For Immediate Release: May 9, 2026

Contact: Michael Clauw, mclauw@campaignforaccountability.org, 202.780.5750

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Campaign for Accountability (CfA) urged the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the House Committee on Natural Resources to open an inquiry into serious and escalating ethics violations involving Karen Budd-Falen, the third highest-ranking official at the Department of the Interior (DOI), and into the apparent failure of DOI’s ethics office to prevent or address those violations. Ms. Budd-Falen has been actively directing federal public lands policy in ways that appear to benefit her family’s extensive ranching operation, and the DOI ethics office, in dereliction of its mandate, seems eager to ratify, rather than remedy, the behavior.

Read CfA’s Letters to the Senate and House.

Ms. Budd-Falen and her husband have an ownership interest in extensive ranching operations that include grazing leases covering over a quarter million acres of federal public land administered by the DOI—the department she now helps lead. When she was initially considered to lead the Bureau of Land Management during the first Trump administration, ethics officials told her she needed to divest these interests. Instead, she withdrew from consideration. When she later joined Interior for a different role in 2018, she agreed to be barred from “participation or involvement in any matters” relating to federal grazing policies.

Despite the clear terms of her 2018 ethics commitments—terms that DOI has never formally superseded—Ms. Budd-Falen has spent the past year directing an aggressive overhaul of federal grazing policy. Most significantly, Ms. Budd-Falen described adding new categorical exclusions to federal environmental review processes that would allow for expanded cattle grazing in northern Nevada—where her husband now manages and profits from her late father-in-law’s ranch, Home Ranch, LLC.

She also appears to have misrepresented the operations of this ranch to ethics officials, stating that her husband, Frank Falen, “does not actively manage Home Ranch, LLC.” Yet, less than a month later, Mr. Falen was listed as ranch manager on documents surrounding a $3.5 million dollar water rights agreement with a mine developer. Although Ms. Budd-Falen’s office was involved in that mine’s approval process—an approval on which her family’s deal depended—she failed to disclose the deal in financial disclosure documents, despite an obligation to do so.

DOI’s ethics infrastructure not only failed to adequately enforce the law, but it also seems to have actively encouraged and covered for Ms. Budd-Falen’s inaccurate disclosures. In response to record requests seeking ethics agreements and waivers covering her current tenure, the DOI said it had no responsive records beyond the 2018 agreement. Then, on March 11, 2026, DOI’s ethics office issued a new partial waiver allowing her to participate in grazing policy of “general applicability” that may have a “direct and particular effect” on her financial interests. These waivers are rare, and the issuance of one following a year of undisclosed conflict-laden participation falls far short of ethics standards.

CfA’s letter concludes by asking Congress to investigate a series of questions surrounding these apparent ethical lapses, which DOI has demonstrated it will not answer on its own.

“The American public is entitled to federal public lands that are managed by officials who are free from personal financial interests in the outcomes of their decisions. The evidence in the Budd-Falen case suggests that standard has been badly compromised, and we respectfully request that Congress investigate this important matter,” said CfA Executive Director Michelle Kuppersmith.

Campaign for Accountability is a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization that uses research, litigation, and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life and hold those who act at the expense of the public good accountable for their actions.