Unplug O’Leary’s Energy Fiefdom : Clinton administration needs to rein in its high-flying, free-spending secretary

It is time that President Clinton publicly reprimand and rein in Hazel O’Leary, who has been running the Energy Department more like her personal fiefdom than a public agency. The secretary’s poor judgment and management has already cost taxpayers plenty, which was demonstrated by two disclosures on Thursday.

The General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, turned up $255,000 in unaccountable expenses for just two of O’Leary’s 16 foreign trips. An investigation by the Energy Department itself, in response to a Times article, confirmed some other questionable practices. For instance, take the case of E. Shirley Thomas, a high-ranking Energy Department officer. The department ordered Thomas, a close friend of O’Leary, who hired her for the newly created job of department ombudsman, to reimburse the government more than $21,000 in living allowances that she accepted but was not entitled to receive after she moved to the Washington area from New Jersey.

The Clinton administration has been too accommodating of the energy secretary since revelations of her high-style spending and travel first surfaced last year. Her travel costs have been considerably larger than those of other Cabinet members. Her high-priced “trade missions” have raised questions too. Then there was the matter of $43,000 in taxpayer money she spent to investigate reporters and media outlets covering the Energy Department. In a time of budget crisis, the department’s spending sends the wrong signal from an Administration grappling with a partial government shutdown.

The GAO audited two of O’Leary’s 16 trips. The Energy Department could not produce records on $175,000 in spending related to a 1995 “trade mission” to South Africa for O’Leary and her party and $80,000 for a similar 1994 trip to India. The GAO also reported that the South Africa trip cost taxpayers $663,600, up from the previously published reports of $560,000. The India trip cost $729,921, about $10,000 more than previously reported.

Of curious note: An unspecified expenditure on the India trip for “lodging” in Vienna and Stockholm, although there was no stopover in either city. The secretary’s special assistant said the cost for her unrelated trips to those cities were inadvertently included in the Indian trade mission account. He also said that the $255,000 in expenses on the two audited trips were proper and approved through U.S. embassies in India and South Africa and that the receipts have been located since the GAO inquiry.

Really? If the Energy Department’s record keeping has been so shoddy, how much was spent on the other 14 trips? How else has taxpayer money been squandered? Is she an asset or liability for taxpayers?