Retaliation after red-flagging Carson's decorating

HUD civil servant claims retaliation after red-flagging Carson's decorating

By LORRAINE WOELLERT

A high-ranking civil servant at the Department of Housing and Urban Development claims she was demoted after raising concerns about agency spending and Secretary Ben Carson’s redecorating plans.

In a sworn complaint to the Office of Special Counsel, HUD official Helen Foster said she was targeted for reprisals in part because incoming Trump administration officials believed her to be a Democrat.

In December 2016, after six months at the agency, Foster was promoted to chief administrative officer, a high-level job that includes oversight of spending and office space. By July 2017, she was demoted without warning or explanation, her lawyer says.

Foster’s trouble began in January 2017, shortly after her promotion, when she was told to “find money” beyond the $5,000 legally allowed for decorating because Carson’s wife asked for funds to buy furniture. When she objected, the agency’s designated acting secretary, Craig Clemmensen, himself a longtime career employee, told her that $5,000 “will not even buy a decent chair,” according to Foster’s complaint, which was submitted in November. The Guardian newspaper reported the story earlier on Tuesday.

Foster also raised questions about more than $10 million in 2016 budget shortfalls that occurred under the watch of her predecessor, a lifelong civil servant. Those concerns were ignored, she said. She also objected to the agency’s handling of a DNC request for public documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

At her own request, Foster has been detailed temporarily to the Treasury Department while her complaint is investigated, said her lawyer, Joseph Kaplan of Passman & Kaplan in Washington.

“She essentially thinks that she’s unemployable now,” Kaplan said. “When she’s gone on job interviews they see she held this high-level position for only seven months. Where does Helen Foster go now to get her reputation back?”

HUD rejected Foster’s accusations and on Tuesday released photographs and purchase receipts showing that Carson spent $3,373 to replace the drapes in his office with wood blinds.

He also sought to fix a conference table and chairs, but HUD staff determined that the furniture, purchased in 1967, was beyond repair. Career staff, without input from Carson or his wife, made the decision to spend $31,561 to purchase a new table, chairs and hutch, HUD spokesman Raphael Williams said.

Other furniture in the office, including chairs and a sofa, was swapped out and replaced with old items stored in HUD’s basement.

“Secretary Carson, to our knowledge, is the only HUD secretary to go to the sub-basement of his agency to select the furniture for his office,” Williams said.

The agency distributed before-and-after pictures of the secretary’s office, as well as agency photographs showing Foster attending work dressed in a bee costume. Foster’s motto-like tagline on her HUD emails was “Bee the change,” a play on Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

In response to a Freedom of Information request filed by POLITICO, HUD also released a lengthy email in which Foster sought to tamp down office gossip about her leadership. These included rumors that she was a “bully” on the verge of being fired and that she forced HUD staff to care for her autistic and intellectually disabled daughter, who once accompanied her to the office on a snow day.

“There is nothing more distracting and damaging than a runaway rumor mill,” Foster wrote in the May 2017 email. “Let me ‘flatten’ a few of these rumors with the truth so we can all just go back to beeing awesome.”

Kaplan, saying that Foster had received top performance ratings up until her demotion, accused HUD of “attempting to smear her yet again for standing up and doing the right thing.”

The Office of Special Counsel, which is not connected to Robert Mueller’s special investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, will make a determination by next week whether to proceed with an investigation into Foster’s complaint, Kaplan said.