The information provided below is 100% confirmed, but for obvious reasons I cannot divulge identifying details.
Native American nations have many guaranteed autonomous rights on par with a state. Natural resources very often fall in this list, given Native Americans' connection to the land and the direct economic and cultural reliance on the natural environment.
The Federal government was moving towards letting Native nations set their own clean water standards within their reservations. This move is still documented on the EPA website. It was all said and done but for the finishing touches - and then the man-made catastrophe named Trump fell into the White House.
Trump appointed as EPA head one Scott Pruitt, who unlike most *45’s appointees seems reasonably competent at what he does. Unfortunately, what he does is mostly to destroy the EPA from above, and to sacrifice the environment at the feet of narrow financial and political interests.
In this vein, EPA professionals were recently told to put the Native American clean-water sovereignty process on hold, and instead to contact county governments overlapping with these reservations and invite them to provide input on the process. Sounds deceptively innocuous, but
County governments have no business interfering with this, it's outside their juridsiction and over their heads. States are the ones setting water standards, so they might have a valid say, maybe - but not counties. Most sizable Native American reservations are in remote areas, very often surrounded by rural Whites who as a rule skew heavily to the right and have many direct conflicts of interest with Native Americans, in particular over land and water.This is yet another GOP scheme, to actively look for ways to derail and sabotage proper governance using whatever pretext they can invent. Along the way, Pruitt’s new push also opens the door to Native Americans' often-hostile White neighbors to meddle in their internal affairs for no substantial reason, reviving echoes of some of the most ugly chapters in American history — and to light yet another fire under the national Culture War.
So.... EPA officers are told to go out of their way, contact county governments overlapping with Native reservations, and ask whether they “would like to provide input” on the reservations' planned standards.
In the particular case I'm familiar with, the counties said “Yes, actually we do want to provide input”. Apparently the instruction from above is to come over and meet them in person. Which means that for each such “input meeting”, a couple of high-ranking EPA professionals need to travel to remote corners of their region, and spend a few days away from their actual jobs, engaging in a process that’s completely empty except for its sabotage potential.
I wonder whether something can be done about this.