General Services Administration officials permitted a high-ranking employee to spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on lavish travel junkets, despite an inspector general’s dire warning about the executive’s pattern of waste, fraud and abuse, officials said Tuesday.

House lawmakers on Tuesday grilled GSA officials for a second day, expressing growing frustration about an expanding scandal centered around Jeff Neely, a regional commissioner with the agency in California who, virtually unsupervised, planned a multitude of exotic trips, some of which the White House knew about.