Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asked her department’s Office of Inspector General whether grounds existed to prosecute employees who leaked budget data to The Washington Post and unclassified information to Politico, according to an internal department report.
The response: It would be challenging, because the department has “little” written policy or guidance on how employees are supposed to handle information.
“While evaluating the . . . incidents of alleged unauthorized releases of non-public information, we identified challenges to criminal prosecution or taking significant administrative actions against individuals responsible for the release of this type of information,” the report said.
Actually whistle blowers are supposed to be protected, and have provided a valuable service throughout the history of this country. (Remember Watergate?)
You would think that a person in charge of education might have known that.
However as it turns out this punish the dissidents idea is rampant throughout the Trump Administration.
Courtesy of TPM:
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt reassigned or demoted at least five high-ranking officials who questioned his spending and other leadership decisions — including the purchase of pricey office furniture and Pruitt’s desire to use sirens to cut through D.C. traffic — according to a New York Times report Thursday afternoon. Four of the officials were career staff and one was a political appointee.
The Times reports that the political appointee, Kevin Chmielewski, was put on administrative leave without pay after Chmielewski raised concerns about Pruitt’s behavior with the White House’s presidential personnel office.
Additionally, Chmielewski and three of the career staffers are reported to have confronted Pruitt directly about his use of taxpayer dollars — particularly, a proposal to buy a $100,000-a-month charter aircraft membership that was eventually scuttled, and an effort to shell out $70,000 to replace two desks in Pruitt’s office.
The sidelined officials also incurred Pruitt’s ire by pushing back on his desire to use sirens in his motorcade in non-emergency situations, including en route to dinner at the chic restaurant Le Diplomate, and were hesitant to approve his frequent first-class and charter flights, his unprecedented 20-member security team, and his request for a bulletproof sport utility vehicle.
So the real sin in the Trump Administration is not the wasting of taxpayer money, but reporting the wasting of taxpayer money.
Drain the swamp my ass!
