Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke waded into The Swamp to deliver a speech to Big Oil and he delivered several comments that are raising eyebrows. From the Associated Press:
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Monday that nearly one-third of employees at his department are not loyal to him and President Donald Trump, adding that he is working to change the department’s regulatory culture to be more business friendly.
Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, said he knew when he took over the 70,000-employee department in March that, “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag.”
Want to work in America’s National Parks? Apparently you need to prove your loyalty to Donald Trump and Ryan Zinke. How would they go about determining whether someone is personally loyal to the president? It’s entirely un-American to demand a test of loyalty to one party or one person.
But that was not the only comment raising eyebrows. He also made big promises to his greedy Big Oil swamp gathering. In the quest to make the Department of the Interior more “business-friendly,” they are going to start cutting all those pesky regulations that protect the environment. More from the AP:
“It’s going to be huge,” he said in a speech to the National Petroleum Council, an advisory committee that includes leaders of the oil and gas industry. “I really can’t change the culture without changing the structure.”
Besides moving employees, Zinke said he wants to speed up permits for oil drilling, logging and other energy development that now can take years.
And when it comes to fracking, which has poisoned water resources and is the primary cause of the drastic rise of earthquakes in places like Oklahoma, he bizarrely added it was a sign God loves us!
“Fracking is proof that God’s got a good sense of humor and he loves us,” Zinke said without explanation.
It sounds as if the Interior Department is being absorbed into the Big Oil swamp and getting away from the mission of the department as a whole. Since its inception, the mission of the Department of the Interior is to protect natural resources:
The Department of the Interior protects and manages the Nation's natural resources and cultural heritage; provides scientific and other information about those resources; and honors its trust responsibilities or special commitments to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and affiliated island communities.
One other item of note about Zinke’s “culture change” at the Department of the Interior, last week he personally installed a hunting video game in the employee cafeteria. Your tax dollars hard at work: