Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
What happens when an EPA employee gets caught with pot? Apparently, a slap on the wrist and paid leave.
If you were caught with marijuana at work, would you be put on paid leave? Probably not, but that’s because you don’t work at the Environmental Protection Agency where one employee got six months of paid leave after being indicted for pot possession.
“The employee was placed on administrative leave on March 17, 2014, after being arrested, jailed and indicted for possession of marijuana,” according to an EPA inspector general report on the agency’s administrative leave practices. The IG noted the EPA gave the employee a total of 7.5 months of administrative leave — well over the 10 days of leave for those suspected of committing a crime are supposed to get under agency guidelines. More troubling, there is “no documentation in the file explaining the deviation from policy or how the terms of the settlement agreement were arrived at.”
This type of cover-up is epidemic throughout the agency.
The EPA watchdog’s report builds off previous findings that eight agency employees were given paid administrative leave totalling “20,926 hours and cost the government an estimated $1,096,868.” These employees were put on paid leave “in connection with employee conduct and disciplinary actions.” Four of those eight employees were on paid leave for more than one year, and some employees received scheduled pay raises despite being put on leave for disciplinary reasons.
A 2014 Government Accountability Office report estimated the “salary cost for EPA employees on administrative leave for fiscal years (FYs) 2011 through 2013 was $17,550,100.” GAO noted 69 EPA employees were on administrative leave for one month or more — 50 of these employees were on leave for more than three months while two were on leave for over a year.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. If history is any indicator, the EPA does not care about the rule of law. They lie, they withhold information from the American public if it makes them look bad, they sabotage projects that don’t align with the Green Agenda, and they misappropriate millions of tax dollars on things like $800 pencil holders. There are sure to be countless other offenses happening on a daily basis within every level of that agency.
The EPA isn’t an agency, it’s a mob family.
