House investigators are probing allegations that a Commerce Department agency has retaliated against numerous whistleblowers who spoke out against financial mismanagement by agency officials, Scribe has learned. The allegations involve the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NIST MEP) program. In a September letter to Commerce’s inspector …
The Commerce Department’s inspector general will investigate whether an obscure agency within the department spent millions of dollars on an annual conference near Disney World in Florida. The agency has disputed those allegations, first brought by congressional Republicans on behalf of a whistleblower. If the whistleblowers’ numbers — contained in …
Clearly, the impact of President Obama’s proposal to consolidate parts of six trade agencies is tiny in comparison to the government’s $3.5 trillion in spending or its trillion-dollar-plus deficits. But if—and that is a big if, depending upon not-yet-available details—it represents a genuine step toward smaller, less costly, and more …
Earlier this week Commerce Secretary Gary Locke descended on Louisiana to announce a $30.7 million grant for a coastal restoration project near Port Fourchon. He called the funding a sign of the “administration’s commitment to help the Gulf Coast’s economy and environment recover in the wake of the BP oil …