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.
“All the new administration was interested in was their checklist for dismantling regulations and weakening environmental and land use protections,” said the former staffer. “Instead of asking why a senator or lobbyist or CEO was asking for a special favor and whether or not it was allowed under the law, this administration wanted to know why the special favor wasn’t already done and which deep state employee was standing in the way.”
Despite his public persona as a folksy Montanan with a Boy Scout’s penchant for pennants and horses, Zinke has taken shrewd and aggressive steps to transform from the inside a department whose 70,000 employees manage the country’s treasured national parks and its endangered species, in addition to overseeing vast energy and mineral deposits on at least 500m acres of public land.
During Zinke’s first months in office, he reassigned at least 25 senior officials at the department, a move that led some of the affected staff to question whether they were being punished for past work on subjects such as climate change, and which prompted at least one high-profile resignation. He publicly questioned the allegiance of other of his newly inherited employees, saying he had “30% of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag”.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
