Some of the senior aides working in the Trump Interior Department are staying behind the scenes.
The department isn’t publicly releasing the names or titles of senior officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s chief of staff and other key advisers working on communications and legislative affairs.
Some of those officials are poised to have significant sway over the department as it pursues President Donald Trump’s aggressive energy agenda and the administration’s sweeping effort to reorganize federal agencies. The opacity on Interior staffing is frustrating many who work with the vast public lands management agency and concerning to government transparency advocates.
Interior “should have a regularly updated directory because they serve, in theory, the public and not special interests,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Their primary goal is to burn down as much as they can, as quickly as they can, and the best way to achieve that is to not even let anyone know who’s there doing the damage.”
