Energy Secretary Is Taken to Task for Costly Trips

The White House has admonished Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary for her expensive foreign travel but insists that her job is still secure, administration officials said Tuesday.

“We had concerns about the nature of [O’Leary’s] trips and the type of accommodations and logistics,” a White House official said about reports that she had traveled overseas frequently and in high style.

Referring to O’Leary’s future trips, he added: “It’s pretty clear that it’s going to be coach class.”

The White House was embarrassed by reports in The Times on Sunday that O’Leary traveled abroad far more than her domestic Cabinet colleagues and her predecessors, was generally accompanied by large entourages and occasionally flew on luxury charter planes used by rock stars and royalty.

The story detailed four elaborate trade missions that included delegations of 40 to 75 private citizens and non-Energy officials, 30 to 51 Energy staff members, and public costs as high as $845,000. On an August trip to South Africa, the tab for hiring video and still photographers alone was $6,500.

White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta expressed displeasure Monday to O’Leary and discussed the need for her to be more frugal in her travel, administration sources said. Panetta also voiced support for steps that O’Leary is taking to address the issue, including requesting an independent investigation of her travel, the aide said.

White House spokesman Mike McCurry defended O’Leary at a news briefing Tuesday. He said there was no reason to believe that her job was in jeopardy.

“She’s been a superb secretary of Energy. She has achieved an enormous amount of cost savings to U.S. taxpayers through her efforts to reinvent the department,” McCurry said.

“The president rightfully would be concerned about any examples of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal budget. But he also knows that those [trade] missions that Secretary O’Leary traveled upon returned--for every dollar of taxpayer money spent--about $1,000” in private business deals “that bring jobs and commerce here to the United States.”

This is the second time in recent weeks that O’Leary has run afoul of the White House. She was rebuked last month for issuing a $46,500 contract to a private firm to analyze and rate reporters’ coverage of the Energy Department.

At O’Leary’s request, Energy’s inspector general has opened an inquiry into the secretary’s travel and the department’s handling of travel arrangements, as well as the hiring of a longtime friend of the secretary’s in a newly created and high-paying job as Energy Department ombudsman. A spokeswoman for Inspector General John Layton said that his office will conduct “a thorough assessment of all of the issues raised” by the story in The Times.

In her request to Layton, O’Leary called for an examination of “the purpose of each trip, the activities of each federal participant in each trip, the funding of each trip . . . and claims for reimbursement for expenses by federal trip participants.”

In addition, she asked for “an assessment of travel authorization, voucher, travel reimbursement and auditing systems . . . with a view to identifying steps that might be taken to reduce errors and improve accounting oversight.” She said in an interview last week that she had discovered recently that this system “is extremely unreliable.”

And the department’s legal office is reviewing whether aides who upgraded to business and first class on flights with O’Leary must repay thousands of dollars to the federal Treasury, as the secretary herself has done. On Nov. 28, O’Leary reimbursed the department for seven disallowed upgrades, totaling $8,748.

On at least some occasions, her senior aides, including Chief of staff Richard Rosenzweig and scheduling director Johannah Dottori, upgraded with O’Leary to work together en route.

Officials are also assessing whether E. Shirley Thomas, O’Leary’s friend of 34 years who was appointed in late 1993 to the ombudsman position, must repay more than $25,000 that she has received as a living allowance for the last two years.

Thomas, whose salary is $93,166, was eligible to receive a daily living payment under an agreement which presumed that she would retain her permanent residence in New Jersey while on leave from her position as a Newark school social worker. In fact, agency officials say, Thomas sold her New Jersey home in December 1993 and now lives in the Washington suburbs.

Thomas declined comment Tuesday.

O’Leary’s travel practices are also expected to be the focus of hearings on Capitol Hill this month. The General Accounting Office, an auditing arm of Congress, is completing a review of O’Leary’s travel, particularly her trade missions to India and South Africa.

Times staff writer Dwight Morris and researcher Murielle E. Gamache contributed to this story.