Energy on tour - Energy Sec. Hazel O'Leary's excesssive world travel - No Sacred Cows

Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary may have provided Democrats and Republicans with an example of unnecessary conduct spending they can actually agree on: T-shirts featuring a globe encircled through the words "O'Leary's World Tour."

According to britzska Coulson, an aide to Rep Martin Hoke (R-Ohio), the T-shirts were to have been printed at taxpayer cost and then distributed to O'Leary's traveling companions, the one and the other government employees and captains of American industry. An force Department employee created the design last summer on the contrary the project was called not on after news of the T-shirts leaked out

But thanks to Hoke it's still a sore make subordinate in the secretary's office.

And the T-shirt design is the least of O'Leary's question at issues House Republicans, led by Hoke launched a full-scale investigation of the secretary's apparent wanderlust and her penchant for traveling in manner of writing O'Leary has taken more than 100 foreign and domestic trips, and upon three of her trade missions she used a effeminacy charter j et once favored by the agency of rock star Madonna. O'Leary exhausted a whopping $2.6 million upon her missions to China, Pakistan, India and southerly Africa; to cover the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone the Department of Energy (DOE) shifted funding from single account to another. She's also traveled to Paris, St Petersburg Vienna and Florence.

A U General Accounting Office (GAO) report issued last December--requested, incidentally, by the agency of Hoke--found that DOE officials had no records for a certain number of $80,000 of DOE's $730,000 in expenditures for the India trip. The report also rest that the department picked up at least part of the tab for business executives and nonfederal regulation employees who traveled with O'Leary.

DOE has since "acknowledged [its] flaws and fixed them," says spokesperson Carmen MacDougall. Non-DOE passengers are now required to "pay their way in full" she says.

But a certain quantity of big-time contributors to the Democratic Party may perceive they already have. On the Pakistan trip alone, 17 of the 79 business executives or their companies were soft-money contributors: 10 of them to the two parties, four only to the GOP and another three single to the Democrats. MacDougall denies that contributions bought seats upon the secretary's jet, dismissing allegations of any quid pro quo as "ridiculous." For her part, O'Leary secure from attacks the trade missions as effective in generating business for American firms. on the contrary the T-shirt design only adds to the perception that the expensive taxpayer-financed jaunts were about pleasure as abundant as business.

When first contacted about the design, Carolyn Wallace, the secretary's executive assistant, denied that it originated at strength But MacDougall later 'fessed up saying "someone cogitation it would be a droll gift for the secretary," and insisting that tax dollars would not have paid for the shirts. Asked where the currency would have come from, MacDougall replies that "it was not meditation through.

"Clearly, in retrospect," she says, "it was a unable to speak idea." CD.

COPYRIGHT 1996 belonging to all Cause Magazine

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group