Like scandals? Take your choice, sex or money? The Obama administration wrestles with both right now.
U.S. Secret Service agents and, so it is said, some of the nation’s elite Marine guards took 20 or more Colombian women into their hotel rooms in Bogata before President Barack Obama arrived there for a conference with Latin American leaders early this week.
Security issues are involved. One or more of the women, alleged prostitutes, could have been agents seeking information about the president’s schedule. A major catastrophe could have resulted.
In any case, such wholesale misbehavior brought disrespect on the U.S. and the administration. One can only conclude the Secret Service needs tightening up. The agents and the Marines should have had explicit orders to conduct themselves beyond reproach since they were part of the President’s entourage.
Investigators have been sent to Columbia to interview the women and catalog the goings on. Secret Service director Mark Sullivan should also review his own discipline policies. Somehow, it should not have to be argued the nation’s top level security team should not conduct itself as though its cadre were sailors on their first shore leave.
IF RAMPANT SEX leaves you cold, try dealing with the discovery the General Services Administration held a management conference in a Las Vegas suburb that cost U.S. taxpayers almost $823,000 to entertain 300 GSA employees in a luxury hotel — and then tried to keep the wasteful spending hidden from the public.
This is another management failure.
Martha Johnson, who resigned shortly before the report on the out-of-control spending was released on April 2, said when she took the office in February of 2010, “a quarter of the executive positions were empty, strategy was non-existent, major customers viewed our partnership askance, labor relations were acrimonious, the information technology was inadequate” and, wrote the AP reporter, “on and on.”
Anger at the report seems bipartisan. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from Washington, D.C., is clearly upset the “expensive partying at a four-state casino resort occurred as millions of Americans were living hand to mouth, struggling under debts and the worst recession since the Great Depression.”
The revelations resulted in the appointment of an acting administrator who is trying to rebuild the agency — which is charged with the management of all of the federal governments physical properties.
But the revelations of mismanagement —or, in this case, little management at all — of the GSA is a major embarrassment to the administration.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
