President Trump has announced that Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke will resign after the first of the year and that his replacement will be announced as early as next week.

Secretary of the Interior @RyanZinke will be leaving the Administration at the end of the year after having served for a period of almost two years. Ryan has accomplished much during his tenure and I want to thank him for his service to our Nation…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

…….The Trump Administration will be announcing the new Secretary of the Interior next week.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

This is a shame and, at the same time, it was inevitable. Like Scott Pruitt at EPA, Zinke understood the agency he lead, he understood how that agency had betrayed and abused everyday Americans in service to powerful, leftwing interests, and he set about systematically dismantling the infrastructure that allowed that to happen. One of Zinke’s first acts was to use his authority to reassign members of the senior executive service from their personal fiefdoms which resulted in several much-needed resignations. He actively worked to roll back the Obama abuse of designating extravagant amounts of real estate as “national monuments” to thwart development and lock in environmental policies. On the downside, he, like Pruitt, seemed to have difficulty in establishing boundaries between his official and personal conduct. And, like Pruitt, even though no major misconduct was proven, the miasma of corruption hung heavy over his tenure in office.

Trump announced today that Ryan Zinke will resign as Secretary of the Interior. Zinke is facing a number of ethics inquiries. A new report documents suppression of science, denial of climate change, and the silencing and intimidation of staff at the DOI. https://t.co/baq5jfCrpn

— Scientific American (@sciam) December 15, 2018

(…they say this like it was a bad thing)

I suspect the ongoing investigations plus the knowledge that incoming House Democrats will use Zinke for a piñata and as a way to paint the administration and corrupt all contributed to the decision to let Zinke go.

Hopefully, Trump will find a replacement for Zinke along the lines of Andrew Wheeler at EPA, a technocrat who is hostile to the race to the left in their agency but who is not a lightning rod for criticism.

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