A year ago, Mary Kendall, the acting inspector general in the U.S. Department of the Interior, sent a letter to the agency’s boss, Secretary Ryan Zinke, on what her office had determined were the D.O.I.’s “most significant management and performance challenges” (as it is required to do annually, by law). Of the nine challenges discussed, there was one—“promoting and maintaining an ethical workplace culture”—that was unprecedented in the seventeen years that such reports have been issued. “We have identified instances in which some D.O.I. employees, including senior officials, have engaged in unethical or illegal conduct,” the report said. Violations included sexual harassment (an ongoing problem among National Park Service employees) and “the acceptance of gifts from outside sources; conflicts of interest, including the use of public office for private gain; and the misuse of Government resources.” Kendall concluded that her office was committed to continuing its investigations, a promise she has kept over the past year. She is currently leading at least four investigations into the activities of Secretary Zinke himself, including one concerning his ties to a real-estate deal, in Whitefish, Montana, that is backed by the chairman of Halliburton.

Last Tuesday, reports emerged that Zinke had dismissed Kendall, who has held her position for close to a decade, replacing her with a Trump political appointee named Suzanne Israel Tufts, who formerly held a post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A department spokesman confirmed Tufts’s move to The Hill, but the source of the news was a leaked e-mail sent by the HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, to his staff the previous Friday. “It is with mixed emotions that I announce that Suzanne Israel Tufts, our Assistant Secretary for Administration, has decided to leave HUD to become the Acting Inspector General at the Department of Interior,” Carson wrote. The subject line of the e-mail was “A Fond Farewell.”

The Senate confirmed Tufts to her position at HUD last December, and she reportedly absorbed the duties of the former chief administrative officer who had refused to approve the new furniture that Secretary Carson wanted, noting that the congressional limit for redecorations was five thousand dollars. (Carson reportedly went ahead and ordered a thirty-one-thousand-dollar dining set under Tufts’s purview, but then cancelled the order in March, after it became widely publicized.) Criticism of the staffing change from government watchdogs, members of Congress, and environmental advocates—it “reeks,” “stinks,” it’s “dangerous,” they wrote—was immediate and widespread. Michael Bromwich, the former inspector general for the Department of Justice, tweeted, “Changing IGs in the midst of multiple serious investigations of the agency’s head should raise alarm bells everywhere.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson from the inspector general’s office said that Kendall and her staff had not been informed of the move. As far as Kendall knew, she still had the job.

The news took a strange turn a day and a half later, when Heather Swift, a senior adviser to Zinke, said in a statement that the D.O.I. had not approved the hiring of a political appointee to replace Kendall. “Ms. Tufts is not employed by the Department and no decision was ever made to move her to Interior,” Swift said. She said that Carson, who is a friend of Zinke’s, had “sent out an email that had 100 percent false information in it.” The White House, she added, had referred Tufts to Interior officials for a possible position in the inspector general’s office, but “at the end of the day, she was not offered a job.” The mixup was explained away as a “miscommunication at the staff level,” according to an unnamed HUD official who spoke to the Washington Post.

Later the same day, coincidentally or not, Kendall’s office issued a report documenting its investigations and conclusions concerning some of Zinke’s alleged abuses of power. Lola Zinke, the Secretary’s wife, had been allowed to ride with the Secretary in government vehicles despite an Interior policy prohibiting the practice among non-governmental employees. (Zinke ultimately reimbursed the department for the taxpayer dollars her rides had cost.) The I.G. found that Zinke had asked his staff to research whether his wife could get a job as an Interior Department volunteer, as a way to make her ride-alongs legitimate and free, according to one ethics official. Zinke “denied that it was an effort to circumvent the requirement to reimburse the D.O.I. for her travel.” The report also documented how the U.S. Park Police had provided a twenty-five-thousand-dollar unarmed security detail to accompany Zinke and his wife on their holiday in Turkey and Greece last summer. (He apparently was concerned about his safety in Istanbul.) Zinke also invited two political contributors, who had hosted a campaign fund-raiser for him in 2014, when he was running for Montana’s lone seat in Congress, on a government-paid trip to California’s Channel Islands National Park. He did not notify D.O.I. lawyers of his financial ties to his two guests.

For now, Kendall and her staff will continue their investigations of Zinke’s conduct. Her office is still looking at several possible abuses, including the potential conflict of interest between Zinke and the chairman of Halliburton over a Montana real-estate deal. The oil-services company stands to benefit from the kind of Interior Department decisions that Zinke has been making in abundance, including opening public lands for increased oil exploration and loosening regulations around drilling standards. In August, Politico reported that the chairman of Halliburton, David Lesar, had backed a development project in Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana, which included plans to build a microbrewery adjacent to land owned by a Zinke-controlled foundation. Zinke’s wife, the foundation’s head, had submitted plans for a parking lot in the development, and Zinke himself had proposed building a microbrewery in the area multiple times since at least 2012. In response, Zinke told reporters, “Neither my wife or I are involved with the building or operation of any planned microbrewery. Any suggestion to the contrary is absurd.”

In the meantime, a total of fifteen investigations into Zinke’s alleged misconduct have been opened since he took office, including I.G. inquiries that have already been closed, and others from the Office of Special Counsel and the Government Accountability Office. There is Zinke’s role in blocking two Connecticut tribes’ applications to open casinos shortly after meetings with lobbyists from MGM Resorts, which recently opened a two-million-square-foot casino complex in Springfield, Massachusetts. Other I.G. inquiries range from Zinke’s efforts to change the boundary of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to deleting any mention of humans’ role in causing climate change from a National Park Service report. Whether Kendall will have enough time to see her investigations to the end is another question. She took the reins in 2009, as the acting I.G., after serving as deputy I.G. for the previous ten years, but has never been put up for Senate confirmation (Obama tried and failed in 2015), meaning her job is still, technically, a temporary one. Last week, Interior’s Deputy Secretary, David Bernhardt, told the Washington Post that the White House wanted to replace her with a “presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed individual.” Suzanne Tufts will not be that individual. On Friday, she resigned from the federal government.