The Clinton administration violated federal law when it went around Congress to save the jobs of workers at a soon-to-be-shuttered Ohio uranium plant, congressional auditors said Tuesday.
The General Accounting Office said the plan to keep the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in standby mode, sparing some 1,000 layoffs, cannot legally be financed in the way devised by former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
Richardson said the plan was an offshoot of a program to privatize government uranium enrichment operations. He arranged to have $725 million in leftover privatization funds returned from the Treasury, then went to Piketon, Ohio, and promised to spend $630 million there to protect the Portsmouth jobs.
The law allows agency decision-makers to be reprimanded, suspended or fired if they obligate the government to spend money that Congress hasn’t formally approved. In this case, the decision-makers were Clinton political appointees who left when the Bush administration took over.
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jwthompson@tribune.com
