Nah...if there is an economic incentive to be ignorant, then that explains his reasoning pretty well.

All that means is that the BLM has to inform congress of their activities etc., and congress can use the power of the purse to deny them funds to act as a check on their power if they don't like what they're doing. But they are told what to do by the executive branch.

Yes, in that the sand is there to eat because elements of the water, in this case parrotfish, have created the things that make extrinsic experience possible, i.e. eating sand.

In the same way, the experiences we have are made possible by both conscious and intentional action, like the parrotfish eating coral, and by unconscious feelings, biases, wants, needs, fears, and interpretations, like the parrotfish shitting out sand and the sand washing up on shores to make beaches. When you interact with the world, it's never a straightforward, 1:1 engagement where what you see is exactly what you're getting. When you sit down and eat sand, you don't think about the fact that you're putting fish shit in your mouth until someone points it out. You can criticize the unpleasantness of the physical experience of eating sand, but, once you become more aware of the unseen processes that lead to the sand being there to eat, you can also criticize the experience from the deeper, but just as real, reality of eating fish shit.