New Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has launched a campaign to overhaul his scandal-plagued department, and his first stop will be the Minerals Management Service office in Lakewood today.
“This is only the first step of our long-term effort to enact comprehensive, top-to-bottom reform of the Department of Interior,” Salazar said at a White House briefing Wednesday.
The Lakewood scandal involved federal employees accepting gifts, drugs and sex from oil company representatives, according to an investigation by the department’s inspector general.
Speaking to the White House press corps, Salazar called it “one of the worst examples of corruption, abuse and of government putting special interests before the public interest.”
The Lakewood office, Salazar said, has the responsibility of collecting royalties and payments from oil and gas development on public lands.
Last year, the office collected $23 billion, he said.
“Yet during the last administration, some of the employees of that office violated the public trust by accepting gifts and employment contracts from the oil and gas companies they are supposed to be holding accountable,” Salazar said.
Salazar is scheduled to meet with the Minerals Management Service’s staff this afternoon and then review what happened, what has been done to address the problem and the next moves to reform the department.
Salazar said that the problem extends well beyond the MMS office.
“Over the last eight years, the Department of the Interior has been tarnished by ethical lapses and criminal behavior that has extended to the highest levels of government,” he said.
“The former deputy secretary of the department under the Bush administration, Steven Griles, was sent to prison,” he said.
“It is the department that the American people associate with Jack Abramoff,” the lobbyist who was convicted of bribing public officials, Salazar said.
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912 or mjaffe@denverpost.com
