Scandal

I understand why Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wants to clean house at the Minerals Management Service. Scandals involving sex and drugs are fun and dramatic to talk about, and they provide an easy target for a surgical strike that leaves everyone feeling good about the agency once the problem's been excised. But it's also a mistake to think that you can nuke the people who behave in a really egregious manner and that afterwards, any and all ethics problems in your agency will miraculously vanish and everyone will behave well until the end of time.

This is part and parcel of the problem with the Obama administration's response to its nominees' tax problems. They nuked someone big--Tom Daschle--and someone smaller--Nancy Killefer. But they've still got Tim Geithner serving in the administration. And more importantly, getting rid of folks with ethics problems doesn't mean that no one will ever have another slip, and it doesn't mean that people won't continue to behave badly.

If you want a new culture in Washington, you don't just need to get rid of the obvious examples of ethical lapses. You need to foster respect among employees at all levels of agencies. You need to end cultures of retaliation and dishonesty. You need to make it clear that documents and processes need to be approached with integrity. Legal problems are terrible, of course. As I've said before, no one ought to get a pass on not paying huge amounts of taxes, or suborning corruption, or otherwise breaking the law. But no one should get a pass on retaliating against a whistleblower, lying to their subordinate, falsifying paperwork, or intimidating a co-worker either. And so if Salazar cleans up MMS and declares himself done, he'll have done the equivalent of only taking half a course of antibiotics to fight an infection, producing resistant strains of disease. Bad behavior will remain, and the people who commit it will be even more confident in behaving poorly, secure in the knowledge that you have to do something really sexy and outrageous to get in trouble.