Sen. Chuck Grassley says a report that taxpayers shelled out nearly a billion dollars to federal workers sent home on paid leave while being probed for misbehavior shows "ridiculous" mismanagement by the government and must be stopped.
Over a three-year period ending last fall, taxpayers paid 57,000 civilian employees from various agencies some $775 million in salaries,
according to The Washington Post, which cited a Government Accountability Office report.
Those same employees continued to accrue their pensions, vacation and sick days and "moved up the federal pay scale," according to the Post.
The reasons given for putting the employees on leave ranged from "alleged violations of government rules and laws, whistleblowing, doubts about trustworthiness, and disputes with colleagues or bosses."
"I see the overuse of administrative leave, of lack of management making decisions on specific employees and being [it] abused and it is costing taxpayers a lot of money. It's ridiculous," Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said Tuesday on the "Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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In May, Grassley penned a letter to then-Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki asking for details on the number of VA's employees on administrative leave over the veterans' treatment scandal, as well as the VA's policies on the length of paid administrative leave.
He pointed out at least 40 veterans died while awaiting care at VA facilities while employees "cooked the books" to make it appear as though vets received timely medical care.
Grassley, and fellow Republicans Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Rep. Darrell Issa of California, requested the GAO report. Grassley and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana are working on drafting legislation to narrowly define paid leave, limiting it to a matter of days, congressional aides told the Post.
"It's possible because first of all, there's no law that prohibits it and it's what agencies can get away with," Grassley told Malzberg.
"When you've got hundreds of different government agencies and almost 20 Cabinet level people all administering in a different way, it brings about the ridiculousness of the fact that you could have 200-and-some federal employees on administrative leave for one to three years.
"You could have thousands on some sort of administrative leave, costing $700 million of taxpayers' money and that's only 60 percent of the federal agencies that have been reviewed so it's probably a bigger figure. Something has got to be done."
The Office of Personnel Management does allow for authorized paid leave for certain things such as donating an organ, house-hunting before a job transfer, attending the funeral of a relative in the military or snow days.
But, the Post reports, those typically require just hours or days, "not the months and years that the GAO discovered are common at more than 100 federal agencies."
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