Stricklandish Hit Job? 0

Raw Story has a report from various news services that

And that’s the sound (the Colorado River–ed.) Interior Department Chief of Staff Tom Strickland was hearing with his wife as he coasted through river rapids while the worst oil spill to hit the US coast since Exxon Valdez neared shore off the coast of Louisiana.

Strickland is

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s chief of staff, as (well as–ed.) the department’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

It doesn’t look to me as if that would necessarily make him a “first responder” to an oil spill.

Indeed, according to the organizational chart, the Minerals Management Service, which is the branch of the Department of Interior directly responsible for policing oil drilling, does not report to him (by the way, none of the several reports I’ve seen on this so far has mentioned that).

Click for a larger image

As the estimates of the spill were revised upwards, he was called home.

I have spent most of my life working in large organizations. Generally, a crisis for one department does not require people in a whole nother chain of command to stop what they are doing and to come watch right then and there. That is why organizations are, well, organized.

Later, in the “how can we keep this from happening again” phase, lots of folks from all over the outfit may get involved.

His being in one of the parks that he is responsible for may look bad, but I question its relevance to anything but attack politics.