The Interior Department’s internal watchdog said it can’t say whether a rash of unusual employment reassignments by Secretary Ryan Zinke ran afoul of federal law.
About the only thing the inspector general can say for sure is that Interior Department officials kept poor records on personnel changes and spending decisions, a report dated Tuesday says. The investigators said there was not enough documentation to judge whether the board that made the transfer decisions complied with federal law to protect employees from sudden transfers.
Democrats had requested that the inspector general examine concerns over Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s reassignment of more than two dozen members of his agency’s Senior Executive Service between June and October 2017.
The 27 changes at the agency forced some to move across the country, raising alarm bells in Congress while taking the agency officials by surprise.
The report found that the Executive Resources Board did not follow the correct protocol for recordkeeping.
The board “did not document its plan for selecting senior executives for reassignment, nor did it consistently apply the reasons it stated it used to select senior executives for reassignment. We also found that the ERB did not gather the information needed to make informed decisions about the reassignments, nor did it effectively communicate with the SES members or with most managers affected by the reassignments,” the report found.
It is not clear if the report gives Democrats much in the way of demonstrating major rules violations, but it could help them tee up more questions.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in response to the report that “reassigning 27 civil service employees with scientific or other technical expertise without following the required process is one more screw-up at taxpayer expense by the Department of the Interior.
“It does not protect our public lands or provide any stewardship,” she said. “Reassignment in this case just means it’s easier for political operatives at Interior to circumvent the law.”
“Obviously, the evaluation confirmed the department’s long-held view that the ERB has the lawful authority to reassign SES members and has done so here,” said Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said in a statement.
