Tag: Department of the Interior

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke violated the department’s policy on travel, the agency’s watchdog concluded

US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke rides a horse to his first day on the job, shutting down DC streets. Credit: US Dept of the Interior, Flickr

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s approach to his wife’s travel and activities sparked concerns among the department’s ethics officials, according to a new report issued Thursday by Interior’s inspector general office.

The report determined that staff in the department’s solicitor office “approved Lolita Zinke and other individuals to ride in Government vehicles with Secretary Zinke” despite the fact that Interior policy prohibited this practice. The employee who authorized the move told investigators that “she routinely advised” Zinke’s aides “that it would be ‘cleanest’ and ‘lowest risk’ if she did not ride with him,” but could find a way to justify it. This summer, Zinke changed Interior’s policy so that family members could ride along with him.

Zinke confirmed to investigators that he had gotten his staff to research the possibility of giving his wife a volunteer job at Interior, a move that one ethics official objected to on the grounds that it was designed so Zinke wouldn’t “have to pay” for her travel. Zinke subsquently “denied that it was an effort to circumvent the requirement to reimburse the DOI for her travel,” the report states.

View the complete October 18 article by Juliet Eiplperin, Lisa Rein and Josh Dawsey on the Washington Post website here.

The Damage Done by Trump’s Department of the Interior

The following article by Elizabeth Kolbert was posted on the New Yorker website January 24, 2018:

Under Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior, it’s a sell-off from sea to shining sea.

llustration by Tom Bachtell

In his first day as Secretary of the Interior, last March, Ryan Zinke rode through downtown Washington, D.C., on a roan named Tonto. When the Secretary is working at the department’s main office, on C Street, a staff member climbs up to the roof of the building and hoists a special flag, which comes down when Zinke goes home for the day. To provide entertainment for his employees, the Secretary had an arcade game called Big Buck Hunter installed in the cafeteria. The game comes with plastic rifles, which players aim at animated deer. The point of the installation, Zinke has said, is to highlight sportsmen’s contribution to conservation. “Get excited for #hunting season!” he tweeted, along with a photo of himself standing next to the game, which looks like a slot machine sporting antlers.

Nowadays, it is, in a manner of speaking, always hunting season at the Department of the Interior. The department, which comprises agencies ranging from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, oversees some five hundred million acres of federal land, and more than one and a half billion acres offshore. Usually, there’s a tension between the department’s mandates—to protect the nation’s natural resources and to manage them for commercial use. Under Zinke, the only question, from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, is how fast these resources can be auctioned off. Continue reading “The Damage Done by Trump’s Department of the Interior”