Todd Zinser, the inspector general at the Department of Commerce, abruptly cleaned out his office Wednesday evening amid a congressional investigation and public calls from lawmakers for President Obama to remove him.
His resignation came as new allegations of whistleblower retaliation emerged from a Democrat-led House Science, Space and Technology Committee probe.
Over the past week, Zinser’s office had refused to answer questions related to allegations that his human resources director improperly placed an employee on leave after her cooperation with congressional investigators became clear.
“I have never been one for long goodbyes or a lot of fanfare, but I do need to let you know that today I informed the president and the secretary of my intent to retire effective at close of business today,” Zinser wrote in an email to his staff Wednesday.
He said he planned to “attend to an important family matter” before “pursuing opportunities outside of government.”
Current and former members of Zinser’s staff told congressional investigators and the Washington Examiner that the Commerce inspector general had created a culture of retaliation in his office by isolating employees who resisted his agenda before stripping of them of their responsibilities.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, had publicly called for Zinser’s removal on the House floor before urging the president to do so both in a letter and in a face-to-face meeting.
Zinser spent more than $250,000 of taxpayer money to hire an outside law firm to defend himself in a wrongful termination case pending against his office, a move some saw as an attempt to keep emerging details of the scandal out of the public record, the Examiner reported last month.
Zinser has weathered a barrage of criticism during his decades in government, repeatedly fending off allegations that he has punished whistleblowers in his own office and protected select staff members from consequences when they violated agency rules.
In 2010, Zinser hired a woman who was later revealed to be his girlfriend. The woman had logged “significant conduct problems” in another Commerce Department office and was on the brink of being removed by her superiors from eligibility for the Senior Executive Service program, a designation that would place her at the highest executive level in the federal civil service.
Johnson said Zinser touched off a “frantic push” to have the woman transferred to his office before she was stripped of her SES eligibility, although he never contacted her former bosses to ask why she was being plucked from the program.
Just five weeks later, Zinser promoted his girlfriend to a senior position in his office, one that afforded her a $150,000 salary, and approved three SES performance bonuses for her totaling more than $28,000 by October 2012.
In response to an inquiry by the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Effectiveness, the governing body of inspectors general, Zinser insisted he had hired the woman to meet a business need in his office and claimed his only personal relation to her stemmed from the two of them being ”avid long distance runners and trained together on a fairly regular basis.”
Zinser and his deputy inspector general allegedly collected and saved the emails of three senior staff he regarded as enemies, including his former deputy, and sifted through the messages to find “anything he might uncover in his former deputy’s emails that Mr. Zinser might be able to use against him,” Johnson told the science committee in March.
Retaining official emails without alerting the office’s chief information officer violated a policy Zinser himself established in 2012.
The embattled watchdog’s behavior as the congressional investigation closed in raised red flags for many involved.
Six days after the House Science Committee sent Zinser a letter requesting he turn over whistleblower retaliation records, the inspector general was seen hauling boxes of files from his office on a holiday weekend using a hand-cart.
A spokesman for Zinser’s office would not answer questions earlier this week as to why the inspector general was carting government documents out of the office while under investigation.
Zinser’s more recent efforts to amend whistleblower policy in his office also prompted concerns from committee staff.
One day after his human resources director placed Rochelle Cobb, an HR specialist in the office, on administrative leave for “performance issues,” Zinser amended a major policy in his office to route all complaints about his employees through his human resources director rather than the office of investigations. The change does not appear to be a common practice among inspector general offices of similar sizes.
Zinser had promoted his assistant to the position of whistleblower ombudsman the week before, signaling to some in the office that the inspector general was cracking down on a key avenue for potential whistleblowers to report wrongdoing by placing someone he trusted in charge of their disclosures.
Cobb, who left the office on administrative leave April 29, told the Examiner she felt she was set up for failure after the human resources director placed her on a “performance improvement plan” that Cobb said “had nothing to do with my performance.”
Cobb said she served decades in the federal government with an unblemished performance record before coming to Zinser’s office.
At a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing on inspectors general Wednesday, Danielle Brian of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight raised concerns about the controversy surrounding Zinser’s conduct.
“We caution that filling IG vacancies should not come at the expense of identifying highly qualified candidates,” Brian said at a hearing that explored the consequences of leaving agencies without watchdogs for long periods of time.
“A recent probe … revealed that Department of Commerce IG Todd Zinser — a permanent, Senate-confirmed leader — did not disclose during his confirmation process that he was previously found to have retaliated against a whistleblower,” Brian said. “This case highlights the importance of rigorously vetting IG nominees before they take office. It also serves as a reminder that it is sometimes beneficial to initiate a vacancy, especially when it means removing a permanent IG who has abused his position and undermined his office’s mission.”
Zinser had been named in a whistleblower complaint to the Office of Special Counsel in 1996 when he was the deputy inspector general for investigations at the Department of Transportation, but he kept the case hidden from Congress when he was appointed and later confirmed by the Senate in 2007.
In a statement on his retirement provided to the Examiner, Zinser touted some of the most significant accomplishments from his more than seven years as Commerce’s watchdog.
Among them was a report his office published in July 2014 that found rampant telework abuse in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is housed in the Department of Commerce.
Johnson pointed to the discrepancy between that report and an earlier report from the same office that praised the patent agency for its “great success” when she first began calling for Zinser’s ouster in March.
“It is difficult to know how auditors from the IG’s office could have so completely missed the signs of waste, fraud and abuse that have now been widely identified in this program,” Johnson said.
Zinser also highlighted his work on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and its acquisition of weather satellites, the issue that sparked the congressional investigation into his activities in the first place.
The science committee had wanted to know why it seemed Zinser in 2012 had willfully ignored a years-long accounting scheme at the National Weather Service, partly by punting the investigation to NOAA and effectively allowing the weather service to investigate itself.
The retiring watchdog mentioned his work “rehabilitating” the inspector general office at the Denali Commission, an obscure development agency in Alaska whose own inspector general wrote to Congress urging lawmakers to shut down the commission and eliminate his position.
