Senior EPA press official has a side job as an outside media consultant
Source: Washington Post
Senior EPA press official has a side job as an outside media consultant
By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis March 5 at 4:57 PM
Two senior Environmental Protection Agency political appointees — including one who personally supervises every grant the agency awards to or solicits from outside groups — got approval from the agency’s ethics office to continue to collect outside income while working for the Trump administration.
Letters from the EPA’s office of general counsel, which were released Monday by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, show that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s special assistant Patrick Davis and the deputy associate administrator for the office of public affairs, John Konkus, sought permission to work for private clients even as they occupied full-time federal jobs.
Davis asked to work “as the sales director of Telephone Town Hall Meeting,” according to a Feb. 3 letter from Justina Fugh, the EPA’s alternate designated agency ethics official, while the clients Konkus is consulting for were not made publicly available. Instead, Fugh’s Aug. 1 letter to Konkus states that he wanted “to take on clients to advise about strategy, mail and media production”: It mentions two “likely clients,” whose names are redacted, adding that he anticipated “getting more clients in the next six months.”
Both officials were instructed that their outside annual income could not exceed $27,765 and that they could not participate in “any matter that will have a direct and predictable financial effect upon your outside” employer or clients.
Davis, who makes about $135,000 a year in his job as a senior adviser for public engagement to the regional administrator in the EPA’s Denver office, also owns a Republican political consulting firm based in Colorado Springs. He was also given permission to “solicit prospective clients” in his spare time, provided that he did not use agency resources.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/05/two-senior-epa-officials-got-to-collect-outside-income-while-working-for-trump-administration-records-show/