THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Secretary of the Interior Ryan 'Hinky' Zinke has promised to get rid of those who actually care about government lands and replace them with properly "loyal" oil industry stooges to make the rape and pillage of our natural resources easier on the bottom line.

In a speech to the oil industry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke claimed that nearly a third of his staff is disloyal to President Trump, saying that workers in Washington are reluctant to relax regulations to permit increased mining for coal and drilling for natural gas and oil on public land.

Zinke promised a “huge” change by restructuring staff positions and possibly shifting decision-making positions in the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Reclamation from Washington to points out West in the speech Monday to the National Petroleum Council of oil and gas executives, first reported by the Associated Press.

“I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” the news agency reported the secretary as saying. Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, fell back on military jargon to show how he intended to bring them in line, saying it’s necessary to “push the generals where the fight is.”

The speech was Zinke’s latest effort to instill fear in his staff. He told a Senate panel in June that he wanted to strip 4,000 employees from the Interior Department — about 8 percent of the full-time staff — as part of meeting Trump’s proposed budget cuts. Attrition, reassignments and buyouts would be employed to achieve his goal, Zinke said.

If that didn’t work, he said, layoffs could follow. That same month, Zinke ordered the reassignments of 50 Senior Executive Service employees, forcing many into jobs for which they had little experience and that were in different locations. At least one executive, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife director stationed in Atlanta, quit.

Interior’s Office of Inspector General is evaluating the reassignments to determine whether they violated the U.S. code, which instructs an agency’s leadership to notify affected personnel well in advance of the reassignment and give them a chance to choose a job option. Several executives said their reassignment notices arrived out of the blue with no prior discussion.

And we all await the new and Hinky approved Loyalty Oath for government employees.