What’s driving an Interior whistleblower to dissent?

Many of the Interior Department’s 70,000 employees were outraged when their leader, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, recently said that 30 percent of them are “not loyal to the flag.” But while the vast majority of them suffered in silence, Joel Clement, until recently the department’s top climate change official, took to Twitter. “Civil servants are loyal to the flag and also know a demagogue when they see one,” he tweeted. Clement also retweeted negative comments from others about Zinke’s speech in late September to the National Petroleum Council, an Energy Department advisory group comprised largely of industry representatives. Current and former federal employees and others who heard and read Zinke’s comment interpreted it two ways. Some thought he meant the U.S. flag. To others the “flag” represented Zinke’s leadership of the department. Clement said that as a longtime Navy Seal, Zinke should understand the serious connotation of his words. “I think he is so arrogant that he thinks his special interest agenda is the same as what’s best for America. He is bought and paid for by oil and gas and political ambition.” Clement is a rare breed: A vocal dissident inside a cabinet agency in the Trump administration. He’s among dozens of senior executives at the Interior Department whom Zinke reassigned in this summer in an unprecedented shakeup of the top career staff. Instead of quitting, Clement in July started publicly criticizing the new administration and filed a whistleblower complaint. Now he’s urging other civil servants to join him in exposing the ways the Trump administration is betraying the core missions of federal agencies. To get a feel for his colleagues’ reactions to Zinke’s recent speech, Clement went to the cafeteria at Interior’s D.C. headquarters. “Everyone was super ticked off...more