If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Bernhardt will become one of two cabinet officials overseeing the nation’s top environmental agencies. The other is Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. Like Mr. Bernhardt, Mr. Wheeler was a deputy who ascended to lead his agency after his former boss — Scott Pruitt, in the case of the E.P.A. — resigned amid allegations of corruption.
Experts in environmental policy say the rise of Mr. Bernhardt and Mr. Wheeler, former advocates for the fossil fuel industry who now lead the very agencies charged with regulating those businesses, represents an extraordinary moment.
“We’ve seen in the past some evidence of industry lobbyists becoming senior officials at environmental agencies, particularly in the Reagan and second Bush administrations,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “But I don’t know of a time in the last four decades when so many of these key environmental positions are being held by people with such a strong connection to industry.”
As a partner in the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Mr. Bernhardt lobbied for the oil companies Cobalt International Energy and Samson Resources. His legal clients included the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents dozens of oil companies, and Halliburton Energy Services, the oil and gas extraction firm that was led by Dick Cheney before he became vice president.
As deputy secretary of the Interior Department, Mr. Bernhardt was the lead author of a revision of a program to protect tens of millions of acres of habitat of the imperiled sage grouse, a puffy-chested, chicken-like bird found in 10 oil-rich Western states. His final sage grouse plan, issued this month, would strip away protections from about nine million acres of the bird’s habitat, a move that, in a stroke, opened up more land to oil and gas drilling than any other single policy action by the Trump administration.
In March last year, a group of oil companies and an industry group, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, wrote to Mr. Bernhardt to thank him for his work on actions “that rescinded and revised mitigation policies that far exceeded statutory authority.” The groups also listed policies they hoped that Mr. Bernhardt would change, including the sage grouse program, which was put in place under President Barack Obama.
Mr. Bernhardt is also the chief author of a major plan, expected to be finalized and made public in the days or weeks after his Senate confirmation, that would allow the federal government to lease almost any part of the entire United States coastline to oil and gas companies for offshore drilling.
