The Government Accountability Office has agreed to a request from Democratic senators to investigate whether the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Trump administration’s ethic rules when hiring certain political appointees.
The inquiry, urged last month by Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., will begin in the next few months, a spokesman for the GAO told the Washington Post.
“The exact scope of what we will cover will not be determined until work gets underway,” said GAO spokesman Chuck Young.
President Trump issued an executive order in January saying that executive-branch employees cannot “participate in any particular matter” on which they had lobbied in the two years before their appointment to the government.
The Democratic senators alleged to the GAO that the EPA circumvented the order by hiring some political appointees under a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act that allows the EPA to hire up to 30 people “without regard to civil service laws.”
“We are concerned that the authorities are being abused and that non-confirmed political appointees may not be complying with the ethics requirements that do apply to them in a timely or complete manner,” the senators wrote in an Aug. 18 letter to GAO.
The senators did not name specific EPA employees who they believe were hired in an inappropriate way.
