Democracy in America | Zinke or swim

Ryan Zinke’s messy week

Confusion and scandal at the Department of the Interior

By I.K. | WASHINGTON, DC

COMPARED to the powerful interior ministries of most countries, which manage national-security and immigration portfolios, America’s Department of the Interior (DoI) is a humble agency. It manages vast lands owned by the federal government, oversees national parks and ministers over Native American reservations and territories like Puerto Rico. The secretary in charge of it often goes unnoticed. But Ryan Zinke, Donald Trump’s boulder-jawed secretary of the interior, is currently attracting attention.

Like several other cabinet members, past and present, in the Trump administration, Mr Zinke is embroiled in scandal. This has created a lot of work for the department’s inspector-general, the internal watchdog. But the response from the Trump administration has not been to ditch Mr Zinke, but to instead try and dispatch with the meddlesome inspector-general. On October 17th, the Hill, an American newspaper, reported that a political appointee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be replacing the inspector-general, even as her office investigates Mr Zinke on at least four fronts. This sparked outrage. Inspectors-general are typically non-partisan and are usually kept in place—even after presidential transitions. The current one, Mary Kendall, has held the role since 2009. When asked for comment, the DoI issued only press statements directing reporters to the White House. The next day, the DoI said that the staff move announcement by HUD in fact “had false information in it”, and that Ms Kendall would keep her job for the time being.

If the botched fake-sacking of Ms Kendall seems bizarre, so are many of the episodes that she is investigating. Before the details were made public, the DoI had been prepared to pay $139,000 to replace six doors in Mr Zinke’s office. Mr Zinke insisted that a special flag be flown whenever he entered agency headquarters (the deputy secretary got one too). A real-estate deal with David Lesar, the chairman of Halliburton, an oil-services firm, in Mr Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana, is also being investigated. The deal seemed designed to set up Mr Zinke with a microbrewery after he left office. On October 18th, it was reported that the inspector-general had issued a report faulting Mr Zinke for improperly bringing his wife, a non-government employee, along in official vehicles. According to the report, he instructed staff to research the possibility of making his wife an official DoI volunteer, which would have allowed her to travel with him for free.

As with Scott Pruitt, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, such scandals have overshadowed the agency’s actual activities. These are also troubling. The top tiers of the DoI include former lobbyists and advocates for mining and energy firms, which lease federal land from the agency for extraction. Mr Zinke appears to have been much less taken with the agency’s traditional mission of land conservation than “achieving American energy dominance”.

Much of the operational details of the department have been left to Mr Zinke’s deputy secretary, David Bernhardt. Mr Bernhardt worked for the agency during the Bush administration, before taking a job representing oil companies during Barack Obama’s presidency. The agency has undone emissions rules, making it easier for companies drilling on federal and tribal lands to emit methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. It has also redrawn the boundaries of national monuments to make them radically smaller. An investigation is also looking into whether Mr Zinke redrew the lines for one of the sites, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, to benefit a Republican state legislator.

In its budget requests to Congress, the DoI has repeatedly asked for steep cuts to the Bureau of Land Management, which operates mining leases. “They basically want to cripple their ability to hold accountable oil companies that drill on public lands,” says Chris Saeger, the director of the Western Values Project, a conservation group critical of Mr Zinke. “That is to create an artificial problem where they don’t have enough resources to police, and then use that as a pretext to get rid of the rules altogether”. In a more normal administration, Mr Zinke’s misadventures might have got him fired. In the current administration, they barely make headlines.

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