On July 29, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on mismanagement at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Specifically, the hearing focused on testimony from current EPA employees about cases of alleged retaliation against employees who manage sexual misconduct allegations and what actions have been taken to address the sexual misconduct issues examined in an April 2015 hearing.
“I was made aware of a sexual harassment complaint in the Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO),” said Ross Tuttle, senior advisor, EPA Region 5. “After speaking with two female employees and the female intern that was the subject of the unwanted behaviors, I began a fact-finding inquiry into the allegations of sexual harassment and hostile working environment complaint brought to my attention by three white females in the EPA Region 5 GLNPO in the Monitoring Indicators & Reporting Branch brought against a white male employee that had ‘agreed’ to work with them during their internship with EPA Region 5. From the conversation that I had with the intern who was being harassed, I obtained the names of more than a dozen other female interns that had worked in this same organization going back to the year 2000…From their statements, I learned that not only had this employee been systematically sexually harassing female interns (going back to at least the year 2000), but an email I received from a current employee and male colleague of the perpetrator stated that the perpetrator had been ‘disciplined’ by his university for this same kind of behavior during his PhD program.”
EPA Region 5 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Specialist Ronald Harris detailed the retaliation by EPA supervisors, saying “The regional office has chosen to offer the reward for ‘going-along-to-get-along’ over accountability…[When] we discovered, through our investigation as EEO officers, [that allegations of sexual harassment] had been going on for at least a decade and involved more than a dozen women, we were immediately retaliated against by Mr. Bharat Mathur (assistant regional director) and removed from our positions in the Office of Civil Rights for following agency protocol and contacting headquarters.”
The following witnesses also testified during the hearing:
