Interior secretary resigns; will leave at end of month

Interior Secretary Gale Norton on Friday announced that she will resign at the end of March.

Norton, who had been in her post for five years, said in a March 9 letter to President Bush that, while there will "never be a perfect time to leave," she is ready to "catch [her] breath" and set her "sights on new goals to achieve in the private sector."

Lynn Scarlett, Interior's deputy secretary, is in line to take over as acting secretary if the White House has not named a replacement by the time Norton leaves. Scarlett is "extremely competent and the secretary relies on her," a spokeswoman said. But the White House will make the final determination, she said.

Among her accomplishments at Interior, which has about 70,000 employees and manages one in every five acres of land in the United States, Norton listed the initiation or completion of more than 6,000 projects to improve national parks, encouragement of "cooperative conservation" and strengthening of protections against wildfires.

"With your support and leadership, your team at Interior has accomplished great work in the face of hurricanes, record-setting wildfires and droughts, acrimonious litigation and expanded post 9/11 security responsibilities," Norton said in her letter to Bush.

Bush, in response, said in a statement, that Norton was a "valuable member" of the administration. "As the first woman Secretary of the Interior, she served the nation well with her vision for cooperative conservation, protection and improvement of our national parks and public lands, and environmentally responsible energy development on public lands and waters," he said.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Norton was instrumental in "efforts to restore badly needed offshore energy production to avoid further supply disruption and higher energy costs for consumers," Bush added.

Norton also listed implementation of the administration's President's Management Agenda among her accomplishments. In an interview with Government Executive last spring, Norton said she supports that agenda because it encourages better stewardship of taxpayer dollars and the production of timely, reliable financial and other information critical to policy decisions.

Interior struggled with some aspects of the agenda, but was making progress, Norton said at the time. For instance, the department is working on a streamlined management system that will replace 80 systems, allowing managers to access financial, property management, travel and acquisition data using one password rather than the up to 30 that have been required.

On the Bush administration's most recent traffic-light-style score card grading agencies' management agenda accomplishments, Interior earned top marks in human capital and competitive sourcing, an initiative to let contractors bid on federal jobs considered commercial in nature. The department remained at the red-light level, however, on financial management and e-government, and earned mediocre scores for integrating performance information into budget decisions.

One issue holding Interior back, is a long-running legal dispute over the management of Indian trust fund accounts. Indian groups claim the department mishandled the funds, and are seeking a full accounting and payment of billions of dollars in royalties they claim the fund's beneficiaries are owed.

Norton said in her letter that the department has "reengineered [its] Indian trust system to provide better service to beneficiaries."

The Interior Secretary also has been an advocate of controversial plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration. Those plans are coming up in discussions as the Senate works on fiscal 2007 budget legislation. Norton joined Bush's Cabinet in January 2001, after a stint practicing law in the private sector. She also spent eight years as Colorado's attorney general. "Hopefully, my husband and I will end up closer to the mountains we love in the West," she wrote in her resignation letter.