Interior secretary calls his agency’s employees disloyal

Speech to oil industry reflects turbulence within his department.

WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke walked into a big gathering of the National Petroleum Council on Monday already facing at least two government investigations for his management of the department’s workforce of 70,000 — but that didn’t stop him from bashing his employees.

Zinke said at the gathering that he figured upon taking his post that nearly a third of the people at the department were disloyal. The comment may have shed light on the secretary’s reasons for directing department officials to reassign about 50 top managers in June, as soon as the move may have been legally permissible.

Several of the managers interviewed by The Times said they were puzzled by the directives, which sent them to corners of the agency where they had no expertise. At least one has filed a whistle-blower lawsuit.

The department is declining to comment on the specific charges leveled against Zinke. But the secretary had plenty to say about what he thinks of the workforce during his talk before the oil trade group.

He said he knew when he took over the department in March that “I got 30% of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” according to a report by the Associated Press. He compared the department to a pirate ship that captures “a prized ship at sea, and only the captain and the first mate row over” to finish the mission.

Walter Shaub, who in July resigned his post running the federal Office of Government Ethics after repeated clashes with the Trump administration, tweeted that Zinke is misguided about what loyalty means.

“Feds are loyal to America, not junior cabinet secretaries and politicians,” he wrote.

Some senior civil servants have charged that Zinke’s moves were intended to drive experienced managers from federal employment. If that was the motive, Zinke succeeded in some cases.

But the reassignments also landed the department in a high-profile whistleblower lawsuit, filed by Joel Clement, the department’s director of policy analysis who had been leading some of its highest-profile climate change work. Clement was plucked from his work helping Alaskan villages imperiled by rising seas and placed in a post overseeing the auditing of oil and gas leases.