I do not know what to make of this. The administration’s environmental policies are a mess, when they’re not actually hostile towards, you know, the environment. This is because people running things in that department were placed in their jobs specifically because that’s the way they feel about it, too. Interior is the department where Steve Bannon’s conjuring words about “deconstructing the administrative state” come to their sharpest point, although Betsy DeVos’ stewardship at Education is coming up fast on the outside.

The president* handed Interior over to Ryan Zinke, a Republican congressman from Montana. Zinke has looked around his department and finds that it is honeycombed with traitors. Time to purge these treehugging subversives. From the AP:

Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, said he knew when he took over the 70,000-employee department in March that, “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag.” In a speech to an oil industry group, Zinke compared Interior 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. “We do have good people” at Interior, he said, “but the direction has to be clear and you’ve got to hold people accountable.” Zinke’s comments echo complaints by some White House allies that a permanent, “deep state” in Washington has sabotaged Trump’s efforts to remake the government.

The “deep state,” of course, are those people who know what they’re talking about, and who know what the mission is of the department in which they serve. Out with them, immediately.

Zinke did not go that far, but he lamented a government culture that prizes analysis over action, saying: “There’s too many ways in the present process for someone who doesn’t want to get (a regulatory action) done to put it a holding pattern.” To remedy that, Zinke said he is pursuing a major reorganization that would push much of the agency’s decision-making outside Washington and move several agencies, including the Bureau of Reclamation and Bureau of Land Management, to undetermined Western states.

Yeah, that’s a great idea. Move the whole thing out to Cliven Bundy country, where they know what freedom is all about.

My goodness, this governing thing is complicated.

On other topics, Zinke said the Endangered Species Act has been “abused” by bureaucrats and environmental groups and needs to be reformed to be less “arbitrary.” “There is no off-ramp” for species to be removed from protected status, he said. Zinke also offered a quirky defense of hydraulic fracturing, a drilling technique also known as fracking that has led to a years-long energy boom in the U.S., with sharply increased production of oil and natural gas. “Fracking is proof that God’s got a good sense of humor and he loves us,” Zinke said without explanation.

“Quirky.”

That’s one word for it.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io