BY BRADFORD MCKEE

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

A recent history of Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is as follows:

In April, the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report on its investigation into the reassignment under Zinke of 27 career members of the department’s Senior Executive Service, high-level staff whose jobs are to “provide institutional stability and continuity” across administrations. More than 40 percent of the executives reassigned, CNN reported, were nonwhite. Ten of those employees told the inspector general’s office they believe their reassignments were for “political or punitive reasons,” including past work on climate change, energy policy, or conservation. The inspector general was unable to figure out whether the department followed legal requirements and guidelines for internal reassignments because “DOI did not document its plans or reasons” for the reassignments. Several department employees told CNN they had heard Zinke say that diversity was not “important” at the agency, which employs nearly 70,000 people, more than 70 percent of whom are white. Zinke’s office denied his ever having made such comments.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel confirmed also in April that it is looking into whether Zinke violated the Hatch Act, which forbids certain kinds of political activity by most employees of the executive branch, by announcing an exemption for Florida from a sweeping plan to begin opening nearly all of the United States’s outer continental shelf to oil and gas exploration. The exemption, the only one given to a whole state, was staged as a victory for Governor Rick Scott, a Republican who is running for one of Florida’s Senate seats.

The special counsel’s office is also examining whether Zinke violated the Hatch Act by tweeting a photo of himself wearing socks that read “Make America Great Again” during a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. In early March, the special counsel’s office issued specific guidance to clarify that federal employees may not wear or display the slogan on duty or in the workplace. Zinke soon deleted the tweet and apologized for having posted it.

In May, Zinke told the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, of his plans to reorganize the Interior Department with a goal of streamlining environmental permitting for oil and gas production.

More recently, in July, Zinke came under investigation by the Interior inspector general for his involvement in a land deal in Whitefish, Montana, Zinke’s hometown, with David Lesar, who is the chairman of the oil company Halliburton. Plans submitted by Zinke’s wife, Lola Zinke, to the city show that Lesar’s development will rely for parking on part of a property owned by a foundation established by the Zinkes to create a veterans’ memorial park. The Lesar development includes a proposed microbrewery, which the city planner was told would be set aside for Zinke, who has long openly stated a wish to open a microbrewery. Halliburton has a direct interest at the Interior Department regarding vast oil and gas leases on public lands. Zinke has denied any involvement in a microbrewery project. “Any suggestion to the contrary is absurd,” he said.

Around that same time, his department, along with the Department of Commerce, proposed rule changes to the Endangered Species Act that would weaken provisions meant to protect threatened species in ways similar to endangered ones, allow economic considerations to factor alongside scientific ones in protecting species, and end scientific and wildlife agency review requirements for approval of drilling permits.

Also in July, a Washington Post report on Interior Department e-mails regarding a project to shrink 27 national monuments found the review by Zinke and his staff of those monuments did not consider their benefits beyond their value for “logging, ranching, and energy development.”

Upon the release of the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act, Jamie Rappaport Clark, the president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife and a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department division, under President Bill Clinton, told the Washington Post, “The signal being sent by the Trump administration is clear: Protecting America’s wildlife and wild lands is simply not on their agenda.”