WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will step down from his cabinet position in the Obama administration and return to Colorado to spend time with his family, his office has confirmed to The Denver Post.
Salazar is expected to broadly announce his departure Wednesday. He has told President Barack Obama that he intends to leave his job by the end of March.
Salazar, 57, will have served a little more than four years in Obama’s cabinet after being plucked from his beloved U.S. Senate seat serving Colorado in 2008.
His decision on whether to stay on at the helm of Interior or return to Colorado — and likely the less-glamorous but more-lucrative private sector — has been weighing on Salazar for a long time.
The president and the vice president have indicated they would like him to stay on at Interior. Obama, at a campaign event in Pueblo last year, called Salazar “one of the finest senators that the state of Colorado ever had, who is now doing a great job looking after the natural resources of this beautiful country of ours.”