"Senator Ken Salazar, the Colorado Democrat who is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of the interior, will inherit a department riddled with incompetence and corruption, captive to industries it is supposed to regulate and far more interested in exploiting public resources than conserving them.

No cabinet post is as critical to the integrity of the nation’s parks, its open spaces and its animal species. Mr. Obama, and his environmental adviser in chief, Carol Browner, must be prepared to offer Mr. Salazar full support, especially in fending off the ranchers and the oil, gas, mining and other special interests who have always found the Interior Department to be a soft target, never more so than in the Bush administration.

Mr. Salazar’s most urgent task will be to remove the influence of politics and ideology from decisions that are best left to science.

Just as Mr. Salazar’s name was surfacing for the job, Earl Devaney, currently the department’s inspector general, reported to Congress that on 15 separate occasions the department’s political appointees had weakened protections for endangered species against the advice of the agency’s scientists, whose work they either ignored or distorted."

Get the Story:
Editorial: Fixing Interior (The New York Times 12/17)

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