October 18, 2018
Update (5:20 p.m.): After almost two days of silence, the Interior Department now denies that Suzanne Tufts will replace Mary Kendall as DOI’s Acting Inspector General, with its press secretary blaming HUD Secretary Ben Carson for sending an email with “100 percent false information.”
Remember Scott Pruitt? For months, it seemed as though no scheme was too sordid for President Trump’s first Environmental Protection Agency director. Using his staff to find his wife a job, renting a condo for dirt-cheap from a lobbyist’s wife, having his security detail drive him around in search of a special moisturizer — the pile of scandals grew ever higher. Yet Pruitt remained. He finally resigned in July, his tenure an impressive feat to all those who wish to exploit Cabinet positions for family gain.
Meet the new Pruitt: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. While he may have been in Pruitt’s shadow earlier in the administration, Zinke has now racked up an impressive number of scandals. Zinke currently faces at least four inspector general probes, and he has faced more than a dozen investigations from the IG, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Office of Special Counsel. Topics include: thousands of dollars in spending on charter flights, censorship of a National Park Service report on climate change, blocking a casino project after visits from a potential competitor’s lobbyists and a real estate deal involving a foundation he created and developers including Halliburton Chairman David Lesar. Not Trump-family-member questions of corruption, perhaps, but above average for a Trump Cabinet official.
No doubt Zinke feels the multiple investigations interfere with his true calling: fulfilling his promise to “work for” the oil and gas industry. But he seems to have hit upon a new way to stymie an inspector general: Fire her.
The Post reports that Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall, “who had led the office for nine years and served as its deputy since 1999,” will be replaced by Suzanne Israel Tufts, currently an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Tufts, a political appointee, has no experience in oversight or the environment. But she has at least one qualification that Zinke might like: At HUD, “she replaced a career official who had voiced objections about a redecoration of [HUD Secretary Ben] Carson’s office.” He also might like that Tufts’s background includes “recruiting and training lawyers deployed by the Republican National Lawyers Association to watch the polls on Election Day 2016.” Or perhaps it was enough that Tufts “noted on her resume that she had experience ‘staffing events hosted by President Donald J. Trump for Victory.'”
Give Zinke points for ingenuity: Apparently, no acting inspector general has ever been replaced with another acting inspector general. And because Tufts’s position is ostensibly temporary, she need not be confirmed by the Senate. (Barack Obama nominated Kendall to fill the position formally, but the Senate never voted on her.)
If Tufts intends to zealously carry out her new oversight responsibilities, she seems to be in no hurry to reassure anyone, especially her new staff. Five days after Carson announced her move, reported E&E News, “Tufts still hasn’t shown up at her new workplace or communicated with the Interior IG’s staff.” On the other hand, if Tufts’s job is to slow the IG probes down as much as possible, she’s off to a terrific start.
Like Pruitt, Zinke does not seem content with simply letting private interests exploit the environment. Even by Trump White House standards, his obstruction of an inspector general is scandalous. If Democrats retake the House and/or Senate, hearings into Zinke’s conduct can’t come soon enough.
