Ryan Zinke's Interior Is a Mess

Christopher Solomon

Last week was a no good, very bad week for the Department of the Interior and its Stetson’d chief, Ryan Zinke. It started with news outlets reporting that Interior’s acting inspector general, Mary Kendall, would be replaced by Suzanne Tufts, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Tufts has no relevant investigative experience and seems to only be notable for shutting down inquiries into the redecoration of HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s office. After a full two days of radio silence, the DOI refuted the reporting. “100 percent false information,” an Interior spokeswoman told the Washington Post. The timing of the apparent miscommunication seemed especially odd, as a concurrent report by Kendall concluded that Zinke and others had not followed the department’s travel policies in several instances. When the smoke cleared, Kendall was still the acting inspector general...Last week’s events bring up another issue. Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt last week lamented to the Post of the top inspector general position, “the job has been vacant... for almost a decade. That’s not good, because that’s not the way we run the country.” But that’s not true. In fact, the events of last week point to an emerging pattern of the Trump administration not filling vacant top positions—jobs so senior that they require Senate approval, claims the organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Nearly two years into the Trump administration, the DOI, for instance, has nearly as many of these vacant positions that must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate (eight), as it has filled (nine). And there is currently no nominee for seven of those eight jobs, points out Jeff Ruch, PEER's executive director. Instead, the administration is staffing these jobs with “acting” chiefs, who can be selected by the administration and who therefore don’t need Senate approval. Such fill-in roles are supposed to be temporary. That’s not happening, watchdogs say. “It is becoming clear that, except when unavoidable, such as Supreme Court vacancies, the Trump Administration is bypassing the bother of Senate confirmation,” PEER wrote this week in an op-ed...Congress enacted a law in 1998 to keep an administration from dodging its ability to “advise and consent” on people placed in high positions. Under that act, actions taken by an official who’s later deemed to be in that job inappropriately can be disputed. “Consequently,” PEER wrote, “these acts of executive hubris may become an Achilles heel.”...MORE