Abstract
In October of 2017, Joel Clement—a federal civil servant who had headed the U.S. Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis since 2011—wrote a stinging resignation letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. In it, Clement accused Zinke and President Trump of having “waged an all-out assault on the civil service by muzzling scientists and policy experts like myself.” The story behind Joel Clement’s resignation—a story still unfolding as of this Article’s writing in 2018—provides a window into the relationship between the political leadership and the civil service at the Interior Department in the first year of the Trump administration. It also serves as a jumping-off point to revisit the value in having a civil service with some independence from politics, and to consider mechanisms to protect that independence. This Article explores those questions through the lens of Clement’s resignation.
