Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is asking the Interior Department to fire a deputy secretary who helped remove Everglades National Park from the United Nations' list of endangered sites.

Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Todd Willens edited a National Park Service report that had recommended keeping Everglades on the danger list before a U.N. World Heritage Committee meeting in June.

"The bottom line is the U.N. should have been presented with the position of our own agency experts," Nelson said in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. "This action is absolutely unacceptable and, I believe, warrants Willens' removal."

Nelson -- the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Democracy and Human Rights -- said his panel would hold a hearing on the issue after the August recess.

Kempthorne has previously issued a statement welcoming the decision to remove Everglades from the list as a sign Interior is making progress toward restoring the region. But in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times this week, Willens admitted the Park Service wanted it to remain on the list.

"I changed the last sentence of our report and said we wanted to be taken off," said Willens, who came to Interior after serving as an aide to former House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.).

Willens said he made the motion before other countries could intervene because "the U.S. should be fully in charge of its own sites" (Greenwire, Aug. 1).

Environmentalists have been wary of Willens since he previously oversaw efforts to rewrite the Endangered Species Act while working for Pombo. In his letter, Nelson noted Willens reportedly took a trip to the Northern Mariana Islands arranged by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.