Bipartisan Group of Lawmakers Calls for Chemical Safety Board Firings

The woes of the Chemical Safety Board intensified on Thursday with the release of a bipartisan letter from 14 members of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel calling on President Obama to fire three of the board’s top officials, including Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso.

Citing misleading testimony, improper use of personal emails for government business and mismanagement that has destroyed agency morale, the members also called for the firing of CSB General Counsel Richard Loeb and Managing Director Daniel Horowitz.

“It is clear that the CSB is in a state of turmoil,” said the letter, signed by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the committee, along with Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and 12 other lawmakers. “It is vital that you act to immediately remove the toxic leadership that is undermining the agency’s critical safety mission.”

The board chairman issued a statement denying the accusations.

The House committee is concerned that Moure-Eraso and Horowitz “committed malfeasance when they approved the search of an employee’s email without any specific reason other than to ‘examine a confidential personnel issue,' " the letter said.

The lawmakers also highlighted a statement Moure-Eraso made at a March 4 committee hearing saying “he consulted with his general counsel, Mr. Loeb, before allowing the search of an employee’s email.” Loeb “claims never to have been consulted about the email search,” the letter continued. “Mr. Loeb sent an email to committee staff following the hearing that said, ‘I was never consulted, in writing, verbally or otherwise, on the decision to review the [employee] emails.’ “

In the last Congress, then-committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., called for Moure-Eraso to resign before his tenure ends in June 2015.

The lawmakers have also faulted the board—which investigates agency handling of industrial accidents—for possible violations of the 1950 Federal Records Act, as modernized for the digital age, by using personal email to conduct business and not capturing them for posterity. The Environmental Protection Agency inspector general outlined the personal email use in a report.

The letter tells the president that the officials should be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

It cites damage to morale as demonstrated in poor staff reviews of its leadership in the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey by the Office of Personnel Management. Agency leaders received a satisfaction score of 26 out of 100.

The lawmakers noted that the IG report found other management problems, such as delays in investigations of accidents and failure to obtain required board approval for acquisitions costing more than $50,000. 

“The CSB’s critical safety mission is too important to be undermined by ineffective leadership,” the letter said. “We have lost confidence that Chairman Moure-Eraso and his top lieutenants are capable of engineering a turnaround.”

Moure-Eraso issued a statement Thursday morning saying, “The letter repeats old personnel-related allegations which have never been substantiated.  The Office of Special Counsel investigated these allegations starting in 2011 and has never made any adverse findings concerning the agency.” He added that he “stopped using personal email for any agency business in March 2013, except for the inadvertent forwarding of an article in August 2013.  During the period in question, all board members used personal email for some agency communications.”

Declaring that he later learned that two board members had continued to use personal emails to communicate with agency employees, the chairman said he had ensured that those records were transferred to an agency server to comply with the Federal Records Act. The agency has also stepped up staff training on recordkeeping, he added.

“I have much important work to do in the next three months,” Moure-Eraso said. “I intend to leave the president’s choice for the next chair, Vanessa Sutherland, with a clean slate, rather than the 22 case backlog I inherited in June 2010."

The agency also released a statement from board member Manny Ehrlich challenging the lawmakers’ characterizations. “I have found Chairman Moure-Eraso to be a great professional colleague, whose devotion to the agency’s mission is without parallel,” Ehrlich said. “I believe that the letter repeats either stale or greatly out of context and exaggerated claims. I am particularly disappointed that the committee is now attacking outstanding non-partisan career civil servants. In my dealings with these individuals, I have found that they represent the best qualities in public employees, and rank among the best professionals I have interacted with in my 50 years in industry.”