Change Long Overdue: Ken Salazar Meets the Interior Department.
By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, who's been named by Barack Obama as the incoming Secretary of the Interior, is a good guy. He is an independent Democrat from southern Colorado, where his ranching family has lived for generations. Four years ago, when he won his seat in the Senate, he demonstrated, to national Democrats, his party's revived potential in the Mountain West. He has an enviable quality for a politician: like Ronald Reagan, folks tend to underestimate him.
Salazar is a moderate. When other Democrats turned their backs, he loyally maintained his friendship with Sen. Joe Lieberman, the traitor from Connecticut. Salazar's first shining moment in the Senate came when Republicans threatened to "nuke" the federal judicial selection process, and he joined with Sen. John McCain in the gang of a dozen centrist Republicans and Democrats who defused that confrontation.
I'm thinking that neither industry nor the professional environmental movement is entirely thrilled with Salazar's appointment to Interior. Yet not terribly angry either. Democrats out West tend to side with the tree-huggers, while recognizing the place that resource development and the recreation industries have in the regional and national economy. I have no doubt that Salazar will make sound, deliberate—maybe even cautious—changes in federal stewardship of the public lands.
Salazar's real challenge—as well as his historic opportunity, and political potential—lies not in policy, but in management. I have lived a life watching crooks in Washington and cannot remember a federal agency so mismanaged, gutted, demoralized and corrupted as George W. Bush's Department of the Interior.
It is stunning. Interior has it all. Thievery. Sex scandals. Money scandals. Archaic accounting and business processes. Energy lobbyists run amok. Former corporate officials and lobbyists, "regulating" the industries they used to work for—who will now return to their cushy industry jobs.
The saga of Jack Abramoff—the sleazy lobbyist who cheated Native Americans out of their gaming profits—was no aberration at Interior. The Abramoff scandals represented the department's very way of doing business.
Before he was a senator, Salazar was his state's Attorney General. He liked those days as Colorado's top cop. And that is the real key to his appointment.
If, in the next four years, Salazar and Obama add not one acre or species to protected status—but clean house at Interior, reform its deplorable practices and leave behind an honest, modernized and model federal agency—they will more than justify the electorate's faith in them, and give Western voters a compelling reason to declare for the Democrats in future elections.
Indeed, that may be said of the Obama administration as a whole. The real action in the next four years may lie in management, not policy. The political party that makes the federal government work, efficiently, for the people, will have a mighty claim on their affection and respect.
It won't be easy. Salazar will need to summon yet undemonstrated guts, purpose and managerial skills to succeed. But it's got to be done. And he has no alternative. If he leaves Interior anything like he finds it, his fine career in public service will be tarnished, and over.
- Read more by John Aloysius Farrell.
- Read more from the Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
- Read more about the Obama administration.
- Read more about the Department of the Interior.
Tags: Barack Obama | Ken Salazar | Department of the Interior | Jack Abramoff | Obama administration | Obama transition
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Reader Comments
Ken Salazar and his decision to continue the Bush Administration's plans to delist 1000 wolves
Mr. Farrell,
After reeading your column about Ken Salazr I felt a need to disagree with you on his principles.
It is my opinion that Ken Salazar is making a huge mistake in continuing the Bush Administration's plan to delist 1000 wolves in the Rocky Mountain ranges. Certainly he can clean house in the Department of Interior and still attend to its business of managing our natural resources.
I am firmly behind President Obama on his plans for our country. But, I believe that whoever vetted Mr. Salazar gave President Obama some bad advice and he should rethink who he has put in charge of managing the Department of the Interior for us. To me it's rather reminiscent of Secretary Gayle Norton and everyone knows what a bad manager she was.
During recent years it has been wonderful to see the return of so many endangered species to their natural surroundings. We now have wolves, coyotes, black bears, etc. in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, elk in northern Wisconsin and that is only a drop in the bucket.
Rarely, if ever, do I agree with humans who feel they are entitled kill or chase off animals from their natural habitats to build, farm and drill. Man needs to stop interferring with Mother Nature - she did quite well before man began usurping everything and declaring it as their right. Where are the natural predators that could control the wolf population, as it was prior to humans taking over? We tend to screw up more than enhance. In the U.S. we did this not to just wildlife - but also to our Native Americans, and look at what we have wrought. Me thinks man should reconsider if they have the right to move in when it will displace or destroy wildlife, trees, lakes, on and on.
I ask your readers to please encourage Secretary Salazar to not be a follower of the Bush Administration's bad decisions and that he change the decision to delist wolves in the Rockies. Perhaps he could use a tuturial on honey bees, which are now another example of man's stupidity. They are nearly extinct and vital to our survival.
We have to put a stop the slaughter, which will occur with the delisting - too much is at stake.
NOT SO FAST...
Mr. Farrell says he has “no doubt that Salazar will make sound, deliberate-maybe even cautious-changes in federal stewardship of the public lands”, because the real challenge is in undoing the damage to an agency “so mismanaged, gutted, demoralized and corrupted as George W. Bush’s Department of the Interior.”
Perhaps Mr. Farrell isn’t aware of Salazar’s endorsement of Gale Norton for Secretary of Interior, when he was Attorney General. Norton was one of the first in a long line of architects of mismanagement and complacency in the Interior. Salazar has a record that shows the inability to be an unbiased steward of the land’s natural resources. As a rancher and landowner, he threatened a law suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for listing the black-tailed prairie dog as endangered. In other words, Salazar can be counted on to make cautious, thoughtful, and responsible decisions about land use and wildlife, as long as it doesn’t have a negative impact on HIS land or the land of his deep-pocked cronies.
We are just emerging from the longest hiatus of meaningful endangered listings in the history of records. To suggest that the next four years should be spent cleaning the house of the Interior, even though the reform might not result in a single acre of habitat or species being listed under ESA protection, is asinine. There are species barely hanging on by a thread, who do not have the luxury of waiting another four years, while Salazar and Obama reform the department’s “deplorable practices”. The new Secretary of Interior needs to put aside his personal prejudices, self-interests, and politics; and be wise enough to listen to his own biologists, because time is wasting
NOT SO FAST...
Mr. Farrell says he has “no doubt that Salazar will make sound, deliberate-maybe even cautious-changes in federal stewardship of the public lands”, because the real challenge is in undoing the damage to an agency “so mismanaged, gutted, demoralized and corrupted as George W. Bush’s Department of the Interior.”
Perhaps Mr. Farrell isn’t aware of Salazar’s endorsement of Gale Norton for Secretary of Interior, when he was Attorney General. Norton was one of the first in a long line of architects of mismanagement and complacency in the Interior. Salazar has a record that shows the inability to be an unbiased steward of the land’s natural resources. As a rancher and landowner, he threatened a law suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for listing the black-tailed prairie dog as endangered. In other words, Salazar can be counted on to make cautious, thoughtful, and responsible decisions about land use and wildlife, as long as it doesn’t have a negative impact on HIS land or the land of his deep-pocked cronies.
We are just emerging from the longest hiatus of meaningful endangered listings in the history of records. To suggest that the next four years should be spent cleaning the house of the Interior, even though the reform might not result in a single acre of habitat or species being listed under ESA protection, is asinine. There are species barely hanging on by a thread, who do not have the luxury of waiting another four years, while Salazar and Obama reform the department’s “deplorable practices”. The new Secretary of Interior needs to put aside his personal prejudices, self-interests, and politics; and be wise enough to listen to his own biologists, because time is wasting
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