At the request of the White House, General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan resigned last night as head of the government’s premier contracting agency, ending a tumultuous tenure in which she was accused of trying to award work to a friend and misusing her authority for political ends.
“It has been a great privilege to serve our nation and a great President,” Doan said in a statement released this morning by the agency.
A White House spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
Doan’s resignation came almost a year after Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he believed Doan could no longer be effective because of the allegations about her leadership.
Waxman’s committee began investigating Doan after stories in The Washington Post showed that she had approved a $20,000, no-bid arrangement last July with a business run by a friend and had tried to reduce the budget of the agency’s inspector general.
Doan had been under scrutiny by the inspector general, Brian Miller, as well as members of Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal employees from prohibited personnel practices.
The committee investigation turned up evidence that Doan might have violated the Hatch Act in January 2007 by asking political appointees how they could “help our candidates” at an agency briefing conducted by a White House official, according to several of the appointees present for the briefing. After a more extensive probe, the Office of Special Counsel concluded that those remarks violated the Hatch Act. The act generally prohibits employees of federal agencies from using their positions for political purposes.
In a letter in June, Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch urged President Bush to discipline Doan “to the fullest extent,” which would include removing her from office. In the ensuing 10 months, the White House said it was considering Bloch’s recommendation but made no further comment.
During a hearing of the oversight committee in June, Doan testified that she did not recall asking the political appointees to help Republican candidates. She asserted that she operated her agency without regard for political concerns.
“I’m not engaged in partisan political activities,” she told lawmakers at the time. “And I haven’t directed anyone to do anything.”
In the GSA statement, Doan expressed satisfaction with her tenure at the agency.
“The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline, re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation’s ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government,” she wrote.
IYFR: It only took a whole YEAR Henry Waxman!! Shame on you.
