Department of the Interior

www.doi.gov

Background

The Interior Department is basically the nation's landlord. It controls one-fifth of the country's 3.7 million acres of land, most of it in the West. It also handles most of the government's minerals -- oil, gas, coal, gold, etc. For this reason, it has become particularly important in recent years given the high price of oil and the interest from the Bush administration in searching for alternative, domestic natural resources on public lands, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The department also runs federal Indian programs, distributes water in the West, conducts mineral and biological research on all lands, regulates some parts of coal mining, sells oil and mineral leases in areas off the coasts where Congress hasn't blocked such work, and keeps track of some ocean animals -- sea otters, polar bears, walrus and manatees.

The only other department that manages much of the federal land estate is Agriculture, which is home to the U.S. Forest Service. The Interior is seen as a Western agency, and presidents almost always pick a Westerner to run it. Secretary Gale Norton of Colorado stepped in spring 2006, and Dirk Kempthorne, former Idaho governor and senator recently replaced her.

The Interior Department is always the fighting field for those interested in more or less development on federal lands. But its influence reaches many other areas of the country. It runs the Statue of Liberty in New York and national seashores along both coasts. And endangered species can stop development just about anywhere in the country. Reporters outside the interior West are more likely to deal with the department's various bureaus, like the National Park Service or the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Interior manages most of its land through three agencies -- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for wildlife refuges, the National Park Service for parks and the Bureau of Land Management for almost everything else outside Indian reservations. Land controlled by each of these agencies also can have other layers of protection for wildlife and recreation, such as official wilderness areas and wild and scenic river corridors.

Two out of every five acres managed by the department are in Alaska, where in 1980 Congress put almost a third of the state in parks, refuges and other conservation areas. Indian programs are in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Western water is dammed and distributed by the Bureau of Reclamation. The Minerals Management Service sells offshore oil and mineral leases. The Office of Surface Mining handles coal mines.

Interior's ocean animals -- the polar bears, sea otters and walrus -- are assigned to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the wildlife refuge people. (Other marine mammals, i.e. whales, seals and sea lions, along with ocean fish and sharks, are handled by the Department of Commerce's National Marine Fisheries Service because such animals were viewed as competitors with fishermen when Congress split up the jobs in the early 1970s.)

Fish and Wildlife also handles any endangered species recovery planning for its animals and for plants, regardless of which federal lands the animals or plants inhabit. The Commerce Department does that work for its own ocean-going charges. The Environmental Protection Agency is not part of Interior.

A 10-year-old class-action lawsuit by thousands of American Indians against the government -- Cobell v. Norton -- has made getting some information from Interior difficult. The Indians accuse the government of mismanaging billions of dollars of royalties from their lands for a century, and the lawsuit has pointed out insecurities in the department's computer system. As a result, parts of the agency's Web sites are inaccessible by court order, including most of BIA. Many records are still available, however, including the locations of oil and gas lease sales and other such information through http://www.geocommunicator.gov/GeoComm/index.shtm. You will need to do some manipulating to get the specific information you need. Try asking the Interior Department media affairs people for help. Or you can ask the advocacy groups that monitor the agency.

Location

Contacts

Most calls directly to the agency's top officials in Washington will be diverted to the public affairs officers.

For help with just about anything in D.C., the Secretary of the Interior's communications office is a good first stop. For now, it is led by Tina Kreisher, director of communications, (202) 208-5256. Her press secretary is Shane Wolfe, (202) 208-6416. These folks are all political appointees, and so the names tend to change but not the phone numbers. They handle the big policy questions and are fairly quick to get back to you.

There are also several public affairs officers who can respond to just about anything, get you documents, explain stuff or set up interviews with particular top officials. They'll almost always call you back quickly and try to get some kind of answer same day if you need it. They all are assigned “beats” in the department, so you'll get one or another depending on your question, although Wright is the most senior and tends to work late.

Most Interior agencies have their own career public affairs officers in Washington, D.C., as well.

The National Park Service has Dave Barna, 208-6843;
The Bureau of Land Management, Celia Boddington, 452-5128;
The Fish and Wildlife Service, Chris Tollefson, 208-5624;
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nedra Darling, 219-4150, email: nedra_darling@ios.doi.gov.
The U.S. Geological Survey, which does far more than geology today out of its headquarters in Reston, Va., has Scott Harris, (703) 648-4460.

Many agencies also have public affairs officers in the regions outside D.C. The farther you go from Washington, the more likely it is that you can quickly reach the actual manager of a program, park or refuge rather than going through public affairs.

Some good outside sources are The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Trout Unlimited, the National Mining Association and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (an environment/energy version of the Heritage Foundation).

Does this agency's information need updating? programs@nationalpress.org