Don’t be surprised if outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder looks a bit youthful in his official portrait, set to be unveiled Friday afternoon.
That’s because Holder, who apparently adheres to the Boy Scouts motto “be prepared,” began planning for the portrait in April 2009, three months after taking over the job. And the portrait — these things run around $40,000 or so — was completed about a year later. (Unclear where it’s been waiting these past few years.)
This seems a bit unusual, but it’s not unprecedented.
At the Justice Department, the time between departure and unveiling is shorter than, say, at the State Department. Portrait unveilings for former secretaries of state Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright have occurred six to eight years after their departures. Hillary Clinton hasn’t had hers hung yet.
But Holder did the honors for his predecessor Michael Mukasey about nine months after Mukasey left office, and former attorney general Alberto Gonzales unveiled predecessor John Ashcroft’s painting just shy of two years after he left.
Holder’s portrait is going to be unveiled while he’s still attorney general, since nominee Loretta Lynch, though approved Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, isn’t likely to be confirmed by the full Senate until next month.
Like Holder, Janet Reno, the second-longest serving attorney general, was still in office — though with only five days to go before the Clinton administration ended — when her portrait was unveiled.
Justice folks were suspiciously hush-hush this week about who’s going to be doing the presentation. Naturally, it turns out to be President Obama.
(We should note that Congress, on a year-to-year basis, started banning the use of federal funds for these portraits. But there is no permanent ban.)
In the tank
The General Services Administration regularly catches federal workers swiping taxpayer-funded credit cards — assigned to gas up and maintain government vehicles — to fuel their personal vehicles.
Since 2010, federal employees have stolen $2.4 million in gas, amounting to about 260 cases of government workers across the country taking fuel, according to an investigation by Scott MacFarlane of WRC-TV (Channel 4) in Washington.
Each vehicle in the federal government’s fleet of more than 205,000 cars, buses, vans and trucks is assigned corresponding credit cards. But federal workers frequently have been found making personal charges for using the card to make a buck, and then forging data to try to cover it up.
The GSA inspector general’s most recent report to Congress, covering April through September 2014, listed a number of gas-theft cases.
For example, Department of Homeland Security contractor Jeffery Franklin pleaded guilty in May for using “multiple GSA Government Fleet Credit Cards to fuel his personal vehicle.” He was sentenced to six months in jail and a year of probation and had to pay $3,920 in restitution. He cannot work for the federal government for three years. (And then?)
In another case, a Navy employee in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to larceny for using the gas cards for his personal vehicles. Petty Officer 1st Class John Diianni was sentenced to five months in jail, given a bad-conduct discharge and ordered to pay $20,000 in restitution. A Labor Department maintenance technician in Glenmont, N.Y., was charged in August with theft and fraud for using the federal gas cards to buy gas for himself and for others in exchange for cash. He paid $950 and was sentenced to five years of supervisory release.
In a more recent court filing in federal court in Norfolk, the GSA found that from October 2012 to June 2014, Defense Department mail carrier Kenneth Alston, used his card to buy gas for other folks in exchange for cash. An investigation began when a computer program that tracks fleet card purchases detected “multiple over-tank transactions, a history of multiple transactions per day, and inconsistent odometer entries.” He pleaded guilty to embezzlement of government property. He hasn’t yet been sentenced.
“These cases protect American taxpayer dollars from fraud,” Deputy GSA Inspector General Robert Erickson told the Loop in an e-mail. “They serve as a deterrent to people considering federal gas card fraud as a way to obtain money. People who steal from the United States in this manner have an excellent chance of getting caught, losing their jobs, and being prosecuted.”
That’s a warning. Given the low price of gas these days, it may not be worth the crime.
Life in the private sector
After more than 20 years working in government, former General Services Administration head Dan Tangherlini looks to be landing quite well, our colleague Jonathan O’Connell reports.
Tangherlini, Loop fans may recall, took over the GSA in the wake of that 2012 scandal over conference spending.
He left a couple of weeks ago and is starting in March as chief operating officer of Chevy Chase-based Artemis Real Estate Partners, which invests in property nationwide.
Tangherlini has a wealth of local and federal government experience, having been D.C. transportation director, deputy mayor and city administrator, as well as interim director of the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority.
At the federal level he’s been at Treasury, Transportation, the Office of Management and Budget, and GSA.
Denise Turner Roth is serving as interim GSA administrator.
Vax populi
This week’s Loop Congressional Research Service report pick looks at the federal government’s role in immunization policy.
With measles cases popping up around the country, CNN/ORC surveyed Americans on whether vaccinations should be mandatory. Nearly 80 percent said yes, parents should be required to vaccinate their children.
The federal government can buy and distribute vaccines, as well as keep data and fund research, but it can’t “mandate the use of specific vaccines by individuals,” the CRS report says. That’s left up to the states.
Our colleague Todd Frankel wrote last month that Mississippi (yes, Mississippi) has the lowest number of unvaccinated children in the country because it has “a strict mandatory vaccination law that lacks the loopholes found in almost every other state.”
Last year, there were more than 600 reported cases of measles in the United States — the highest number in 20 years. In the first month of 2015, there were 102 cases. As of this week it’s up to 154 cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the annual rate of children getting their measles shots remains above 90 percent, “the increased number of imported measles cases, combined with pockets of unvaccinated individuals, has resulted in a larger number of outbreaks in recent years,” the CRS report says.
And even though the federal government can’t force anyone to vaccinate their kids, it can keep urging folks to do so. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, on the White House blog this week, noted the measles outbreak and said: “The most important thing people can do to protect themselves against measles is to get vaccinated.”
— With Colby Itkowitz
Twitter: @KamenInTheLoop, @ColbyItkowitz
Colby Itkowitz is a national reporter for In The Loop.
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