From NY Times
Editorial

We knew that bad things would happen when President Bush filled many of his important environmental posts with right-wing activists and industry lobbyists who had spent their careers criticizing the laws they were now being told to uphold and representing industries they were now being told to regulate. Just how bad became clear this week in the course of some pointed testimony from the Interior Department’s inspector general, who accused top officials at his agency of fostering a culture of managerial irresponsibility that tolerated conflicts of interest, cronyism and other lapses.

At a House subcommittee hearing, the official, Earl Devaney, said that short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior. The committee had summoned Mr. Devaney to give his views on some flawed drilling leases the department signed in the late 1990’s — before the Bush administration came to office — that could allow big oil companies to escape billions of dollars in royalties on oil and gas produced in the Gulf of Mexico. The leases appear to have been the result of bureaucratic bungling, not favoritism, but Mr. Devaney suggested that Interior had since gone to some lengths to cover up its mistakes.

On the broader subject of departmental ethics, Mr. Devaney expressed particular frustration at what he described as the kid-gloves treatment of J. Steven Griles, a former industry lobbyist who was deputy secretary during Mr. Bush’s first term, before returning to the lobbying game. Regarded by many environmentalists as the Svengali behind Gale Norton, Mr. Bush’s secretary of the interior until earlier this year, Mr. Griles brought a pro-industry bias to nearly every big decision made during the Norton regime. He was an architect of the administration’s relentless search for oil and gas in fragile areas of the Rocky Mountain West. He was also involved in an agreement between Ms. Norton and the state of Utah that opened millions of acres of potential wilderness to commercial exploitation, and was instrumental in rolling back environmental regulations governing the mining industry.

Beginning in 2002, Mr. Devaney conducted an 18-month investigation into a whistleblower’s complaints that Mr. Griles had behaved improperly by meeting with former business partners and with industries that stood to benefit from departmental decisions. The office of government ethics eventually ruled that Mr. Griles had not violated any laws. But Mr. Devaney has made clear his belief that Mr. Griles, who was allowed by Ms. Norton to stay on the job after simply confessing to bad judgment, should have been severely reprimanded, if only to send a much-needed message to the department that even the appearance of impropriety cannot be tolerated.

That message still needs sending, and it is up to Dirk Kempthorne, Ms. Norton’s successor, to do it. Mr. Kempthorne has promised to investigate the foul-ups and cover-ups regarding the oil contracts. But he should broaden that inquiry to encompass the ethical shortcomings of an agency whose reputation for probity and fairness is as low as it has been since the dark days of Ronald Reagan.