Interior makes more details of recent SES reassignments public

The Interior Department is beginning to make more details public about its recent — and often controversial — round of senior executive reassignments.

Thirty-three senior executives, or 15 percent of the department’s Senior Executive Service cadre, received reassignment notices from Interior on June 15. Twenty-three of those SES accepted and made the transfer to their new positions, according to documents Interior recently made available.

It’s the first time the Interior Department has publicly stated the number of executives involved in its June round of reassignments. Members of Congress and senior executives involved in the Interior reassignments had provided rough estimates of the total number, but the exact number was unknown.

The release from Interior comes a few weeks after Joel Clement, a former senior executive who publicly resigned after the agency reassigned him, sued the department. At the time, Interior hadn’t complied with any of Clement’s roughly 30 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents related to the department’s decision to reassign one-third of its SES members. Read more…