Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his allies are counterpunching as they defend his travel practices. The aggressive tactics blend blunt talk from the former Navy SEAL with finger-pointing that amounts to jabs at his Democratic predecessors. The combination could help Zinke ride out a wave that, grown larger, swamped one of his former Trump administration colleagues. The approach is also characteristic of someone trained not to back down. Zinke's deputy secretary, David Bernhardt, typified the approach yesterday, after being hit by an Office of Inspector General "management advisory" that cited "deficient" documentation for Zinke's travels. Bernhardt thanked Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall for her "diligence and sense of urgency." Then he turned the tables. Bernhardt advised Kendall that he and Zinke had "inherited an organizational and operational mess from the prior administration." He itemized 12 trips made by former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, for which travel vouchers remain unfinished. "I also request all management advisories involving [the secretary's office] over the past 10 years be provided to me immediately, so that I can better identify the full scope of the systemic problems that potentially exist," Bernhardt wrote. With the Obama administration having controlled the Interior Department for eight of the past 10 years, the prior management advisories could provide Zinke's team with offensive as well as defensive material, in addition to helping improve departmental management. In a similar vein, two top Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee last month asked Interior for documents related to secretarial travel on government-owned, rented, leased or chartered aircraft since Jan. 20, 2009, which was the start of the Obama administration The documents revealed that the Obama administration's two Interior secretaries, Jewell and Ken Salazar, accumulated close to a million dollars in noncommercial travel expenses during their years in office. "This data show that Secretary Zinke's flights have been on par, if not below the average amount of money spent on noncommercial airline flights," Molly Block, a spokeswoman for the House Natural Resources Committee, said after release of the documents...more
No comments:
Post a Comment