American taxpayers have spent over $1 million paying Environmental Protection Agency employees to do nothing. And we don’t mean just being unproductive. Quite literally nothing, as they enjoy paid administrative leave for months and sometimes even years.
A report released by the Office of Inspector General Wednesday found that eight EPA employees garnered 20,926 hours of paid administrative leave at a cost to taxpayers of $1,096,868.
One of these employees has been on paid leave for more than four years. Three others were on paid leave for more than one year. All eight employees were on paid administrative leave for at least four months.
The amount of paid leave taken may even be higher, the report stated, as several of these employees were missing timesheets.
The EPA allows for paid administrative leave for voting, funerals, donating blood, and bad weather, though these excuses would hardly explain four years out of the office. The EPA’s leave manual offers no determination for what is considered an “acceptable amount of administrative leave,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The leave manual also notes that these employees could be out for disciplinary reasons or if their presence would “constitute a threat to public property or the health and safety of coworkers or the public,” which seems like a very odd thing to get paid for.
The extra investigation into the EPA’s paid leave comes after the Government Accountability Office revealed in October that more than 57,000 federal employees had been on extended paid administrative leave at a major cost to taxpayers. The EPA was one of the worst offenders in that report with 69 employees paid to not work for 4,711 days between 2011 and 2013, costing more than $17 million.
