Joshua Roberts / Reuters President Donald Trump and acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, Jan. 21. In a memo to staffers last year, Bernhardt touted his efforts to improve the department’s “badly neglected” ethics infrastructure.

A government ethics watchdog has called for the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General to launch a formal investigation into violations of federal ethics rules by six high-ranking agency officials who maintained close ties to former employers.

The 19-page complaint from the D.C.-based nonpartisan nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which cites two HuffPost reports, comes two weeks after President Donald Trump nominated David Bernhardt, Interior’s acting secretary and a former oil lobbyist, as the department’s permanent chief. He would replace Ryan Zinke, who resigned in January under a cloud of ethics scandals.

The CLC wrote in its complaint Wednesday that the senior employees’ violations “suggest a disturbing pattern of misconduct” across the agency.

“It appears that former Secretary Zinke’s disregard for ethical norms has sent a signal to Interior employees that skirting ethical rules, including violating a signed ethics pledge, is tolerated at the Department of the Interior,” the group wrote in its letter, addressed to Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall.

There have been numerous instances of apparent conflicts of interest among top Interior officials ― many of which the agency has brushed off or ignored entirely. Bernhardt will likely face questions about the allegations outlined in the CLC’s complaint during his upcoming Senate confirmation hearing.

One of the appointees named in the CLC’s complaint is Lori Mashburn, the agency’s White House liaison, who attended two private events hosted by her former employer, the right-wing Heritage Foundation. She joined Zinke at an Oct. 16, 2017, foundation affair that it described as “an exclusive briefing for members who support Heritage with gifts of $10,000+ annually or legacy commitments of $200,000+.” She worked as an associate director at Heritage from October 2011 to January 2017.

There’s also Ben Cassidy, the department’s senior deputy director for intergovernmental and external affairs last year. A longtime lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, he participated in several agency meetings dealing with issues that he had lobbied Interior on while still with the NRA, including trophy hunting and national monument designations. He also served as a point person for members of a hunting advisory council, including one of his former NRA colleagues.

President Donald Trump’s ethics pledge bars political appointees in the executive branch from participating in certain matters involving former employers or clients for two years. It also prohibits former lobbyists from participating in any particular matters they lobbied on in the two years before being appointed.

In addition to citing HuffPost’s reporting on Cassidy’s and Mashburn’s ethics troubles, the CLC’s complaint highlights previously unreported emails between Cassidy and NRA lobbyist Susan Recce, his former employer, regarding recreational shooting on public lands in Arizona and Utah.