waste & abuse

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 | by Sean Paige

Government Lawyers' Labors Lost

Consider, if you will, the plight of the lowly and downtrodden assistant U.S. attorney: a leper of the legal profession who's been forced against his or her will into a life -- or at least a few years -- as pit-bull litigator for the Department of Justice, or DOJ. The hours are long, the coffee comes hot and black and the rewards are few -- aside, that is, from the hefty salary, the beaucoup benefits, the springboarding possibilities to greater glories and the visceral thrill that comes from dragging monopolistic software moguls down to earth.

But now, after decades of suffering in silence, the worker bees of the U.S. justice system are fighting back with the only weapon at their disposal -- the multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit. DOJ lawyers past and present recently banded together to bring a $500 million claim against the department, alleging it cheated them out of their overtime pay.

"The purpose [of the lawsuit] is to ensure that the nation's chief law-enforcement agency abides by the law itself" said the lawyer's lawyer, Robert A. Van Kirk, alleging that Justice effectively keeps two sets of time sheets as a way to avoid complying with the Federal Employees Pay Act of 1945, which requires overtime pay for employees -- and lawyers count -- who work more than 40 hours a week.

About 180 present or former DOJ lawyers reportedly already are involved, and Federal Claims Judge Robert H. Hodges Jr. recently gave the plaintiffs permission to notify 12,000 others that they, too, can sign on to the potential gravy train.

DOJ has denied that it violates the law, but Van Kirk produced DOJ policy manuals that seem to require overtime and a prescient internal memo, dated 1998, warning: "If the department continues to ignore this problem, sooner or later, an intrepid attorney will develop a class action on this issue and major problems will result."

"Our understanding was that there was no entitlement to be paid for overtime and we were expected to work the hours the job required," said one former U.S. attorney who has joined the lawsuit and today is recovering from overtime-stress disorder in private practice. "No one left at 5 o'clock, ever."

White House in a Frenzy to Declassify Nuclear Secrets

It became fashionable in the wake of the Soviet Union's disunion to believe that national-security secrets, too, were a thing of the paranoid past, resulting in a 1995 presidential executive order requiring a massive, declassification of millions of formerly secret documents. But three years and 600 million declassified documents later, the effort itself is under review, as some worry that in a rush to spread a little sunshine we also might be giving away to potential adversaries information on our nuclear-weapons program.

About 400 million pages have been made public, 200 million are declassified but unreleased and another 1 billion pages are said to await review for possible declassification.

"I support efforts to release government information to the public, but in doing so we have to be careful not to continue to accidentally release sensitive nuclear-weapons design data that countries like Iran and Iraq could use to advance their own nuclear-weapons programs" said Arizona Republican Sen. Jon L. Kyl, who supports legislation that would require a review of the declassification work that's been done on documents relating to nuclear weapons. Kyl last year joined with several other senators in warning National Security Adviser Sandy Berger that nuclear secrets may be leaking out because of the White House's "frenzied attempt" to meet a year 2000 declassification deadline.

But opponents of the measure, set for a vote this fall, call it an overreaction to allegations of Chinese spying. "This is all part of the frenzy about Chinese espionage that is driving Washington crazy," says Steven Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. Kyl, however, says a recent review by the administration of improperly released nuclear data "detailed numerous examples of key design information that was not intended to be released but, in fact, was released."

Kiddie Care

Operation Kiddie Care, a two-year investigation of the Department of Agriculture's $1.7 billion Child and Adult Care Food Program, or CACFP, found that the program is being plundered for personal profit by the private middlemen charged with feeding its 2.4 million beneficiaries.

Led by Department of Agriculture Inspector General Roger Viadero, the probe has resulted in 44 indictments, 28 convictions and millions of dollars in ordered restitution in 14 states. The most imaginative scams include setting up phony day-care centers, claiming to feed phantom children and putting friends or relatives on the payroll who have never done any work. The less imaginative, however, resorted to good old-fashioned, no-frills extortion.

In California, the large number of CACFP indictments have led to a major shake-up in the state Education office responsible for overseeing the program and to the hiring of five additional auditors to keep tabs on meal providers. The office's former head and her husband, who ran something called Pacific Asian American Family Care in Long Beach, received prison terms and were ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution for their schemes to steal from the program.