Barack Obama is filling out the final members of his Cabinet, with plans to announce today the appointment of Ken Salazar, a Democratic senator from Colorado, as secretary of the interior. Salazar joins the rest of Obama’s energy and environmental team (see Nature story here), which includes Steve Chu as secretary of energy, Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Carol Browner in a new White House position coordinating climate and energy issues.

Salazar, whose family has lived in Colorado for five generations, is known as a dealmaker. He fought Bush administration plans to open new areas to oil-shale exploration, but has supported offshore oil drilling (Washington Post). Environmentalists are less happy with his appointment than they would have been if one widely circulated name, Raul Grijalva — a Democratic congressman from Arizona who chairs a House subcommittee that oversees public lands — had been tapped instead. Salazar will be taking over an agency with vast responsibility that includes managing national parks and forests and overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has been hammered in recent years (New York Times) over its management of endangered-species listings. “He’s better than what’s come before, but it looks like it’s going to limp along as a semi-broken agency,” Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Washington Post.

Elsewhere in Washington, the game of musical chairs continues. Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, will run the US Department of Agriculture (Washington Post). Vilsack, like Obama, supports biofuels such as ethanol – although he has proposed cutting down on the massive ethanol subsidies that exist in America.

And some top health-related posts will definitely be vacant soon, confirming the usual trend of leaders exiting with the administration. Yesterday Andrew von Eschenbach, head of the Food and Drug Administration, said he would resign on 20 January, the day Obama is sworn in as president. Leading candidates to replace him, as reported elsewhere, include Joshua Sharfstein, the health commissioner of Baltimore, and Steve Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and frequent FDA critic. In an overview story, the New York Times notes that National Institutes of Health head Elias Zerhouni is already gone (check out Nature’s interview with the departed head here), that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Julie Geberding expects to leave shortly, and that John Niederhuber will likely step aside as head of the National Cancer Institute.

Image: Salazar