On August 9, 2001 Secretary Norton appointed Mr. James E. Cason as Associate Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior. According to Mark Pfeifle Press Secretary for the Interior Department the Associate Deputy Secretary will work for Deputy Secretary, Steven Griles, and will help carry out the implementation of the President Bush's initiatives. This position was not subject to Senate confirmation.

Mr. Cason has a long history of government service including his position as manager for the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation from 1990 - 19993. Before that he served as Acting Assistant Secretary and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Dept. for Land and Minerals Management from 1985 to 1990. From 1982 to 1985, he served as Special Assistant to the Director of Interior's Bureau of Land Management. Prior to joining the Interior Department Mr. Cason was a real estate developer in Oregon.

What is not in the Administrations press release is that in 1989 Mr. Cason was a nominee for Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment under the first Bush Administration. In this position Mr. Cason would have been responsible for the National Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service. However, this appointment never occurred because his nomination was never voted on in the full Senate committee. Although Mr. Cason's nomination made it through the Senate Agriculture Committee (Oct 19, 1989) on a vote of 12-7 the vote never went to the full committee because Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole conceded that Cason would be unable to win approval in a vote of the full senate. This was apparently the first time that any nominee for assistant secretary had failed to win confirmation after being approved in committee. . Mr. Cason later asked the President to withdraw his name from consideration. The White House then withdrew Cason's nomination because of the strong opposition within the committee and the full Senate over his stand on key conservation issues.

Congressional opponents led by Senator Patrick J. Leahy charged that Mr. Cason had made numerous decisions that favored business interests and some Senators even called Mr. Cason a "James Watt clone". (Leahy's staff conducted a lengthy background investigation of Cason that delayed hearings by several months). National environmental groups opposed Cason head-on for opening the door for exploiters when he was assistant secretary of the interior for land and minerals management.

It should be noted that not only did the Senate and environmentalists oppose Cason's confirmation colleagues of his did as well. According to a story in The Record, R. Max Peterson (the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service during the Reagan years and a loyal Reaganite), said that "Mr. Cason's decisions at the Department of the Interior were uniformly bad when measured against any reasonable standard of public interest and fairness to the public which owns the public lands."

Background on Cason

Mr. Cason may have improperly pressured the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service not to list the rare northern spotted owl as a threatened species out of concern that it would limit logging in the Pacific Northwest. According to a Washington Post story in 1989 Mr. Cason objected to a 1986 warning by departmental biologists that logging in the Pacific Northwest was threatening survival of the rare spotted owl. "Our concern was that is was a very, volatile issue", Cason told the Senate Agriculture Committee during his nomination hearing. According to a New York Times article Mr. Cason attempted to distort in one case, and to suppress in another, scientific reports that came to conclusions unfavorable to the timber industry. Again, during the Senate Ag. Committee hearing Mr. Cason testified "We were very concerned about the conclusions they had drawn, which did not appear to have a solid foundation." Mr. Cason denied that he had ordered the biologists to surrender their copies of the spotted-owl report, although he said, "I think it's entirely possible that the [biologists] would have interpreted the conservation that way".

In 1986 Cason played a key role in the Interior Departments decision to resume selling titles to federal oil and shale tracts for $2.50 an acre, far below their market value. He then proceeded to approve the granting of titles to some 82,000 acres, even though Congress had made clear its intent to revise the program. One set of claims, 17,000 acres, was purchased for $42,000 and sold months later for $37 million. Mr. Cason said that he was "carrying out existing law because Congress had failed to revise it." Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan subsequently suspended the patent sales. Two years later when Congress considered trying to change the law that made these transfers possible Mr. Cason rushed out to Colorado to urge more claimants to "line up to the trough while they could". They did so by the thousands.

He also approved a revision of Federal audit regulations that would have cost Federal and local governments -and saved 12 major oil companies-scores of millions of dollars in unpaid or underpaid royalties. According to a New York Times article Mr. Cason signed this deal on the stationary of the oil companies' attorneys.

Cason objected to new Forest Service rules that would have made it more difficult to drill for oil and gas in national forests. The Forest Service rules, Cason said yesterday, "gave the impression that oil and gas leasing would be absolutely at the bottom of the pecking order." These rules were the result of the Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act of 1987. This act gives the Forest Service the final authority to allow or deny oil and gas leasing and development on National Forest Lands. In the past, the BLM has had that authority.

Mr. Cason also presided over changes in the mode of reporting private lumbering operations in the National Forests, to create the false appearance that the government was making money on its timber cutting permits.

Cason also failed to develop a worthwhile system for monitoring strip-mine operators to ensure that those in violation of environmental stipulations in past permits do not receive new permits. A report issued in January 1989 by the GAO says that the present system is too slow, is riddled with errors and is essentially usless.