Last week, Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar's remarks to department employees emphasized ethics and accountability--a theme he also stressed in his confirmation hearing. POGO hopes that he'll be successful, but I do want to take issue with one statement he made:
In the last few years, this Department has suffered because of ethical lapses and criminal activity at the highest level. That doesn’t mean to say that the people of the Department of the Interior are bad people, because they are not. You know how one apple in a bushel can spoil the whole bushel? There has been, essentially, a picture of this department that has been painted unfairly on the backs of career employees because of the actions of political appointees.
Secretary Salazar is right when he says that there were several bad apples. But he is severely underestimating the scale of the problem if he thinks that it's just a matter of a few individuals stepping out of line. If Secretary Salazar wants to improve royalty management, he needs to recognize that there are systemic and structural problems that need to be solved. And it's not just a Bush administration problem--POGO released our first report in 1995, under Clinton.
There's a lot of work to do to assure taxpayers the government is collecting all of the royalties owed on their lands. Auditing needs to be improved, the merits of the Royalty-In-Kind program need to be reconsidered (and to be honest, the program should be shut down), and Salazar was right when he said that department ethics reform needs to have statutory support (*cough* perhaps something like this). So yes, there were some bad apples that have since left, but until there are more reforms to clear the bushels, taxpayers won't have the protections they deserve against the rotten produce.
-- Mandy Smithberger
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