"Dems Want Probe Into Whether Interior Department Discriminated"

"Senior Democrats are demanding that Congress’s investigative arm probe whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s mass reassignment of senior career civil servants last summer violated federal anti-discrimination laws.

In a letter sent Wednesday to the Government Accountability Office, obtained early by TPM, a group of Senate and House Democrats say they’re concerned that the controversial reassignments — already the subject of multiple investigations — are disproportionately affecting employees who “belong to a protected class.”

It’s illegal to make federal personnel decisions based on race, gender, age, religion, or disability.

The congressional letter comes days after the attorney representing some of the targeted employees in the Senior Executive Service (SES), the top rank of non-political federal employees, claimed that nearly half of those reassigned were minorities."

Alice Ollstein reports for Talking Points Memo March 28, 2018.