OIG report: Procedures used of the OJJDP to award discretionary grants in FY2007

Pic above is a memo dated March 20, 2009 from Acting Attorney General Laurie O Robinson that was requested to implement a policy for AAG for OJP (Office of Justice Program) and OJJDP Administrator to maintain records supporting their decisions and approvals in the grant-decision process.

Written by Biloxi

This report [which was overlooked in the media] by the Inspector General Glenn Fine gives in-depth of how he concluded the former OJJDP Administrator J. Robert Flores violated the ethics rules on grant-making. Fine examined many interviews and a number of grants to conclude the findings on Flores and the improper procedures with the OJJDP. Click here to read report. Here is one example of from Fine's report:

Results in Brief
Congress provided OJJDP nearly $330 million for FY 2007 operations
and awards, with about $113 million reserved for grants to juvenile justice
initiatives and mentoring programs.

In April 2007, Congress approved DOJ’s spend plan, which allocated OJJDP funds to broadly defined programs. The spend plan did not specify how OJP or OJJDPwould choose award recipients.

In February and March 2007, Administrator Flores recommended placing nearly all of the $113 million reserved for juvenile justice and mentoring programs up for competition – a proposal that Assistant Attorney General Schofield ultimately rejected.

Schofield told us that she decided to use invitational awards to ensure that continuing and deserving programs would receive funds. Schofield further asserted that she and her staff only gave
invitational awards to organizations that had demonstrated a strong record of performance and results.

Once OJP made these invitational awards, less than $40 million of the $113 million remained for OJJDP to award via six competitive solicitation announcements. OJJDP waited until after Congress approved OJP’s spend plan in April 2007 before drafting many of its competitive juvenile justice and mentoring solicitations.

Consequently, OJJDP did not announce several competitive grant programs until May 2007, which was more than halfway through the fiscal year. The late program announcements reduced the
amount of time organizations had to apply for grant funds. In fact, solicitations initially remained open for only an average of 17 days.

We believe that this abbreviated application period did not provide sufficient
time for many prospective applicants to complete all the steps necessary to
submit a grant application.

And Fine's conclusion:

During our interviews, Flores reiterated the reasons
for his award recommendations, but told us he did not maintain any record
to support his decisions.

In our view, Administrator Flores and Assistant Attorney General
Schofield did not adequately document the reasons for their respective
award recommendations and decisions.

So neither Flores or his boss maintain any record or documentations on grant-making decisions and recommendations. It is hard to believe of no documentations from an Administrator of 6 years. But, of course Flores' agenda as OJJDP Administrator was to spread then President Bush's religious and political agenda, the Faith-Based Initiative.

Fine pointed out from his report: Executive Order 13279. In the report, Executive Order 13279 (2002) directed heads of other federal agencies that
provide services to children and others in need to encourage the participation of faith-based and community organizations in receiving federal financial assistance (E.O. 13279). Flores' nomination of OJJDP Administrator was sent to the Senate on May 23, 2001. Flores was confirmed on April 12, 2002. Bush issued Executive Order 13279 on December 12, 2002, nine months after Flores was confirmed.

Here was an excerpt:

Section 1. Definitions. For purposes of this order:

(a) ‘‘Federal financial assistance’’ means assistance that non-Federal entities
receive or administer in the form of grants, contracts, loans, loan guarantees,
property, cooperative agreements, food commodities, direct appropriations,
or other assistance, but does not include a tax credit, deduction, or exemption.

(viii) services for the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency
and substance abuse, services for the prevention of crime and the provision
of assistance to the victims and the families of criminal offenders, and
services related to intervention in, and prevention of, domestic violence;

The pic above is from Fine's report of examining the award recipients from the National Juvenile Justice Programs and Mentoring recipients. Two of the award recipients that I have looked close at are Best Friends Foundation and National Organization of Concerned Black Men.

According to Sexuality Information and Education Council in U.S. website:

Community-based organizations in Washington, DC received $793,538 in federal funds for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in Fiscal Year of 2008. There were Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) and Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) grantees.
There was one CBAE grantee in Washington, DC: Best Friends Foundation. and one AFLA grantee in Washington, DC: National Organization of Concerned Black Men.

Best Friends Foundation received $550,000. The length of the grant is for five years:2008–2013.National Organization of Concerned Black Men received $243,538. The length of the grant was for five years: 2004–2009.National Organization of Concerned Black Men provides out-of-school enrichment and prevention programs to African American children from disadvantaged communities throughout the country. And here was Flores gave Best Friends' special treatment:

In the summer of 2008, controversy erupted over the Best Friends Foundation’s grant award of $1.1 million from the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice.10 During the grant review, the Foundation’s grant was ranked 53rd out of 104 total applications. It was noted during the review that the organization refused to participate in Mathematica’s congressionally-mandated study to determine the effectiveness of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

Flores created a new grant category to ensure the Foundation received an award despite the grant’s poor review. This new category was titled, “Utilizing school based outreach efforts directed at preventing high-risk activity (out-of-wedlock pregnancy)”according to Sexuality Information and Education Council in U.S. website.

Notice that Best Friends was ranked 53 and National Organization of Concerned Black Men was ranked 19. NOCBM received less than half of grant money than Best Friends. Yet both were Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage grantees

Inspector General Fine made a recommendations to OJP to implement policies grant decision makers, AAG, and OJJDP Administrator maintain records to support their decisions and approvals of the awards and gave OJP goals to implement such action:

Pg. 82

Resolved. We recommended that OJP implement a policy to ensure
that award decision makers, including the Assistant Attorney General
for OJP and the OJJDP Administrator, maintain records supporting their
selections or approvals of OJJDP invitational awards. OJP agreed and
stated that it has implemented the requirements of the Associate
Attorney General’s May 2008 memorandum requiring that, beginning
in FY 2008, documentation be maintained to support all discretionary
funding recommendations and decisions. As part of its response, OJP
provided a memorandum, dated March 10, 2009, from OJP’s Acting
Assistant Attorney General to OJP bureaus and program offices
directing them to continue documenting all discretionary funding
recommendations and decisions as set forth in the May 2008
memorandum. Further, by September 30, 2009, OJJDP will develop
and implement an internal guidance manual that will include
procedures for supporting and maintaining evidence of its selections or
approval of award decisions. This recommendation can be closed
when OJJDP provides us its FY 2008 and 2009 discretionary funding
recommendations and decisions explaining the award selections made,
the reasons for the selections, and the policy consideration on which
the selections were based, as well as its updated guidance manual.

It is my hope that OJP will heed to the Inspector General's recommendations, have a plan of action, and move forward to restore the faith and integrity lost in the OJJDP in the past six years.

IG Report: Former OJJDP Administrator Flores violated ethics rules in grant-making.

Click here to read IG report.

Also, Flores' Chief of Staff, Michele DeKonty is also under investigation and IG concluded misconduct by IG. I will write on this breaking news soon.

Here is the highlights from IG's report:

The Office of the AAG for OJP forwarded its findings to the 010, which undertook this further
investigation.

The following allegations were in the initial complaint received by the OIG:

• The circumstances of Fonseca's contract suggest that Fonseca was operating under a prohibited "personal services" contract with OJJDP's Administrator, Robert Flores; and

• Fonseca's contract amounted to waste and misuse of funds because he did not produce material
related to juvenile justice programming. During an OIG interview of a witness who requested confidentiality, the following further allegations were raised:

• Flores misused his authority as Administrator by mishandling the award of discretionary grant funds for fiscal year (FY) 2007 in that some of the highest rated grant applications were not selected for funding by Flores while lower scoring applications were funded.


Flores asked career staff to babysit his children on a number of occasions when he brought them to the office.

• Flores requested his Special Assistant to work on his resume.
• Flores went to Las Vegas to deliver a speech at a conference of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, but he did not make the speech.


The OIG investigation substantiated the allegation that Flores did not follow appropriate contracting procedures in the hiring of Rene Fonseca as a consultant for OJJDP. Flores, through OJJDP employees, directed OJP contractors Aspen and DB Consulting to hire Fonseca as a consultant after his other efforts to hire Fonseca were denied. Fonseca was paid about $281,000 by OJJDP from November 2004 to July 2007. Our investigation concluded that Fonseca's contract constituted a personal services contract prohibited by the FAR, Part 37.104, because he was assigned deliverables by Flores in addition to those specified under his contract, he reported directly to Flores, and was supervised directly by Flores rather than by his employer, the prime contractor.

The OIG investigated the allegation that Fonseca's contract amounted to waste and misuse of funds. We concluded that the documentation of Fonseca's work was not sufficient, particularly in view of his rate of compensation and the duration of his contract. However, the OIG could not conclude based on the evidence we were able to uncover, that Fonseca's contract was a misuse of OJJDP funds. However, our investigation was not complete because Fonseca refused to be interviewed by us, and we could not compel his cooperation.

We substantiated the allegation that Flores did not pay for a round of golf he played with an OJJDP grantee until over two years after playing the round. Federal regulations prohibit government employees from accepting from a prohibited source gifts in excess of $20. See Accepting Gifts, 5 CFR 2635.202-204.

This report should be included in Flores's personnel file and his violation of the gift regulations should be considered if he seeks federal employment in the future;

This report should be included in DeKonty's personnel file and her misconduct should be considered if she seeks federal employment in the future;

More from Washington Post.

More on the IG report on DOJ hiring practices.

We now know how deeply poisoned the Justice Department is. We are now just talking about the U.S. attorney firing scandal. We are talking about the entire hiring practices in the entire Justice Department. I had posted earlier about how the faith bases initatives were implanted in certain agencies [from Bush's executive order in 2001] for a political agenda especially in the DOJ and in the OJJDP with J. Robert Flores. But, this latest opens up a huge number of criminal investigations to those current and former employees in the Justice Department.

From the Inspector General's report, this is not just Alberto Gonzales' former aides such as Monica Goodling that crossed the line in hiring practices but Mike Elston and Bill Mercer and others at DOJ crossed the line. Here's a list of the people on the working group who originally changed the hiring practices in 2002: Andrew Hruska, then Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General,Adam Ciongoli, then Counselor to the Attorney General; Paul Clement, then Principal Deputy Solicitor General; David Higbee, then Deputy Associate Attorney General; Howard Nielson, then Counselor to the Attorney General; and Christopher Wray, then Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

More from TPM:

In today's report on bias in hiring practices at the Department of Justice, the Office of the Inspector General found Michael Elston "violated federal law" by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations:

As explained below, we concluded that Elston violated federal law and Department policy by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations. First, the data analysis indicates that highly qualified candidates with liberal or Democratic Party affiliations were deselected at a much higher rate than highly qualified candidates with conservative or Republican Party affiliations. Second, Elston admitted that he may have deselected candidates in a few instances due to their affiliations with certain liberal causes. From page 18 of the report (pdf).

Here is more of the selection of DOJ hiring practices:

The nomination process for attorneys had two stages. First, individual offices in DOJ reviewed applications and selected certain ones for interviews. Then, a Screening Committee selected by the deputy attorney general reviewed the selections and made nominations for final interviews. This was a change made in 2002 when the "involvement of political appointees at the Department in the hiring process was greatly expanded."

The OIG broke down nominees into those that they classified as "Liberal," "Conservative" and "Neutral."* They then evaluated the deselection (removal from the hiring process) rate of applicants from 2002 to 2007. They found a strikingly high percentage of identifiable liberals who were culled from the process compared to identifiable conservatives.

For example, in 2002, of the 100 "liberals" nominated, 80% were "deselected" by the Screening Committee. Of the 46 "conservatives" nominated, only 9% were deselected.

Chart 3 of the report (pdf) details the discrepancy:

Perhaps even more disturbing, of the 71 candidates who were deemed "Highly Qualified" (attended a top 20 ranked law school, were in the top 20% of their class and had previously held judicial clerkships and were members of the law review), 37% were deselected.

And the kicker?

15 out of the 17 highly qualified candidates who were categorized as "Liberal" were deselected. Zero of the five highly qualified "Conservative" candidates were deselected.