The Bush Administration's Teapot Dome?

I though we were missing something: an old fashioned oil scandal in D.C.

Four independent government auditors rebel against the Interior Department (NYT) over a series of give-away oil and gas leases on federal lands:

The new accusations surfaced just one week after the Interior Department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, told a House subcommittee that “short of crime, anything goes” at the top levels of the Interior Department.

In two of the lawsuits, two senior auditors with the Minerals Management Service in Oklahoma City said they were ordered to drop their claim that Shell Oil had fraudulently shortchanged taxpayers out of $18 million.

A third auditor, also in Oklahoma City, charged that senior officials in Denver ordered him to drop his demand that two dozen companies pay $1 million in back interest.

And in a suit that was filed in 2004, Mr. Maxwell charged that senior officials in Washington ordered him not to press claims that the Kerr-McGee Corporation had cheated the government out of $12 million in royalties.

Where's the mandated federal cut, they ask? Never mind that, say superiors, how about those Cowboys?

Here's the wikipedia review of the Teapot dome scandal, for those of us who would prefer Warren Harding to Gruesome Boob. The essence was: endemic corruption by presidential appointees.

The question is: was there personal corruption involved; did political appointees at Interior get rich? The personalization of horrible conduct is necessary for most scandals - sadly, mere evil policy that screws over millions of people rarely is.