More fun and games in the Bush Administration

Just in case the Bush Administration's spectacular displays of arrogance, corruption, and incompetence in international affairs have washed from your mind its spectacular record of arrogance, corruption and incompetence in domestic affairs, we have this from today's New York Times:

The Interior Department’s chief official responsible for investigating abuses and overseeing operations accused the top officials at the agency on Wednesday of tolerating widespread ethical failures, from cronyism to cover-ups of incompetence.

“Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior,” charged Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general, at a hearing of the House Government Reform subcommittee on energy.

“I have observed one instance after another when the good work of my office has been disregarded by the department,” he continued. “Ethics failures on the part of senior department officials — taking the form of appearances of impropriety, favoritism and bias — have been routinely dismissed with a promise ‘not to do it again.’ ”...

He expressed particular fury at the willingness to dismiss two dozen potential ethical lapses by J. Steven Griles, a former industry lobbyist who served as deputy secretary of the interior during President Bush’s first term.

Mr. Griles resigned after allegations surfaced that he pushed policy decisions that favored some of his former oil and gas industry clients and that he tried to steer a $2 million contract to a technology firm that had also been one of his clients.

In a 145-page report in 2004, the inspector general described Mr. Griles as a “train wreck waiting to happen.” But on Wednesday, Mr. Devaney said he was appalled that the Interior Department’s office of ethics dismissed 23 out of 25 potential ethical breaches against Mr. Griles and that Gale A. Norton, then secretary of the interior, decided not to act on the two remaining allegations.

Mr. Griles is once again a lobbyist in Washington... Mr. Devaney said that case was typical of a much broader “culture of managerial irresponsibility and lack of accountability” in the top reaches of the Interior Department.

“I have unfortunately watched a number of high-level Interior officials leave the department under the cloud of O.I.G. investigations,” Mr. Devaney said, referring to the Office of Inspector General.

“Absent criminal charges, however, they are sent off in the usual fashion, with a party paying tribute to their good service and the secretary wishing them well, to spend more time with their family or seek new opportunities.”...

Mr. Devaney’s broadside against the Interior Department’s culture dovetailed with his tentative conclusions in his most recent investigation, into how the department had managed to sign 1,100 leases for offshore drilling that inadvertently let energy companies escape billions of dollars in royalties on gas and oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico.

The leases, signed in 1998 and 1999 during the Clinton administration, allow companies to escape normal federal royalties — usually 12.5 percent of sales — on the tens of millions of barrels of oil on each lease.

The royalty break was intended as an incentive for deepwater drilling, but it was also supposed to end if oil prices climbed above a “threshold” level of about $34 a barrel. The leases at issue omitted that restriction, and department officials kept quiet about their mistake for six years after they discovered it.

The problem was first disclosed by The New York Times in March. Government officials now estimate that the mistake could cost the Treasury as much as $10 billion over the next decade.

It just never stops with these people, does it? Just 859 days to go, and counting...