Boyz N the HUD
Dealey, Sam
In government oversight circles, Susan Gaffney is a highly regarding official. She is President Clinton's 1993 appointee as inspector general at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In...
...Troubling," said Sen...
...Claiming the "integrity of the EEO process" has been compromised, it's now asked of the EEOC to rule on Patrick's findings...
...The report, by Donald Bucklin, a former counsel for-curiously-Sen...
...On September 1, 1998 she wrote to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision asking that the supervisory agency take over the investigation...
...Soon after her testimony, they commissioned an "independent" review of their actions...
...Beyond the pale," said Sen...
...HUD has heard the foot-steps...
...But what really nettled the committee was Gaffney's latest clash with Cuomo over a discrimination complaint lodged against her...
...Note this doesn't say such an environment exists, only that minority employees perceive it exist...
...in addition to Thompson's inquiry, other members are asking questions, as is the General Accounting Office...
...The initial $100,00 retainer for Patrick and Gibson was over 27 times that amount, and sources believe that their leagal teams were ultimately paid much more...
...A day Gaffney met with Cuomo, "I reminded him that...if he started the 'dirty tricks' again, I would gight," she told the committee...
...The secretary repeatedly assured me that he had nothing to do with these actions," gafnet testified...
...Bad Blood between the secretary and his IG began in 1995 when Gaffney questioned grant awards in a pet program of then-Assistant Secretary Cuomo...
...Their contentious relationship has poisoned the air at HUD for over two years...
...Now, Official data shos that Gaffney's staff-37percent minority and 51 percent women-is the most "diverse" of all departmental Offices of Inspectors General...
...Patrick had been roundly criticized as an overzealous advocate of affirmative action during his Justice tenure...
...Sam Dealey...
...In 1996 HUD hired 72 investigators to look into EEO complaints at an average cost of $3,675 per investigation...
...said Gaffney, Cuomo offered her a deal: Leave HUD and he'd settle the case, maybe even anoint Newsome her succesor...
...Susan Collins...
...She suggested he fire them...
...The EEOC misght also want to explore why HUD brass are driving this woman from her job, and why de facto power at the departments has been seized by the elite palace guard of white males the secretary has surrounded himselft with...
...Gaffney cant's appeal patrick's report, but Congress may save her...
...Then there's the matter of Patrick and Gibson's payment...
...Two months later Newsome filed a complaint with the departments' Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) office, which began a routine inquiry and hired an outside investigator...
...Cuome-through Glaser-also empowered these lawyers to investigate larger issues of allegd bias in the IG's office...
...Cuomo didn't respond...
...He explained to me that his key aide saw me as 'the embodiment of evil,' and there was nothing he could do about it...
...Gaffney tehn took steps to address minority sensitivity, including establishing a Diversity Liaison Group...
...The EEOC said it couldn't take control unless Cuomo, who has complete discretion over the investigation stage of HUD discrimination complaints, authorized the transfer...
...In early 1998 report to Congress, Gaffney criticized some of Cuomo's ballyhooed reforms...
...But when wind of the complaint reached HUD's tenth floor, Newsome found some unexpected support from "key aides" to Cuomo, notably Deputy General Counsel Howard Glaser...
...The committee launched its own innvestigation of the investigation...
...Gaffney's story-now in the public record-worried top HUD officials, too, although for a different reason...
...The next day...
...Cuomo's feud with his own ethics watchdog burst into the open last September when Gaffney, specking befor Fred Thompson's Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, reported orchestrated and "escalating" attacks on her office by Cuomo and his "key aides," including cooked up charges of racism, insubordination, and malfesance, and general dirty-dealing...
...The results indicated that the IG's office had problems in this area...
...Gaffney's catching on...
...It seemed a foregone conclusion what he would find...
...Gaffney reveals many are petty, nit-picking arguments based upon misrepresentations, distortions of events, remarks taken out of context and arguments that defy logic and reason...
...But now she's come up against a force she just can't crack: her own boss, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo...
...He would noty...
...Thompson's fundraising inquiry, concluded HUD had handled the case admirably...
...Glaser put a stop order on the original investigation, hiring instead two lawyers to look into the charges...
...She was concerned that the internal review by HUD's EEO was going to be a monkey court," said a Hill source...
...To no one's surprise, it recommended Newsome's promotion...
...After he became secretary in 1997, tensions grew...
...I said that I now intended to fight...
...Meanwhile, a distiguished public servant of 28 years is caught up in Cuomo's political ambition...
...In fact, our review of the numerous allegations made by Ms...
...Patrick's conclusions miffed some long-time HUD observers...
...I fear that if I leave," Gaffney told teh Senate committee, "the secretary would replace me with someone whose loyalties are to the secretary and not to the department...
...The story alarmed mebers of the Governmental Affairs Committe...
...Gaffney had a hunch she was being railroaded...
...According to a letter from Deputy Secretary Saul Ramirez, the report also alleged a "widespread percetpion by minority employees of an environment of racial insensitivity...
...In an agency long synonymous with "waste, fraud, and abuse," Gaffney has spent her tenure cracking down on questionable grants, sweetheart deals, and widespread contracting abuses...
...The result was what sources call a whitewash...
...When Gaffney came on board 1993, they recall, one of her first acts was to commission on a working group to study divertsity issues in her office...
...the secretary countered with two "independent" reports he'd commisioned...
...In December 1997, Philip Newsome, a black senior official in the IG's office, was passed over for promotion...
...He's since joined the lucrative filed of civil-rights shakedown artists pioneered by jesse Jackson...
...Then came the Patrick report...
...Thompson...
...His choices raised eyebrows in the IG's office: former civil rights czar Deval patrick, and former Gore counsel Kuniki Gibson...
...The day Gaffney's next report went public, HUD put out an agitprop release undercutting it...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
