Donald Trump's team of diehard archconservatives (we can probably dispense with giving Trump himself agency in these decisions, given that his own ideological preferences begin and end with "how much did person so-and-so suck up to me today?") has been doing a bang-up job of installing crooks into government. These are people who are specifically and publicly at odds with the central premises of the agencies they are supposed to head; people who have come directly from regulated industries into new positions re-writing the regulations their once and future companies are asked to abide by; people who don't have enough patience to plan for that lucrative cash-out at the end of their terms and instead go for the more immediate satisfaction of jetting around the country on somebody else's dime.
Trump's new nominee to head the Interior Department comes from columns A and B. David Bernhardt has been up until now the acting secretary for that department, having been elevated into the position after Ryan Zinke ducked out amidst a shower of ethics investigations. Before joining Team Trump, however, he had settled into a lucrative lobbying career—one so extensive that upon joining the department, he had to walk around with a small card listing off his 26 recent clients in order to keep track of which things he would ostensibly be required to recuse himself from.
He is not, however, the sort to ruin an effort at the most efficient possible sucking-up of our natural resources with tawdry scandals. There will be no Zinke-level scandal eruptions; Bernhardt is devoted to doing things by the book, so that the tweaks made to American policy under his own management are not so easily undone.
At least, that's what we thought. In practice, Bernhardt seems to have stepped in it with a set of eyebrow-raising decisions during Trump's imposed federal shutdown.
After pictures of national parks overrun with trash and stopped-up toilets began to irritate the American people, Bernhardt ordered the most popular parks to stay open and clean up the damage by dipping into each park's long-term maintenance purse, a decision which will have budget ramifications for the next 10 years. That decision was seen as an effort to gloss over the very real damage being done to both the parks and the economies that rely upon them, so that the pictures would stop appearing on the nightly news.
Bernhardt's more curious move, however, was suddenly recalling at least 40 furloughed workers—non-essential personnel, in the prior judgment of his department—in order to continue Trump administration efforts to speedily expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters. And the Bureau of Land Management somehow managed to stay almost entirely open "in order to comply," in their words, "with the administration's America First energy strategy." This meant that new industry drilling applications continued to be processed and accepted even as many of the government functions Americans not in industries David Bernhardt has served as lobbyist to remained shuttered.
Those moves are now being scrutinized by watchdog groups, and Bernhardt can expect to be grilled on them by a new Democratic House with near-zero patience for the sort of stunts that Trump's government appointees so regularly got away with under Republican oversight. The question is not only whether these moves to seemingly tactically protect Trump administration priorities during the shutdown were ethical, but whether Bernhardt and others skirted the law in order to pull them off.
Those will be among the questions being asked today in a hearing of the now majority-Democratic Appropriations subcommittee for the Interior. It is likely that Bernhardt himself will be summoned to answer them sooner or later.