Our Interior Secretary is a great outdoorsman

Happens to the best fisherman all the time.

As Zinke and I casted over the ice-cold water, I noticed something funny about his setup. He kept struggling to strip line out of the bottom of the reel. For a while, I thought he was simply having trouble concentrating on our conversation while casting. No, there was something wrong, and when I asked him to stand for a portrait, I finally saw what the problem was. He had rigged his reel backward, so that the line was coming out of the top of the reel.

You'd think a Navy SEAL, Montanan and professed outdoorsman would know how to rig a line. But, really, this article is about Zinke's history and his work at Interior, where he's been under the microscope for "improper travel practices" and for getting his buddies government contracts.

[I]t’s the memory of a more moderate Zinke that has many Montanans, along with conservationists across the West, feeling baffled.

Right out of the gate, Zinke signaled not only that he would support the Trump administration’s plan to expand the oil and gas industry’s access to federal public lands, but that he would lead from the front—even when that meant attacking the Antiquities Act, the formidable land-preservation law signed in 1906 by Zinke’s hero, Theodore Roosevelt.

  Outside Online

As principled as Pence. And the whole damned Trump administration.

Apparently, he's used his service as a Navy SEAL to boost his political ambitions. Not that he's the only example of that angle.

But he hasn’t always been forthcoming about his military career, which some of his critics say was hampered by an official reprimand from superiors over misuse of Department of Defense travel funds.

Zinke’s election to the Montana senate in 2008 was bolstered by a coveted endorsement from Montana Conservation Voters, a nonprofit that surveys candidates on their positions regarding environmental issues.

[In Congress in 2015] Zinke voted against House measures to sell federal public land to the states, a thumb in the eye of the Utah delegation that includes Rob Bishop, chair of the Natural Resources Committee. [...] As a congressman, Zinke repeatedly stated his firm opposition to the sale or giveaway of public land.

[...]

Zinke made waves with his vote [...] to permanently reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The LWCF was designed to channel severance funds from the oil and gas industry into conservation and land-acquisition projects at the state level.

Zinke told me that Teddy Roosevelt gave us the first hundred-odd years of public-land stewardship, and that he sees it as his duty to guarantee the next hundred.

Then what the hell happened?

In Zinke’s testimony before Congress on the 2018 budget, he didn’t push back on President Trump’s proposed deep reductions to Interior, which include an 84 percent cut to the LWCF, the oil-funded conservation program that Zinke fought for as a congressman. But in his speeches and in my interviews with him, he has acknowledged that his agencies are underfunded and overburdened. Despite that belief, he has proposed more funding cuts and a workforce reduction.

[...]

Following an order issued by President Trump in April, Zinke told his agency to conduct a review of 27 monuments declared since 1996 and comprising 100,000 acres or more. The stated purpose was to ensure that the monuments complied with the Antiquities Act and to identify opportunities to change management policies, reduce acreage, or rescind monuments determined to be out of compliance.

Zinke provided 90 days for public comment on most of the monuments under consideration, all of which had been designated by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. But he allowed only 15 days for comment on Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

[...]

In August, when Zinke turned in his report on the monuments, it was no surprise to see that Bears Ears and Grand Staircase­Escalante [...] were on the list for drastic reductions in scale and changes to management policy that could allow for currently prohibited consumptive uses, such as oil and gas exploration.

[...]

But there’s a big catch: it’s not clear that President Trump has the authority to change monuments designated by previous presidents.

Authority or no, he's doing it.

Congress has always retained the authority to revise executive monument designations.

Retained but not exercised. Congress is good at that.

In pursuit of President Trump’s energy agenda, [Zinke has] pledged to throw open the gates to development on public lands on a scale that has not been seen for decades, if ever. Interior also oversees offshore leasing. In October, Zinke announced the largest lease sale in U.S. history, involving nearly 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, including areas where a moratorium has been in place since the Deepwater Horizon spill.

All this is happening at a time when oil and gas prices are near record lows, thanks in part to the fracking boom and a supply glut. This means that new ten-year oil and gas leases on public land will auction for peanuts and deliver meager royalties to the Treasury. The American people will get pennies on the dollar compared with what they could earn if sales of certain leases were delayed until the market made them lucrative for taxpayers rather than virtually free for developers. [...] [H]e personally led an effort at the request of the energy industry to do away with an Obama-era rule that boosted royalty revenues by eliminating loopholes that companies used to drastically reduce their obligations.

[...]

[Also, t]here are thousands of leases that have been sold but are not in development because of the glut. So why would Zinke want to flood the market with more, all but guaranteeing low sale prices?

Gee, I don't know. Shall we find out who's lining his pockets?

In September, Zinke disparaged Interior employees in a speech at a gathering of oil-industry executives, suggesting that the problem is not scientific opinion in general—but scientific opinion that stands in the way of the Trump administration’s plans. “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” he told them.

“The 2018 budget reduces lower priority programs $1.6 billion below 2017 and supports 59,968 full-time equivalents. This represents an estimated reduction of roughly 4,000 full-time equivalent staff from 2017.”

"Loyal to the flag." Trumpy through and through.

At interior, Zinke has run the show with military style, going so far as to insist that his employees raise and lower a special sec­retary of the interior flag every time he ­enters and leaves agency headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

At least he has the important thing covered.

Showboat.

I wonder if he saddled his own horse.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.