Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke claims one-third of his workforce is disloyal to him and President Trump/DOI
In sports parlance it's called an unforced error. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke made one the other day when he was captured stating that roughly one-third of his vast workforce is not loyal to him or President Trump. The comment quickly was condemned, including by some who wagered that the percentage was much higher.
U.S. Rep Raúl M. Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, called Tuesday for Secretary Zinke to apologize.
“Secretary Zinke should clarify his comments and apologize to the public servants he is supposed to be leading. He often refers to his military service, so he should be well aware that loyalty is earned and you don’t earn it, or deserve it, with divisive comments like these," the congressman said.
The comment was made Monday to the National Petroleum Council in Washington, D.C.
"I got 30 percent of the crew that's not loyal to the flag," he said in a story distributed by The Associated Press.
On a Facebook page for National Park Service employees, some ventured that the percentage was higher than 30 percent, in some cases much higher, while others said their loyalty was to the agency mission and not elected officials.
According to the Sierra Club, Secretary Zinke went further, telling the oil industry leaders that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff “hated people to a degree.”
The secretary also said Interior staff spend too much time analyzing an issue and not acting on it, and he intends to end that by reorganizing his department to put the decision-makers out in the West where decisions involving energy development and endangered species are most centered.
At the Sierra Club, Rob Vessels, who represents the group's Military Outdoors Campaign, said the secretary needs to reexamine his military background, rather than citing it to explain how he's going to manage the Interior Department and the public lands it oversees.
“Ryan Zinke is all too quick to tout his patriotism for serving in the military, but he fails to recognize the patriotism in protecting America’s public lands," said Mr. Vessels. "Serving our country is patriotic, but so is working on behalf of the American people at the Department of the Interior, so is protecting our public lands for everyone to enjoy, and so is calling for our government to be better at working for every single person here. Given the groups Zinke has chosen to speak to and meet with as secretary, we know where his loyalties currently reside. I, and millions of Americans wish that it was with us the people, and not with the fossil fuel industry.”
The military symbolism was also dismissed by the Center for Western Priorities, where Executive Director Jennifer Rokala said that, “Secretary Zinke clearly views our parks and public lands as a battlefield and himself as a general fighting on behalf of oil and gas companies. In the past two days, he has declared war on his own agency in front of oil executives and told clean energy groups that public lands are best suited for drilling.
"Less than a year into the job, Secretary Zinke has abandoned Western values in an attempt to drill, mine and log our public lands at all costs.”
Comments
Disgusting.
Disloyal?
Disloyal to what? Sometimes the most loyal patriots are those who have courage and determination enough to stand for what is RIGHT and against what is WRONG.
We need loyal Americans now more than ever. I sincerely hope that Drumpf, in his efforts to play to his followers, will wind up actually uniting a majority of our citizens to stand for what is right despite his best efforts to distract us from issues that are important and demean those who disagree with his ugliness and other nonsense.
This guy is a grade A PUTZ and completely unqualified for the position he's in. The DOI is not the freaking military and shouldn't be treated like it.
I do hope that those in the DOI are not just loyal to an administration, or any administration for that matter. Instead, they need to be loyal to the parks and public land areas that they are in charge of administering, so that future generations also have them to appreciate and enjoy. Administrations come and go, but our parks and public lands need to be preserved well past them.
Zinke will be gone in 3 years and some odd months. Unfortunately, this guy will do so much damage before he's out that he'll leave a scar and distort many many acres of public lands for decades, if not thousands of years.
I totally agree with D-2 and the others who have commented on this matter. The Secretary is wrong and should be ashamed of himself. He has some of the best employees who work for government. Show some respect and appreciation Mr. Secretary.
As a retired American , my wife and I have traveled all over parts of this great country and spent a good deal of time in our National parks and State parks and have found not one park member that is not dedicated to the parks or the job they were hired to do. We have however found several that are fed up with the bureaucracy that is constantly interferring with the job they were hired to do with the EPA being number one culprit
Zinke's entire quote in the Associated Press is quite amazling:
Zinke (& Trump) certainly seem like pirates, but it's the Interior Department and the resources it manages that is the real captured prize. His analogy is further confused in that they are not first mate and captain, but mere bagmen for the real pirate captains in the fossil fool industry.
Secretary Zinke obviously knows very little about the employees he oversees. I expect his tenure to come to a very unsatisfactory (to him) end, much like that of former Interior Secretary James Watt.
I was just reading where his future aspirations include running against the current Democratic incumbents in either the Montana US Senate race or the Montana gubernatorial race. The article mentioned, absolutely coincidentally of course, that Zinke's actions on shrinking and/or mining national monuments in the state of Montana are much less severe than elsewhere. Do your research andn draw your own conclusions.
The Fox News crowd is really at fault here. In TN, as deep a red state as Alabama, it is quite common that all public gyms etc are permanantly placed on that network. If Hannity or Rush says it, it is so. Locals here will tell you that all other outlets are fake news and refuse to look at any other source. And that mentality is rampant in this country. When I casually mention to that crowd that Zinke, for instance, was caught with his hand in the travel fraud cookie jar that seems to be all the rave amongst Trump's billionaire cabal this month, the information is met with pure dismissal and disbelief. Because it wasn't on fox.
I really don't know how you combat that kind of growing, rampant insular ingorance.