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Head of Interior Department conduct board joins lobbying firm |
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By Kevin Bogardus and Mike Soraghan
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Posted: 07/11/07 07:11 PM [ET] |
The senior Interior Department official who headed a conduct board crafted in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal is leaving the government to join a top firm that lobbies the department.
Mark Limbaugh, Interior’s assistant secretary for Water and Science, soon will leave the department for the Ferguson Group, a lobby firm that advocates for several local and state water authorities before Interior.
“From my perspective, these are temporary jobs. You have to make a living,” Limbaugh said. “When you are in a business like natural resources, you are not going out to work for a tire store.”
Before his departure was announced in late June, Limbaugh, a distant cousin of radio host Rush Limbaugh, led a “conduct accountability” board at Interior created by Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.
Ethics at Interior have been an issue for some time. Because it regulates Indian casinos, the agency was a focus for Abramoff, a onetime high-flying Washington lobbyist now in prison for bribing members of Congress.
J. Steven Griles, a former deputy secretary at the department, was sentenced to 10 months in prison late last month for lying to a Senate committee about his relationship with Abramoff.
In addition, deputy assistant secretary Julie MacDonald resigned after an Interior Inspector General report found she had released non-public information and altered scientific reports involved with the Endangered Species Act.
Griles had left the department even before he lied to the Senate committee. But some officials with connections to Abramoff and Griles continue to work at top posts in the agency.
Doug Domenech, an Interior aide, reportedly has been linked to Abramoff and a former president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, Italia Federici. James Cason was Griles’s deputy and is still at the department.
Kempthorne “has been rhetorically committed to an ethical workplace but has not brought in new brooms to sweep clean,” the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), Jeff Ruch, said.
Since November 2006, Limbaugh has headed the board at Interior. The body was designed to ensure fairness in managing discipline cases, according to a department-wide June 27 memo by Kempthorne.
Two days later, the official announced his resignation. Limbaugh said the department is still finalizing procedures but the board has already handled some cases.
Ruch said “it is awfully late in the day over there at the Interior Department” with Limbaugh departing for a lobby firm instead of continuing with the ethics post.
In the same memo, Kempthorne laid out a 10-point plan he has implemented to make his department “a model of an ethical workplace” by hiring more ethics lawyers and strengthening penalties, such as for misusing government computers, among other actions.
Limbaugh’s departure comes on the heels of his deputy Jason Peltier’s resignation. Peltier left the department in late June to join the Westlands Water District in California, which has interests before Interior, as its chief deputy general manager.
Democrats have raised concerns about Peltier’s and others’ moves to Westlands from Interior. In a June 28 letter to Kempthorne, Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) asked for documentation behind Peltier’s move, as well as for Susan Ramos, a former Bureau of Reclamation official also working with Westlands, due to potential conflicts of interest.
Limbaugh said that Peltier recused himself from “California issues” and added he has done the same.
“I have done the same thing as soon as I was approached and I recused myself from any matters involving clients of the Ferguson Group,” the Interior official said.
Limbaugh says he will adhere to federal rules and not lobby his old post during the one-year “cooling-off” period.
The Ferguson Group lobbies the department. With $10.6 million in earned revenue for 2006, firm president Roger Gwinn estimates a third of that is derived from clients concerned over water resource issues.
The ethics process at Interior in the past has offered little protection from allegations of wrongdoing.
Several meetings between then-Secretary Gale Norton and Federici were approved by ethics officials. Federici since has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the Abramoff scandal.
Limbaugh said this is his last week at the department. His first day at the Ferguson Group is July 23.
According to an invite obtained by The Hill, the Interior official’s farewell party is this Thursday. |
