O’Leary Goes in Style, You Pay : Clinton should pull the plug on energy secretary’s luxurious, pricey travels

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary threatens to give wretched excess a bad name. After less than three years in office, O’Leary has outdistanced all of her domestic counterparts in the Cabinet by logging 130 days of overseas travel, in addition to the scores of trips she has made around the United States. But the secretary doesn’t just travel. She TRAVELS, in a style more appropriate to a spare-no-expenses potentate than to someone who--regardless of her private wealth and previous insistence on luxury--is for now a public servant and as such is supposedly subject to certain fiscal restraints.

O’Leary invited deserved criticism earlier this year when The Times reported that, thanks to various upgrades and a taste for the tonier hotels, the costs of her domestic travel far exceeded those of her Cabinet colleagues. Now reporters Alan C. Miller and Dwight Morris, again using the Freedom of Information Act, have unveiled the mind-boggling record of O’Leary’s numerous overseas junkets.

At times using a leased luxury jet favored by rock stars and similar royalty, O’Leary has led “trade missions” to various countries at costs of as much as $845,000 a pop. Besides paying for the opulent airliner, taxpayers have also footed nearly all the bills for the swollen entourages that O’Leary typically takes with her. On one trip to India the secretary took along 44 business executives, 21 of whom have yet to repay the government even the nominal pittance they were billed.

O’Leary, echoed now by Vice President Al Gore, justifies her costly perambulations by claiming they produce valuable contracts for U.S. companies. What this implies is (1) that were it not for O’Leary’s initiative these businesses would have been incapable of selling overseas and (2) that the exorbitant costs of O’Leary’s travels are directly related to her claimed successes. None of this will wash. Here is a clear case of a public official abusing her access to public funds in a day of increasing budgetary austerity. Clearly it’s time for President Clinton to order his energy secretary to start showing a lot more respect for the costs of how she runs her operation.