Avatar director James Cameron was summoned to Washington yesterday to advise the Environmental Protection Agency on innovative ways to cap the massive, ever-worsening BP oil spill, according to the AFP. AFP said Cameron attended the meeting with a Canadian submersible researcher, who built the submarines used on his 1989 movie The Abyss. But it doesn’t say exactly what real experience Cameron has with oil rigs, environmental cleanup, or anything else that qualifies him to figure out the many complicated technical issues that have stumped an entire industry. But hey, he did direct Titanic, which has something to do with water. Plus…
Browsing: Interior
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Sam Hamilton died Feb. 20 after experiencing chest pains while skiing in Colorado. Hamilton’s death was consistent with an underlying heart problem, Summit County (Colo.) Coroner Joanne Richardson told The Associated Press. He was in Colorado for a regional leadership training meeting, which ended Feb. 19, said the agency in a news release. Hamilton, 54, was sworn in as director in September 2009 after more than 30 years with the service. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement that Hamilton’s leadership and commitment to the service will be missed. Sam was a friend,…
Want to dance on federal property? Well, you can’t if you’re at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., a federal judge ruled Jan. 25. U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote in a 26-page opinion that the memorial’s interior is not a public forum, ruling against a woman who was arrested along with 17 others while dancing in the Jefferson Memorial to celebrate the third president’s birthday on April 12, 2008, reported The Washington Post. The celebrants were listening to music via headphones and danced to celebrate “the individualist spirit for which Jefferson is known,” wrote Alan Gura, the attorney for…
The Interior Department will phase out its controversial royalty-in-kind program, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced at a hearing this morning. Interior’s Minerals Management Service is responsible for collecting revenue from oil and natural gas projects on federal lands. The RIK program collects those royalties as oil or gas instead of cash; the government then sells the minerals and sends the revenue to the Treasury. But the program has been plagued for years by ethical problems and accounting difficulties. The program puts MMS managers — federal employees — in the odd position of acting like oil or gas salesman. Managers often don’t…
This weekend I took a trip to Ellis Island, which is operated by the National Park Service, in New York City. While I expected to discover quite a bit about the conditions my ancestors endured when they passed through there in the early 1900s, I did not expect to discover a government contracting story that seems to prove the adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same.†According to an exhibit at the history of the immigration station, after the original complex of wooden buildings burned to the ground in 1897, the Treasury Department ran a competition…
We’ve been reporting for months on the Bush administration’s “midnight regulations,” the flurry of often controversial last-minute rules approved in November and December. The president already announced plans to undo the “conscience rule,” one of most controversial regulations. And today another rule met its end: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that he’s seeking the end of the “mountaintop mining” rule that allowed coal companies to dump the “fill” — the leftover rocks from mining — in streams. “We’re cleaning up a major misstep from the previous administration,” Salazar said today at a press conference. “This was bad public policy… it…
The White House announced six more political appointees Tuesday, including three for the Veterans Affairs Department. Roger Baker, nominee for assistant secretary for information and technology, Veterans Affairs. Baker is the former president and chief executive office of Dataline, a technology company in Norfolk, Va. He also is a former chief information officer of the Commerce Department and served on President Barack Obama’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications policy group during his 2008 presidential campaign. William Gunn, nominee for general counsel, VA. He represents military members and veterans in his Northern Virginia law practice. He retired in 2005 from the Air…
During a news briefing this morning at the Old Executive Office Building to roll out his 2010 budget, President Obama provided a little more detail about some of the nearly $2 trillion in proposed cuts he mentioned during his joint session to Congress on Tuesday. The highlights — or lowlights, depending on your view: Nearly $200 million at the Interior Department by cutting programs to clean up abandoned coal mines that have already been cleaned up. Nearly $20 million by modernizing programs and streamlining bureaucracy at the Agriculture Department. Tens of millions of dollars by cutting an Education Department student…
A couple of tidbits about stimulus oversight. First, the president just announced Earl Devaney as the inspector general for the stimulus program. The name might sound familiar: Devaney has been the Interior Department’s IG since 1999, and he led some big investigations — the Jack Abramoff scandal and the MMS scandal, to name a couple. He’ll undoubtedly have his hands full with the new job (can we call him the SIGSTIM?). Second, the Interior Department will announce its own “stimulus czar” this week. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters the yet-to-be-named official is someone with lots of oversight experience. The…
This one is slightly unbelievable. You may remember Milton Dial from last year’s Minerals Management Service scandals. He pleaded guilty in September to violating federal conflict-of-interest law. And today, he was sentenced by a federal judge, Robert C. Jones. What was Dial’s punishment? “I apologize to you, sir,” U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Jones as he imposed a minimum sentence on Milton Dial, a former deputy associate director in the Lakewood, Colo., office that handled billions of dollars of oil and natural gas contracts. The judge said he felt Dial, who retired from the agency in 2004 after 33…