Energy & Environment
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Energy & Environment
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Political appointee placed at Interior IG, Democrat says |
The Trump administration has installed a former White House official and author of the Project 2025 Republican policy playbook at what is supposed to be an independent internal watchdog at the Interior Department, a House Democrat says.
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Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.), the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, released a statement this week saying that Dennis Kirk was placed in the Inspector General’s office at the department, which oversees the nation’s public lands and national monuments.
“Dennis Kirk is a fake and fraudulent watchdog. Everyone should have their eyes wide open. Each and every thing this political puppet does will be in service of Donald Trump,” Huffman said.
John Bell, a spokesperson for the Office of the Inspector General (IG) at the Interior Department, declined to comment.
The Hill also attempted to email Kirk at the inspector general’s office and did not immediately receive a reply. However, the email to Kirk did appear to go through, unlike a test email sent by The Hill to a fake address at the same domain, which bounced back.
Kirk served in the White House Office of Personnel Management during the first Trump administration. He’s also one of the authors of a Project 2025 chapter on the federal bureaucracy.
This is apparently not his first time being installed at an inspector general’s office. The Washington Post reported that then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard placed Kirk at the watchdog in charge of overseeing her work last year.
Meanwhile, Mark Greenblatt, a former IG at Interior, called the appointment unprecedented and a threat to the office’s independence and investigations.
“It’s extremely out of the ordinary,” Greenblatt, who was ousted during a purge of inspectors general last year, told The Hill.
Greenblatt, who was actually appointed to be the IG by Trump in 2019, warned that having a political staffer at the office could also compromise whistleblower identities.
“You have whistleblowers who come to the Office of Inspector General to make complaints, including complaints about senior political officials and sensitive political programs, and their names and identities are supposed to be kept confidential,” he told The Hill. “But if you have an administration mole in the office, all of a sudden, does that information become fair game to the administration?”
Read more at TheHill.com.
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Welcome to The Hill’s Energy & Environment newsletter, I’m Rachel Frazin — keeping you up to speed on the policies impacting everything from oil and gas to new supply chains.
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How policy will affect the energy and environment sectors now and in the future:
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Senate Republicans on Thursday voted down an amendment that sought to open up Americans’ ability to sue pesticide companies over the health impacts of their products.
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As the Colorado River dwindles, it threatens to reduce the availability of both water and electricity in the western U.S.
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An emerging deal between Iran and Oman could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and give the countries joint control over its traffic, a major concession to Tehran.
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The Trump administration is paying yet another company more than $1 billion to give up the rights to produce wind off the U.S. coast, the firm announced Thursday.
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News we’ve flagged from other outlets touching on energy issues, the environment and other topics:
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Two key stories on The Hill right now:
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Internal squabbles erupted in the Senate Republican Conference on Wednesday as GOP senators battled each other and the White House over a variety of issues, prompting Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to warn that his colleagues face a potential legislative “train wreck.” Read more
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President Trump on Thursday signed two executive orders again aimed at restricting birthright citizenship, an apparent attempt to circumvent a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutional protection. Read more
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You’re all caught up. See you tomorrow!
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