Why America's Interior Department has nothing to do with police
In most countries an interior ministry means police and internal security. America's version manages national parks, dams, wildlife refuges and relations with Native nations, which is why it earned the nickname 'the Department of Everything Else'. It was born from a tidy-minded complaint about offices stuck in the wrong departments.
The first Congress considered a domestic department in 1789 but handed those duties to the State Department instead. The idea lingered for half a century until the Mexican–American War left the country with huge new territories. Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker then argued that the General Land Office had little business sitting in the Treasury, Indian Affairs in the War Department, or the Patent Office in State. The Senate approved his proposal 31 to 25, creating the department on March 3, 1849, the eve of Zachary Taylor's inauguration.
Over time it shed some roles. Agriculture spun off into its own department, and water pollution control moved to the Environmental Protection Agency once that existed. What stayed was land, natural resources, wildlife, territories and Native American affairs. Today it oversees about 75% of federal public land, and as of mid-2004 that meant 507 million acres, roughly a fifth of the country, including 476 dams, 433 park sites and 544 wildlife refuges. The Bureau of Land Management alone handles about an eighth of the nation.
Its secretaries have made history in several ways. Albert B. Fall, caught up in the Teapot Dome scandal over oil leases, was convicted of bribery in 1929 and served a year in prison. James G. Watt banned the Beach Boys from a 1983 Independence Day concert on the National Mall and resigned that year after a demeaning remark about his staff. In 2021 Deb Haaland became the first American Indian to lead any executive department.
The department has also confronted its own record. A 2010 law provided $3.4 billion to settle the long-running Cobell lawsuit over mismanaged Indian trust funds, and a boarding school investigation launched in 2021 found that 973 children died at federal Indian schools.
Source: United States Department of the Interior
