Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has said a series of things like “I don’t care about diversity,” while reassigning a disproportionately non-white group of 33 senior career staffers away from their original work, according to previous reports. But it turns out, it was more specific than that:
Nearly a third of the senior Interior Department (DOI) career officials reassigned under Secretary Ryan Zinke in a major agency reshuffling are Native American, even though Native Americans make up less than 10 percent of the Department’s workforce, a review by TPM has found. [...]
Former government officials tell TPM that they see the reassignment of top Native American staffers as part of an effort to remove internal opposition to Zinke’s plan to open up more tribal and public lands to the fossil fuel industry. [...]
Government documents and news reports reviewed by TPM show that at least ten are members of Native tribes. The list includes workers who have served in government for many years, like Chickasaw Nation member Stanley Speaks, Oglala Sioux member Michael Black, and Miami Nation member Darren Cruzan.
Several others on the list are Black and Latino, online records show.
Oh, so it might not be that Zinke hates Native Americans so much as that he hates their opposition to his attempts to open their land to drilling. That’s much better!