The Zinke effect: how the US interior department became a tool of industry

[arenean]

From The Guardian:


Since his first day on the job, when he surrounded himself with a National Park Service police escort and rode through Washington DC on a white-nosed horse named Tonto, the US interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, has exhibited a flair for ostentation.

Not long after taking office in March 2017, the new secretary started flying a special flag, adorned with the agency’s bison seal, above the interior department’s elegant New-Deal-era headquarters. At a cost of more than $2,000, he also commissioned commemorative coins emblazoned with his name to hand out to visitors and staff. He replaced the doors in his office to the tune of more than $130,000, and installed a hunting-themed arcade game in the department’s cafeteria.

Yet to some longtime civil servants working at interior headquarters, this flashy behavior was merely a distraction from graver concerns.

“There was a lot of eye-rolling and embarrassment about the flag and the horse and all of the ridiculousness,” said a former senior employee who left last year and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. For some, the dominant emotional tenor at the time was “fear and anxiety” as Zinke and his team ushered in “dramatic change” at the interior department.

Full story: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/12/the-zinke-effect-how-the-us-interior-department-became-a-tool-of-industry

[Scarsdale]

1. Well, easy to see

why tRump chose HIM. Just as flashy, ostentatious and free with taxpayer $$$ as tRump. Are any of tRump's appointees actually qualified for their positions?

[sharedvalues]

2. This all happened under GW Bush too. It's REPUBLICANS

It’s the Republican Party that is at fault- captured by billionaires and corporations.

[JayhawkSD]

3. Zinke certainly seems a bad choice.

And his personal behavior is distasteful, to say the least. It may be, and probably is true that this appointment is a disaster for the government and for the nation.

But the article is almost entirely generalities and supposition, short on any specifics of any details of actual misconduct. His staff, for instance, held a bunch of meetings. Okay, that is their job. What came out of their meetings is not stated in the article, other than that one of a dozen or so lawsuits was settled afterward. Was that lawsuit settled as a result of those meetings? The article does not even actually suggest that such was the case, but places them in the same paragraph so that we can infer that it was.

It did get specific when it said that, "Zinke drastically reduced the size of Bears Ears national monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument in Utah last year in what amounted to the largest rollback of protected public lands in American history," except that Zinke did not do that. Trump did that when he reversed an executive order by Obama which expanded those monuments. There were many who thought that Obama's executive orders were overreach. I don't know the facts and have no opinion on this particular issue, but I can tell the difference between Zinke's signature and Trump's.

I'm not defending Zinke. Almost all of Trump's appointments are awful, and what I do know of Zinke I don't like at all, but this article is mostly drivel.