When the Congressional Accountability Act (CAA) passed in 1995, the vote was 98-1 in the Senate and 390-0 in the House. However, in light of recent allegations of sexual misconduct against Rep. John Conyers and a settlement with at least one former staffer, the “accountability” promised by the popular act’s title may have been oversold. Indeed, Congress’s ostensible attempt to hold itself to higher standards in terms of “civil rights, labor, and workplace safety and health laws” has been less than a rousing success.
From the outset, the funding for settlements of claims against various parts of the legislative branch, including the House and Senate, was opaque. Not one, but two accounts were established in 1995 for “Awards and Settlements.” According to a Senate Appropriations Committee staffer questioned by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, a fund of $1 million was established by the Senate and was originally intended to be an annual appropriation. After the CAA passed, however, the fund was changed to a “no-year” appropriation, meaning funds were not added annually but carried over from year to year. This $1million fund has appeared on Senate financial reports for the last 22 years, unused and apparently unnoticed. Here is how it is presented in the latest semi-annual Secretary of the Senate report:
Based on the format of the rest of the report, any activity in the fund would be reported with detailed transactions. The Appropriations Committee staffer who researched the $1 million reserve could not immediately say why the fund was still in existence after 22 years of idleness.
The second “Awards and Settlements” fund was established by the CAA legislation but without a specific appropriation for monetary awards. Rather, awards were to be paid from a special account established by the Treasury Department. Unlike the Secretary of the Senate report, however, the Treasury Department’s fund for paying awards and settlements does not include detailed transactions, only lump sums, a strike against the accountability promised by the CAA. Below is a recent report from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) showing the activity in the Office of Compliance Awards and Settlements Fund for fiscal year 2016:
Funds for this account are appropriated only as needed, but the wording of the CAA (Section 1415) is unclear as to the ultimate source of the money. The law states:
One possible source of the funds is the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, a catchall fund to pay out a variety of claims and settlements from many different agencies of the federal government. The fund gained notoriety as the source of the $1.2 billion paid to Iran as part of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with that country. The Treasury Department has not responded to multiple inquiries about the Awards and Settlements Fund.
When the Office of Compliance was besieged with requests for details of settlements, Executive Direction Susan Tsui Grundmann issued a two-page letter detailing about $17 million in payments over two decades. The amounts of the payments, however, have been publicly available in the OMB reports for years. For example, Grundmann’s letter shows that in 2007, $4,053,274 was paid. This OMB report from November 2007 shows (in thousands) that “$4,053” paid out that year:
Additionally, the annual report of the Office of Compliance mentions the $4 million also on Page 14: “In FY 2007, 38 cases were resolved by formal settlement agreement and of these cases,25 cases resulted in monetary awards totaling over $4 million.”
Though Director Grundmann said she was releasing information with detailed numbers of settlements and amounts in response to media requests, the Office of Compliance has published such information before, as recently as 2014 in a format very similar to Grundmann’s letter:
As Director Grundmann made clear in her letter, the settlements paid by the Office of Compliance deal with multiple statutes, including “the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act,” as well as the sexual harassment claims that garner most of the headlines.
The annual reports of the Office of Compliance include a significant amount of statistical data on claims that pass through its office. The 2016 report says that of the 49 “requests for counseling” (“the first step in the conflict resolution process”) only six were related to the House and only two to the Senate. By contrast, 19 were related to the architect of the Capitol and 18 to the Capitol Police.
Of the 128 violations alleged in the 49 counseling requests, 77 were discrimination or harassment of some kind. The breakdown of those 77 complaints is as follows:
The report does not make clear which violations were alleged in the 6 House and 2 Senate incidents, or how much settlement money was distributed related to those eight cases.
Ironically, the one settlement of which the public has been made aware (Rep. John Conyers) was paid with dollars from Conyers’s Senate office account and not either of the funds established for Awards and Settlements. Conyers is under pressure to resign his seat in Congress due to the revelations of sexual harassment allegations and at least one subsequent payout disguised as compensation to a “temporary employee.”
THE WEEKLY STANDARD was the first to publish the documents where Conyers’s falsely reported the $27,000 payments, originally reported by Buzzfeed.
