Stewardship: Manuel Lujan, Jr., Reports on his First Two Years as Secretary of the Interior

Lujan, Manuel

During the past two years, we at the Department of the Interior have made significant progress in achieving the Bush Administration's ambitious goals of improved stewardship of the human, cultural, historical, and natural resources entrusted to us. We are well on our way to meeting on of the greatest challenges our Nation will face in the 1990's: balancing environmental protection with economic growth to maximize society's well-being. This means achieving harmony and balance in fulfilling the President's goals of restoring and maintaining our fragile environment while at the same time fulfilling our national needs for energy, minerals, and other resources found on federal lands. We have taken action to meet this challenge. One of our major achievements was the successful implementation of the first phase of the President's "American the Beautiful" program, which was first included in the fiscal year 1991 budget. It emphasizes resource protection and recreation programs in the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Department of the Interior, and to leave a legacy to the 21st century, we launched our "Legacy '99" program to repair and rehabilitate the facilities of the Department by 1999. This program includes major funding increases for the backlog of rehabilitation projects, for dam safety, for the management and cleanup of hazardous materials and for maintenance and repair of the Department's facilities.