Democracy in America | That Zinking feeling

Ryan Zinke resigns as America’s secretary of the interior

And a new chief of staff arrives

By J.E.F. | WASHINGTON, DC

ONE THING that Ryan Zinke, who resigned from his post as interior secretary on December 15th, never lacked was a sense of ceremony. Most Washingtonians commute to work by subway or car. For his first day in office Mr Zinke travelled by horse. Mounted police escorted him; a Native American drummer greeted him. During his tenure, a security staffer would ascend to the interior department’s roof to hoist a secretarial flag—blue, depicting the agency’s bison seal flanked by seven white stars—when he arrived in the morning. When he left for the evening the flag would be lowered. This ritual has a long history but today is more honoured in the breach than the observance.

But it was not excessive flag-hoisting that drove Mr Zinke from office. Like Tom Price and Scott Pruitt, who served respectively as President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, and head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr Zinke left amid a raft of ethics investigations.

His department’s inspector-general found that he violated policy by having his wife travel with him in government vehicles, and by having his security detail join his family on vacation, costing taxpayers more than $25,000. That same entity is also investigating his decision to block two Native American tribes from expanding their casino after his office was lobbied by a gaming firm that wants to open its own casino nearby. The Department of Justice is investigating whether a real-estate development deal near land owned by Mr Zinke and his wife amounts to self-dealing and a conflict of interest.

Mr Zinke long faced criticism from environmentalists—and praise from fossil-fuel interests—for easing environmental regulations and opening public lands to oil and gas exploration. His deputy secretary and acting replacement—David Bernhardt, a former oil-and-gas lobbyist with so many potential conflicts of interests that, according to the Washington Post, “he has to carry a small card listing them all”—will no doubt face similar opposition.

For his part, Mr Zinke has denied wrongdoing; he said he was resigning because he could not “justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations.” He lasted as long as he did in part because Mr Trump reportedly likes him personally, though he risked becoming a target of Democratic subpoenas when the new Congress convenes in January.

Mr Zinke will leave office at roughly the same time as John Kelly, Mr Trump’s chief of staff. Mr Kelly will be replaced by Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He was offered the job after two potential candidates—Nick Ayres, currently chief of staff to Mike Pence, the vice-president, and Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor—declined.

That the most powerful non-elected job in Washington has become a poisoned chalice says much about how Mr Trump’s White House operates. The chief of staff’s job is to control access and the flow of information to the president. Mr Trump resists such strictures, preferring a more freewheeling style, operating on instinct and gut feelings. Mr Kelly came in with a mandate to control leaks; 17 months later, the White House remains a sieve.

According to Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers”, a book about White House chiefs of staff, “the most important thing a chief of staff can do is walk into the Oval Office, shut the door and tell the president what he does not want to hear.” The best chiefs have been forceful figures. But Mr Mulvaney will have to do the job while also remaining in command of the OMB, which bodes well for neither the sizable federal agency in charge of the president’s budget nor the prospects of a more smoothly running White House.

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