Montana Sen. Jon Tester criticized the Trump administration on Tuesday after the U.S. Department of the Interior provided a list of proposed conservation projects a week late and without detailed funding requests.

The department missed a Nov. 2 deadline to nominate projects for funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a key component of the Great American Outdoors Act that President Donald Trump signed into law in early August.

Tester, a Democrat, and Montana's Republican Sen. Steve Daines both sponsored the landmark conservation bill, which permanently funds the LWCF at $900 million per year with royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling. The law also provides up to $9.5 billion over the next five years for overdue maintenance of national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and other public lands.

Tester, who pushed for years to fully fund the LWCF, and other congressional Democrats said a list of proposed LWCF projects provided by the Interior Department on Monday was incomplete because it did not describe the projects or include a funding request for each one individually.

The Trump administration also identified 725 deferred-maintenance projects for fiscal 2021, aimed at fixing roads, trails, campgrounds, monuments and visitor facilities. The Interior Department and the Agriculture Department, which runs the Forest Service, presented those projects to Congress by the Nov. 2 deadline but provided few specifics.

"Interior’s blatant disregard for a law it championed is a slap in the face to the grassroots folks in Montana and across the West who spent decades fighting for full LWCF funding," Tester said in a statement. "The lack of accountability in this process has forced Congress to step in and create our own list of projects, because this administration continues to show that their interest in protecting public lands only lasts as long as the flash bulb of a photo op.”

Tester and Daines both sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which proposed its own list of projects and funding levels in an Interior Department spending bill. The department includes the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies that manage federal lands.

The committee wrote that it's "disappointed by the lack of specific bureau and project-level information contained in the submissions and believes additional details regarding proposed projects are necessary" for Congress to make informed spending decisions.

The bill currently would provide more than $39 million for conservation projects in Montana, including on the Lower Musselshell River, the Blackfoot River watershed, the Miller Lake valley, the Kootenai Forestlands, Bad Rock Canyon, Lolo trails and national wildlife refuges.

Conservation groups under the umbrella of the LWCF Coalition also criticized the Trump administration.

“The administration has utterly blown its shot at implementing this historic conservation and recreation law, whiffing on three separate chances to get this right,” Drew McConville, a lobbyist for The Wilderness Society and spokesman for the LWCF Coalition, said in a statement Tuesday.

“First, they missed the deadline. Second, they sent up project lists that have nowhere near the level of detail required. And third, their submission dramatically short-sheets federal land conservation and recreation. After three strikes, they should head back to the dugout while Congress steps up to finish the job right."

In a phone call with conservation advocates this week, Interior Department officials argued that under the Great American Outdoors Act it was up to the White House, not the Cabinet agencies, to release the lists of projects, according to a report from E&E News, a site focused on energy and the environment.

Daines, who joined Trump at the bill's signing ceremony and touted his role in moving the legislation on the campaign trail, has not criticized the administration for missing the deadline. His spokeswoman, Katie Schoettler, said Daines pushed the Interior and Agriculture departments and the White House Office of Management and Budget to release the LWCF project list last week.

"Sen. Daines will fight to ensure Montana projects are prioritized and receive funding from LWCF – as he always does," Schoettler said in an email. "While the [funding] breakdown was not provided in some of the lists from USDA/DOI, what Congress does is what matters the most."

Reporter Chad Sokol can be reached at 758-4434 or csokol@dailyinterlake.com