As if an extravagant government workers’ conference
in Las Vegas at a cost to taxpayers of $685.00 per person per day weren’t enough
of a scandal, Tuesday’s second day of Congressional hearings into the lavish
spending habits of GSA’s Region 9, before a subcommittee of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, revealed a timeline including
exotic taxpayer funded travel by disgraced GSA executive Jeffrey Neely and his
wife around the South Pacific after agency leaders in Washington,
D.C. were made aware of the facts respecting the scandalous Las Vegas meeting. According
to the subcommittee’s timeline, Neely’s 2010 Las Vegas conference excesses were
revealed to GSA’s Deputy Director Susan Brita, as well as resigned
administrator Martha Johnson and commissioner Ruth Cox, by Inspector General
Brian Miller at a briefing in May, 2011. Following that briefing, agency
leaders allowed Neely and his wife to spend an additional 44 days flitting
around the South Pacific on taxpayer funded junkets to such lavish locales as
Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, and the Northern Marianas, as well as Napa Valley wine
country.
One GSA funded February, 2012, Neely family South Pacific
tour lasting 17 days was described in Neely’s e-mail messages as a birthday
party. “Rough schedule per our conversation. Guess this’ll be your birthday
present,” Neely wrote to his wife.” Her response: “We gonna party like iz yo
birthday.” This sort of wasteful spending, after being alerted to Neely’s
earlier misdeeds prompted California Congressman and subcommittee chairman Jeff
Denham to angrily remark to the assembled GSA witnesses, “I am prepared to
systematically pull apart GSA to the point I’ll question whether GSA is needed
at all.”
Referring to Neely’s invocation of the Fifth
Amendment at another Congressional hearing a day earlier, and his conspicuous
absence from this hearing, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Chairman John Mica alluded to pictures of Neely lounging at the Las Vegas
resort during the discredited 2010 conference. “The only way we’ll be able to
see him is on a video in a hot tub.”
Responding to questions from subcommittee members,
Inspector General Miller described the detailed nature of the improprieties his
investigation has uncovered. “Every time we turned over a stone we found 50
more with all kinds of things crawling out.” Miller noted that among his
revelations was the theft of 115 iPod music players from Neely’s GSA awards “store.”
Through a subpoena to Apple, computer locating technology traced one of the
stolen iPods to Neely’s daughter. “There were so few controls and so little
restriction preventing people from even going into the GSA store and taking
things that we could not tell for sure who stole what from that store,” Miller
told the subcommittee.
GSA Chief of Staff Mike Robertson testified that he
told Deputy Counsel Kimberley D. Harris, in the White House Counsel’s office,
about the profligacy in Neely’s GSA region within a few days of the May, 2011
preliminary revelations by Inspector General Miller.
Seeking to explain the ten month delay in taking
any disciplinary action against Neely to stop his extravagant family travel at
government expense, resigned GSA Administrator Martha Johnson she “had to
follow due process concerning personnel matters.” Someone needs to explain to
Washington bureaucrats that “innocent until proven guilty” does not translate
to “continued unfettered discretion with taxpayer dollars until proven
mendacious.”
