of the Public Lands Foundation, a nonprofit made up mainly of retired BLM employees. “We’ve got to stop this back-and-forth thing. It’s just not good for an organization. It’s not a healthy way to operate.”

Giving even more power to political appointees to fire career staff is a frightening proposition to Rugwell. “Putting people in place because of their loyalty to a person puts people in place that are not qualified to do the job,” she said.

“Less Effective and Less Efficient”

Project 2025 not only calls for the relocation of agencies’ offices but also goes further in promoting an industry wish list for lighter regulations. In some cases, the leaders of trade groups or industry advocates wrote chapters proposing how to redirect agencies regulating their member companies.

Among their environmental proposals: delist key species from protections under the Endangered Species Act; vacate Biden’s goal of conserving 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030; walk back protections for large swaths of the West in order to offer lease sales to the oil industry; and dismantle policies meant to combat climate change.

If such environmental and public health proposals move forward, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the scale of the demolition,” said Symons, the former EPA employee.

Under Trump, the EPA shrank to its smallest size in decades.

Symons now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit composed of former EPA staff, and believes the Biden administration has begun turning around the agency. He co-authored a recent report that estimated rules the agency wrote on topics such as air pollution since Biden took office will save more than 200,000 lives through 2050.

Project 2025 proposes disbanding multiple offices within the agency, halting millions of dollars of grant funding for universities that “produce radical environmental research” and pausing Biden-era rules.

“The EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator,” Project 2025’s authors wrote.

“By putting polluters in control over our air and water instead of EPA scientists,” Symons said, “Project 2025 would put the lives of millions of Americans needlessly at risk from asthma attacks, cancer, lung disease and heart disease.”

In Project 2025, Pendley also focused on the obscure agency tasked with regulating coal mining: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. He proposes moving its headquarters from Washington to Pittsburgh to be “in the coal field.”

The number of coal mine inspectors should be cut, Pendley wrote, pointing to the industry’s falling production. “The people that I talked to thought there were enough people out there to do the job,” Pendley told ProPublica.

Former agency staff questioned his logic. Moving the headquarters would only serve to make the agency “less effective and less efficient,” argued Joe Pizarchik, the agency’s longest-tenured director, who served until the day Trump was inaugurated.

The largest coal-producing state by far is Wyoming, not Pennsylvania, and historical coal mines in need of cleanup are scattered across Appalachia. As with the BLM, the employees who need to physically be in mines are already stationed in coal country, from offices in Charleston, West Virginia, to Casper, Wyoming. Headquarters staff, meanwhile, need to be in the capital to work alongside Interior Department leadership, Pizarchik said.

As for the agency’s inspectors, many mines that no longer produce have yet to be cleaned up, so the number of permits that the agency oversees has not fallen significantly, Pizarchik explained. Meanwhile, the number of coal mine inspections across the country, a 2018 study found, had already fallen more than 20% over the preceding decade.

“Frankly, it’s asinine,” Pizarchik said of Project 2025’s call to cut inspectors because of decreased production. “That statement is either made out of ignorance of the facts, or it is trying to mislead people.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

The fire protection district said a lot of these challenges are not unique to them and something volunteer departments are experiencing across the state.

Democrats performed badly north of New York City in critical House races. Can they do better this year?

It’s part of a Vietnamese-language red-baiting campaign by Rep. Michelle Steel, who faces a stiff challenge in California’s 45th Congressional District against veteran and pharmacy owner Derek Tran.

Norms are made to be broken in a time of emergency; so too for the idea that science must float above politics.

by Lisa Song

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Tucked into a green-sounding federal recycling bill filed last month is a wish list, not of tough new mandates to get a handle on the world’s plastic’s crisis, but of regulatory rollbacks and government assistance that would boost the plastics industry.

Endorsed by petrochemical lobbyists, the legislation is being criticized by environmentalists who are calling it the industry’s own Project 2025 — a playbook for a potential Trump administration to support an oil and gas industry that’s increasingly dependent on manufacturing plastic.

Among the bill’s supporters’ litany of wishes: They want taxpayers to help prop up “advanced” chemical recycling methods that companies have oversold as a solution for plastic-choked oceans and communities.

They want one of the plastic industry’s dirtiest and most inefficient technologies — one akin to incineration — to be redefined as manufacturing, which would make it exempt from air pollution laws.

They want to legitimize an accounting method that allows companies to exaggerate how much recycled plastic is in their products.

And they want to ensure secrecy around how companies process old plastic and prevent states from setting more stringent regulations for the industry.

Even though the bill itself is a legislative long shot, federal agencies under Donald Trump could adopt some of its most extreme provisions without congressional approval, said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The previous Trump administration had already started the most consequential rollback — the exemption from air pollution regulations — before the Biden administration reversed it.

“The likelihood of really bad stuff happening is exponentially greater under a second Trump administration,” Rosenberg said. The Trump campaign didn’t return a request for comment.

Lobbyists could also break up the bill and try to push it through one piece at a time regardless of who wins the election, he added.

The American Chemistry Council, a prominent plastics lobby, praised the bill as “ground-breaking, solutions-oriented legislation aimed at increasing plastics recycling and preventing plastic from ending up in the environment.” The bill echoes key provisions from a 2022 ACC policy plan. Council spokesperson Andrea Albersheim pushed back on the “inflammatory” characterization that the bill is akin to Project 2025 and noted that it has bipartisan sponsorship.

Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Dr. Larry Bucshon, a Republican congressman from Indiana, co-sponsored the bill, titled Accelerating a Circular Economy for Plastics and Recycling Innovation Act of 2024.

Bucshon is retiring at the end of the legislative session. Davis is in his first term in Congress and faces a competitive reelection race in November; he serves on congressional committees involving agriculture and the military, not science or the environment.

Neither congressman answered ProPublica’s questions about the bill’s creation or its contents. Davis’ press release about the legislation included a statement of support from the CEO of Berry Global, a major plastic packaging manufacturer with a facility in Davis’ district.

Berry supports the act “because it would help modernize the nation’s fragmented recycling infrastructure and significantly increase use of recycled material in new products,” CEO Kevin Kwilinski said in the statement.

Bucshon noted in the release that his district is “home to a number of plastic manufacturers.”

Albersheim, the industry spokesperson, lauded Bucshon’s “long track record of working in a bipartisan fashion on recycling infrastructure legislation.” Bucshon “reached out to a variety of stakeholders,” she said, “including ACC, for perspectives, information and feedback.”

The bill doesn’t include any of the fixes that researchers have found would be most effective in curbing the plastics crisis: capping plastic production, limiting single-use plastic and removing toxic chemicals from plastic products.

The pro-recycling claim hides the bill’s true intent, which is to increase the use of chemical recycling, said Cynthia Palmer, senior analyst for petrochemicals at Moms Clean Air Force. “If you don’t nerd it out and spend your nights and weekends studying these details, then it sounds really good.”

Expanding a Mirage

The plastics industry, which plans to double production over the next few decades, prefers to tackle the plastics crisis through waste management rather than reducing its output. It has long heralded recycling as a cure, despite knowing that traditional methods can barely make a dent in the problem. More recently, the industry has touted new forms of chemical recycling as the solution.

ProPublica explored the most popular form of chemical recycling, pyrolysis; we found it is so inefficient that it yields products with almost no actual recycled content. Companies use a kind of mathematical sleight of hand called mass balance to inflate the recycledness of their most lucrative products by taking credit for the recycled content of other, less lucrative products. It allows a plastic cup with less than 1% recycled plastic to be advertised as 30% recycled.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently issued the first federal policy against mass balance and the California attorney general has sued ExxonMobil for “deceptive” plastic recycling practices, including mass balance. An ExxonMobil spokesperson recently told ProPublica that the company’s chemical recycling process works, and that it has “processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills.”

The bill would reverse course and require the EPA to authorize various forms of mass balance for recycled plastic packaging. A federal rule along these lines would override state laws and prevent states like California from placing restrictions on mass balance or chemical recycling within their borders, according to the bill.

If an industry-friendly administration takes over, Rosenberg said, the EPA could easily legitimize mass balance. Further changes could come from the Federal Trade Commission, which issues the Green Guides — national guidelines on how companies can advertise environmentally friendly products without deceiving the public. The Biden administration has spent nearly two years working on an updated version of the Green Guides that will likely define what counts as recycling and whether companies can use mass balance to advertise their products.

The nation’s chemical recycling capacity is extremely limited right now. The few American facilities — including one owned by ExxonMobil — can only handle a tiny fraction of the nation’s plastic waste.

The ACC recently told ProPublica that it is lobbying for mandates that would require more recycled plastic in packaging; this would create more demand for the technologies, which would spur growth.

The bill calls for a national standard to increase recycled content in plastic packaging by up to 30% by 2030. To meet that goal, “it will be necessary for the recycling market in the United States to expand its deployment of advanced recycling technologies,” the bill states.

It dedicates a significant chunk of federal resources toward expanding plastic recycling infrastructure and smoothing the way for new chemical recycling facilities. There are few details on the scope and cost of these initiatives, or whether they could work at scale.

Some of the funding would come from fines against companies that don’t comply with the new recycling standard. The bill also requires considerable labor and time from government employees who are tasked with setting up guidelines and requirements to standardize and expand plastic recycling. For instance, regulators must create “data collection procedures” to calculate the annual amount of plastic waste that chemical recyclers could process into new plastic. Another provision points to federal support for using plastic as a construction material, possibly for seawalls that protect communities from sea-level rise and storm surges.

Plastic production was responsible for roughly 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 — the very thing driving climate change and severe flooding. The industry’s emissions could double or triple by 2050.

A study authorized by the bill sets the stage for even more government spending. The report, which requires input from plastic and chemical recycling industry representatives, will provide recommendations on financial incentives for improved collection and sorting of recyclables — a necessity for chemical recycling — and potentially expanding the EPA’s National Recycling Strategy to incorporate mass balance. Under a Trump administration, the EPA could update the strategy with that change, Rosenberg said.

Prior news investigations have found that plastic bag dropoff programs, like this one in Thorndale, Pennsylvania, have a spotty record, with much of the plastic ending up in landfills. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Up in Smoke

During pyrolysis, materials like plastic are heated in a low-oxygen environment until they break down into other chemicals. The process produces hazardous waste and releases carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are toxic at very low concentrations.

The EPA has defined pyrolysis facilities as incinerators for decades, and the Clean Air Act defines anything that combusts any solid waste — including discarded plastic — as an incinerator, said Jim Pew, an attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice.

This bill would count pyrolysis as manufacturing, not incineration. That bureaucratic shuffle would remove federal air pollution regulations that govern the facilities’ toxic air emissions, Pew said. There are no manufacturing regulations that would automatically apply, so the EPA would need to create brand-new rules, among other changes, he added, which is unlikely to occur because it would take sustained efforts over multiple administrations.

“It is not accurate to suggest that the bill would exempt or remove pyrolysis regulation under the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws,” Albersheim, the ACC spokesperson, said. “Instead, the bill aims to address uncertainty under the current laws and correct a misunderstanding about how the technology works.”

When ProPublica asked which federal air pollution laws would apply if pyrolysis is no longer considered incineration, Albersheim said some facilities would not release enough pollutants to meet certain EPA regulation thresholds.

After lobbying from the ACC and others, about half of all U.S. states have passed laws classifying pyrolysis as manufacturing. But the federal government has ultimate authority to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Under then-President Trump, the EPA began the process of redefining pyrolysis as manufacturing. The Biden administration later reversed that decision but “left the door open” for a future attempt, Rosenberg said. If Trump wins, he said, it would be even easier for a Republican administration to remove pyrolysis from the Clean Air Act.

The bill gives regulators authority to audit companies’ recycling practices, but the results could be kept from the public. Any “proprietary information” uncovered during these investigations would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Journalists and researchers routinely use FOIA to access government records and inform the public about corporate wrongdoing or public health threats.

Trade secrets are already protected under FOIA; Rosenberg fears the wording of the bill could broaden the definition of what’s exempt from public disclosure. The bill’s co-sponsors didn’t respond to questions seeking clarification.

Palmer of Moms Clean Air Force said the bill gives the industry cover as it tries to triple plastic production over the next few decades. All these efforts to increase recycling through whatever means possible are meant to “divert our attention” from the “sinister” effects that plastic has on the environment and our communities, she said.

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Does changing the shape of the recycling symbol make it any less misleading?

GRANITE CITY - The Illinois Department of Transportation today announced that a full closure of eastbound Interstate 270 between Illinois 3 and Riverview Drive in Missouri is scheduled to take place for approximately one hour between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. on Thursday night, Oct. 24, 2024, weather permitting. The closure is necessary to install an overhead sign truss. All lanes will reopen when work is complete, no later than 5 a.m. Friday, Oct. 25. Motorists should plan accordingly and are encouraged to use alternate routes during this closure. Drivers are urged to reduce speed, be alert for changing conditions, obey all construction signage, and refrain from using mobile devices while approaching and traveling through the work zone. For IDOT District 8 updates, follow us on the social media platform X at @IDOTDistrict8 or view area construction details on IDOT’s traveler information map on GettingAroundIllinois.com .

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Shelly Johnson of Bethalto, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

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Arlene Allmeyer is a kitchen and bath designer with 40 years of experience. Here, she offers her thoughts on creating bold and beautiful powder rooms.

The 10th biannual exhibition curated from artists within 200 miles. Opening May 7th and on display through October, the 10th Biannual will feature 32 artists and 41 works from a […]

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Return to a time when steamboats ruled the river. The one-hour narrated riverfront cruise aboard the Riverboats at the Gateway Arch explores the history of downtown St. Louis, including the […]

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As they say, the wheels of justice grind slowly. The presumed upside is that they grind finely, which means every periodic iteration should produce better outcomes. And maybe that’s true in some cases. (Cases handled in the Fifth Circuit, not so much.) This one’s in the Fifth Circuit but at least hasn’t suffered the possible […]

The Missouri attorney general fought her innocence case and her release from prison.