Report on Energy Secretary’s Trips Finds Fault but Fails to Assign Blame

An extensive independent probe into Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s foreign travel missions blames sloppy planning and inefficient management for exorbitant costs and other difficulties associated with the trips but stops short of holding any individual Department of Energy official accountable.

The final report, more than 300 pages, was issued Tuesday by the department’s inspector general in an attempt to close the case on O’Leary’s highly publicized foreign travel, which included four trade missions that cost a total of $3.42 million. The report varied little from a draft version released in June.

The report included 31 recommendations for the department, including a proposal that O’Leary appoint a senior DOE official to issue guidelines for all international travel conducted by department officials and that DOE’s assistant secretary for policy establish procedures for measuring the success of the missions.

Most of the recommendations already have been adopted, DOE officials said Tuesday. For example, the department has introduced a procedure for naming a senior official to take responsibility for planning all aspects of foreign trips by the secretary and other DOE employees, said Dan Reicher, O’Leary’s chief of staff. The procedures were used during two foreign trips O’Leary took in recent months, Reicher said.

In defending the trips, O’Leary and other DOE officials have said that they helped generate up to $19.7 billion in energy-related business agreements for U.S. companies.