Officials at the Interior Department say that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is taking a very Trump administration approach to diversity:
Three high-ranking Interior officials from three different divisions said that Zinke has made several comments with a similar theme, saying "diversity isn't important," or "I don't care about diversity," or "I don't really think that's important anymore."
Bad enough that he’s saying it, and potentially bringing that attitude to future hiring decisions, but that’s not all. Last year, 33 senior executive staffers were reassigned. At least one says it’s because he was a climate change whistleblower, and beyond that, it sure looks like race was at play in the decisions:
[Whistleblower Joel] Clement's attorney, Katie Atkinson, told CNN that she believes at least 15 of the 33 who were reassigned were minorities.
A CNN comparison with senior executive staff levels made available by the Office of Personnel Management show that a disproportionate number of those moved were racial minorities.
Only 28% of the 235 senior leaders at Interior self-report as minorities, but more than 40% of the 33 people who were moved in June without warning were non-white, based on the numbers provided by Atkinson.
It’s possible that those people weren’t reassigned exactly or directly because of the color of their skin, or because of their ancestry. It’s even probable that Zinke didn’t stride down the halls using a paper bag test to reassign people. But if he was moving people from policy positions to accounting positions, as happened to Clement, and it was because of their ideas, because they weren’t rejecting science and falling in line with Trumpist doctrine quickly enough, and it just so happens that that meant the changes disproportionately affected people of color … well, that’s a big part of the point of diversity.
It’s about the representation of ideas and views and knowledge that people get because of differing life experiences. And it would definitely be in line with what we know about Zinke—and the Trump administration, more generally—to reject that.