New Republic: Coal, casinos and cocaine at DOI

Politics

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

"If the news reports are accurate, Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado has been tapped by Barack Obama to head up the Department of Interior. Let's hope he knows what he's getting into. After the last eight years, the Interior Department has become fairly dysfunctional, and this may end up being one of the most difficult jobs in the Obama administration-not to mention one that gets remarkably little attention.

Looking back historically, the Interior Department has been a mess from the very beginning. It was created in 1849 essentially to handle the government's odds and ends, from exploring the West to conducting the decennial census to managing the D.C. jail system, and quickly became a massive patronage reservoir: Walt Whitman was famously fired from the department in 1866 by a reformer secretary trying to weed out sinecures. The public-land giveaways in the 1890s were frequently plagued by fraud--a precursor to the Teapot Dome scandal under Warren Harding--and the Indian Bureau has been criticized for corruption and inefficiency for as long as anyone can remember.

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. "

Get the Story:
Coal Mines, Casinos, and Cocaine (The New Republic 12/16)