The head of the Census Bureau broke government rules beginning in 2013 when he attempted to oust the head of the 2020 Census — and tried to find a replacement by hand-picking a placement firm, according to a government report.
Rules mandate all government agencies use competitive bidding to fill contracts.
John Thompson also tried to conceal what he was doing by telling the headhunter not to use his government e-mail and, instead, to send messages regarding the search to his gmail account, the report found.
Thompson and his hand-picked headhunter — who has no employees and worked out of his home and who the Census boss knew from a previous job — would exchange 27 e-mails without using government accounts, another violation of the rules.
The cozy relationship might have gone unnoticed, if not for a whistleblower — a person who wanted the 2020 Census job but didn’t get it exposed the arrangement, according to the report from Todd Zinser, the inspector general of the Department of Commerce, which oversees Census.
The report was posted on Commerce’s Web site a couple of weeks ago without so much as a press release.
“The resulting investigative report presents a case study in how a federal agency can fail to follow the rules while attempting to recruit senior officials,” Zinser said in the report.
Ironically, Zinser resigned his job right around the same time the report was issued — and after a congressional committee determined he wasn’t doing enough to protect whistleblowers.
The Thompson report — “Review of a Census Bureau Sole Source Award for Executive Search Services” — is damning in what it shows about how Census is being run during the Obama administration.
The way Thompson tried to hide his action says a lot about rule bending at Census.
As my readers already know, I’ve been looking into financial and statistical fraud at Census for more than two years. There is already one verified case of data falsification in the Philadelphia Census region, and I have several whistleblowers (all of whom have been retaliated against) who have told me that cheating also occurred in four of the five other regions.
The data falsification involved the extremely important and very closely watched Current Population Survey, which is used to calculate the monthly unemployment rate.
When Congress looked into the issue of data falsification last year, Commerce’s “obstruction made it difficult to prove, or disprove” the extent of the cheating. But there are signs that it was massive with regard to unemployment-rate data.
I’ve also looked into the matter of how Census issues contracts, especially when it claims competitive bidding isn’t warranted. In government lingo, these are referred to as “sole source” contracts.
Census had $1.1 billion budget in 2015. It requested an increase of 38 percent, to $1.5 billion. Census so far has blocked all efforts by The Post to investigate these sole source contracts.
So far, the only contracts turned over were orders for office supplies. Clearly, someone has a sense of humor and a desire to tick me off.
I’ve already reported that Census has a long-term $2-million-a-year no-bid contract with the University of Maryland for support services that very likely should have been competitively bid, a whistleblower told me.
That whistleblower said he was harassed for drawing attention to the deal.
Interestingly, Robert Groves — Thompson’s predecessor at Census — had been a professor in the same university division that got the contract.
In the latest investigation, Thompson’s lawyers told Zinser that using a handpicked headhunter and personal gmails were not evidence of an attempt to sneak around the rule — but rather innocent misunderstandings.
“[I]f the director was attempting to hide communications with the headhunter, he could have spoken with him by telephone without leaving an obvious e-mail trail,” Thompson’s lawyers wrote to Zinser. Really?
So why did Thompson, in a Dec. 8, 2013 e-mail to the headhunter, in discussing the search for a 2020 Census boss, tell him “as an aside, I have a gmail account” that is “probably better to use” because “[m]y government e-mail is public information.”
I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life investigating Census but, since Thompson and his gang like playing games with e-mails, I think it’s time to for the Justice Department and the FBI to step in.
Census provides info vital to the functioning of the economy. If its economic statistics are flawed, manipulated or otherwise falsified — as they seem to have been — it can lead to bad policy decisions.
Also, Census has an enormous budget that can be abused by politicians of either party. Patronage jobs and gifts for supporters can easily be hidden in a Census-sized budget.
The headhunter case proves that closer monitoring of this US agency is necessary.