Coal Mines, Casinos, and Cocaine

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The current Bush administration has gone further still. Bush's Interior transition team, after all, included GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and stuffed the department full of former industry officials, many of whom were unqualified to do the conservation jobs they were given. The key figure early on was deputy secretary Steven Griles, an ex-mining executive who flouted ethics rules by conferring with former coal clients over mountaintop mining and coal-bed methane drilling. (His meetings were discovered by Kirsten Sykes, a young staffer at Friends of the Earth.) Griles was eventually ousted after the Abramoff scandal, when it was revealed that he had pledged to block approval for an Indian casino that Abramoff was fighting to kill while the lobbyist poured money into a front group run by Griles's girlfriend. (Griles later served ten months in prison for obstruction of justice.) During the Bush years, Interior officials catered entirely to miners, ranchers, and loggers--and paid virtually no attention to conservation. The tone was set from the beginning, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) diverted thousands of gallons from the Klamath River at the behest of farmers, despite scientific findings that the diversions would lead to massive kills of endangered salmon and suckerfish. (Later reporting revealed that Dick Cheney had pressured the department to divert the water.) Bush's first Interior secretary, Gale Norton, interfered with scientific assessments of the impact on Arctic drilling, suppressed a report on mountaintop removal mining, and refused to list a single new endangered species. Again, the difference with what was going on in the EPA was stark--Jeff Ruch of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, whose group works with whistleblowers at both agencies, told me that at the EPA, scientific recommendations would simply be excluded from consideration by political appointees; at Interior, however, officials like Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for Fish & Wildlife & Parks, would order the conclusions reversed. (MacDonald, semi-hilariously, resigned after it was revealed that, among other things, she was sharing internal agency documents with a teenage online gaming friend via his father's e-mail account.) Then, of course, there was the spectacularly sordid ongoing scandal at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the federal agency that sells oil and gas collected as royalties from energy companies drilling on federal lands. As an inspector general's report revealed earlier this year, MMS employees were receiving thousands of dollars of gifts from the oil companies they were supposed to oversee. Stacy Leyshon, who had received $2,887 worth of meals, drinks, and golf passes from oil companies between 2002 and 2006, later allowed companies to revise their bids for oil after they had been awarded--118 amendments that cost the government $4.4 million. The manager of the royalty program was steering contracts to his outside consulting firm, all while buying cocaine from and sleeping with subordinates....