Reagan administration Interior Secretary James Watt, pictured on Dec. 23, 1980, has died at age 85.
AP
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — James Watt, the Reagan administration’s sharp-tongued, pro-development interior secretary who was beloved by conservatives but ran afoul of environmentalists, Beach Boys fans and eventually the president, has died. He was 85.
Watt died in Arizona on May 27, son Eric Watt said in a statement Thursday.
In an administration divided between so-called pragmatists and hard-liners, few stood as far to the right at the time as Watt, who once labeled the environmental movement as “preservation vs. people” and the general public as a clash between “liberals and Americans.”
In that sense, Watt foreshadowed combative Interior secretaries like Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, who, like Watt, aggressively pushed to grant oil, gas and coal leases on public land, increase offshore drilling and limit expansion of national parks and monuments.
“While no one’s death should be celebrated, he was the worst of MAGA before it was invented,” tweeted David Donger of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
Watt and his supporters saw him as an upholder of President Ronald Reagan’s core conservative values, but opponents were alarmed by his policies and offended by his comments. In 1981, shortly after he was appointed, the Sierra Club collected more than 1 million signatures seeking Watt’s ouster and criticized such actions as clear-cutting federal lands in the Pacific Northwest, weakening environmental regulations for strip mining and hampering efforts to curtail air pollution in California’s Yosemite Valley.
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