Jim Beers: Appointments and Rumors of Appointments Jan 25, 2009

Appointments and Rumors of Appointments

Many years ago, my mother once observed at the dinner table "you can tell a
lot about someone by the company they keep". The wisdom of that observation
has grown in my mind with the passing of the years. It is my belief that it
applies even to Presidents as in "you can tell a lot about a President by
the appointments they make".

Amidst the recent picture of CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta's daughter
being hugged by Hugo Chavez to the grinning delight of Daniel Ortega; the
radical animal rights agenda of the new Chief of the White House's Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs; the spectacle of a Secretary of State
whose husband has collected and will continue to collect millions of dollars
from Middle East tyrants; and a Treasury Secretary who not only evaded
paying substantial taxes for years but was specifically paid money by his
employer to pay those taxes: comes a disturbing rumor that should concern
every American.

In the late 1990's the US Fish and Wildlife Service tried to force me to
retire and when I wouldn't they embarked on a hideous campaign to destroy my
reputation, harass my family, and make me unemployable. There was no
official reason for this because it could not be defended publicly. In
fact, it was because of the secret alliance of the then US Fish and Wildlife
Service Director and extremist environmental groups and radical animal
rights groups. I had been working for several years here, in Canada, and in
Europe to defend the authority of State Fish and Wildlife agencies to
administer trapping programs and for American businesses to buy and sell fur
and fur products in the face of European Union bureaucrats efforts (on
behalf of American/International extremist environmental and radical animal
rights organizations) to ban all fur and fur products from Europe that was
then the world's largest buyer of furs. When the US Trade Representative
and State Department delegations (of which I was usually the sole fur
management and use advocate) prevailed and caused the EU bureaucrats to back
down, the Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service was secretly furious
because she had been promising her new "secret friends" that we would not be
successful. I say "secret" because at that time USFWS was publicly
cultivating the fiction that they represented the management and use of fish
and wildlife and not the radical agendas of the groups that now control
them.

I will not bore you with the ten months I spent at home fighting the FWS, or
telling you about the time the police were called to be on the lookout for
me since they were going to fire me and I might be violent, or envelopes of
official notifications left surreptitiously in my front door on a Sunday
morning, or the written threats to cancel my retirement for 5 years and my
health insurance as a government employee forever, or about the employees
that literally jumped off elevators and ran up "down" escalators to avoid
being "seen with Beers", or about the financial settlement (your taxes) that
I finally accepted THAT FORBID ME FROM SPEAKING OF ANY OF THESE THINGS FOR THREE YEARS under penalty of forfeiting all funds, or the mental impact of
being forced out of a career in my prime; no I have written and spoken
extensively about these things and you can find much of it on the internet.
What I want to speak of here is what happened during the 10 months I was
told by a Department of the Interior lawyer (the prefer the title
"solicitor") to "stay home and go fishing".

President Clinton was in the White House and the Republicans controlled the
House of Representatives. I was a ready-made partisan tool and a rare
experienced employee with insider knowledge being abused publicly; so I was
asked to explain what was going on to some staff members of the Resources
Committee which controlled FWS funding. In the course of my explanation of
my work with trapping I mentioned that in my capacity as a wildlife
biologist responsible for excise taxes collected on arms and ammunition and
fishing tackle that had been earmarked for state fish and wildlife programs
(hunting and fishing) for many decades there was seemingly a growing amount
of such funds ($4-500 Million per year) disappearing in Washington and
therefore not available for the intended state hunting and fishing programs.

Congress told FWS almost immediately to provide the financial records of all
the excise taxes collected and disbursed for the previous two years. FWS
belatedly responded by sending up to Congress 19 tall boxes of computer
printouts with ALL USFWS FUNDING collections and expenditures for the
previous two years. They then lied to Congress that it was impossible to
separate out the excise taxes from all the other funding and (I was told
secretly) got a big laugh out of how Congress would never be able to figure
out anything from all those printouts. You cannot begin to realize how true
that was when you consider all the "Base" funding, and "New" funding, and
grants, and "refuge" funding, and restricted Law enforcement funding that
goes to refuges, and environmental funding, and fisheries funding, and
cost-sharing, and fund-sharing with other federal agencies and Universities,
and Endangered Species funding, and Marine Mammal funding, etc., etc. plus
the excise taxes and other funds shared with or appropriated to state
program. Add in that all these funds have restrictions on who gets them and
what they can (and cannot) be used for. Then add in that each employee
reports hours of work under this funding and that funding and that bonuses
are awarded from funds with all these restrictions and you begin to have a
glimmer of what so amused FWS managers that were (it turned out) protecting
the Director and others from a financial scandal of gargantuan proportions.

Long story short: I volunteered during my ten-month banishment to "go
fishing", to fish in those computer records for Congressional staff for any
indication of what happened to the excise taxes during those two years. It
took several weeks of long days but my old budget experience as a "budget
analyst", and as "Operations Chief of National Wildlife Refuges", and as the
Program Administration Chief for the Environment Program plus several yellow
magic markers and red pens and I had the flow identified. Congress called
in the GAO (General ACCOUNTING Office - now sadly renamed the General
Accountability Office for hiring non-accountants and others in a lowered
auditing mission) and the rest is, as they say, history. I met with the
accountants several times and they finally issued a report (before my exile
was terminated with the above mentioned settlement) that showed (among other
misallocations) $45 TO $60 MILLION THAT WAS INTENDED FOR STATE FISH AND
WILDLIFE PROGRAMS HAD BEEN "KEPT" BY FWS AND USED (among other things) TO:

1. INTRODUCE WOLVES INTO YELLOWSTONE PARK AND THE ENTIRE UPPER ROCKY MOUNTAIN WEST,

2. OPEN A NEW ENVIRONMENT OFFICE IN CALIFORNIA TO "PARTNER
WITH CALIFORNIA EXTREMIST GROUPS, AND 3. TO AWARD THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN BONUSES TO FWS MANAGERS THAT HAD NO RIGHT TO SUCH FUNDING.

Note that #'s 1.and 2. above had been DENIED funding by Congress previously.

There were three packed and tumultuous hearings before the House Committee.
At one the Director simply didn't show up as requested so the Chairman
cancelled the hearing and demanded her there the following week. At
another, Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, God Bless her and may she
Rest In Peace, asked the Director (who had just said that her lawyer had
advised her that she could use that money however she wanted) if the
Committee might not be able to ask her (the Director) to help fund the "Star
Wars" Program that the Democrats were opposing in Congress. That not only
brought the "house down" it capped the acknowledgement that the money had
indeed been stolen and used to fund things disregarding both law and
regulation.

As a result there were plans to audit the California office but they were
abandoned when the child of a powerful politician was transferred to that
office. Wolves were by then "out of the bottle" and there was no hope to
put them back in. The bonuses had already been spent by employee-managers
that had no role in their ill-begotten source. The Director was by then at
the close of her administration as President Clinton was about to be
replaced by someone else. The biggest shock and disappointment was the
failure of the State Fish and Wildlife Agencies to demand the replacement of
the funding identified in the two years and to demand audits of previous
years TO IDENTIFY AND REPLACE ALL THE MILLION STOLEN FROM STATE HUNTING AND FISHING PROGRAMS TO SAY NOTHING OF THE HUNTERS AND FISHERMEN THEY REPUTEDLY "REPRESENT". The State Fish and Wildlife Agencies and their powerful Washington Lobby Organization opted instead to remain silent and get a
percentage of future funding allocated to their Washington Lobby Office
where it is controlled not only for lobbying (federal funds for "lobbying??)
but even more importantly it is KEPT OUTSIDE STATE AUDITORS AND STATE
LEGISLATORS AND GOVERNORS PURVIEW by not having to "pass through" State
budgets before being sent to the Washington lobbyists, in other words the
State Agency Directors have control of it unfettered by State (you and me)
controls through our elected officials. PLUS, by not "rocking the boat" the
State Fish and Wildlife employees and Directors endeared themselves to the
politicians and environmental/animal rights Pooh-Bahs that they (the State
F&W folks) believe will be running things after they eliminate hunting,
fishing, trapping, and the management of plants and animal for people. PLUS,
the absent State officials were already getting all manner of federal funds
through FWS (Endangered Species, EIS funding, Marine Mammal, "Research",
etc. and angering federal overseers in FWS was not recommended in the class
on "How To Get Every Federal Dollar Due You And/Or Available".
Last but not least, the statutorily required audits of State fish and
wildlife agencies every 5 years mandated to continue receiving the excise
taxes had fallen into abandonment and State agencies rightly fearful that
honest and renewed audits by FWS would find all manner of diversions of the
funding in the states so angering FWS overseers instead of "partnering" with
them was in "everyone's (except hunters and fishermen's) best interest.
Note: In fact the eventually renewed audits found over $120 Million in
misused funding in the states: so the auditors were fired and the misused
funding "massaged" over time to insignificance by the new auditors employed
by USFWS - THE INTERIOR DEPARTMENT INSPECTOR GENERAL who is also responsible for oversight of USFWS!

This rerun of an old saga has a point. The Assistant to the Director of FWS
for those two years when the money disappeared and the fellow that oversaw
my travails was Dan Ashe. He was previously a Democrat staff person on a
House Committee (Merchant Marine and Fisheries) that was dissolved just
after the Republicans (Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America) took
control of the House in 1994. Shortly thereafter he turned up one day in
the Directorate of the US Fish and Wildlife Service as an Assistant Director
in charge of (among other things) the excise tax disbursements to the State
fish and Wildlife Agencies. Philosophically and in fact he attended most of
the "secret" meetings between the Director and the radical organizations
about me and the trapping issue and he, like the Director, was hesitant to
show any public problem with my strong support of State fish and wildlife
management, State programs, and particularly trapping and fur use. I was
even told one day at the Office of the US Trade Representative that,
unbeknownst to me, Mr. Ashe had contacted the White House about the
possibility of an Executive Order banning trapping on all federal lands in
case the environmental/animal rights crowd went ballistic if the European
fur market was kept open. There is more but you get the picture.

Now there is a strong rumor (even "up" here in subzero Minnesota) that Mr.
Ashe is being considered for Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Could be: the current President might well nominate and the current Congress
might well confirm Ingrid Newkirk of PETA or Peter Singer of Princeton for
the job. So in a "spirit of cooperation" and in an attempt to "cooperate
and not be partisan" I hereby suggest the following questions for any
confirmation hearing. Now I suppose the number of Representatives and
Senators that would stand up to the current political tsunami covering
Washington is nil. My only hope is that one Senator and one Representative
that is either not seeking a lifetime career job or who discovers that he or
she is actually a Vertebrate animal might actually say something in earshot
of one media person that is not too busy writing platitudinous pulp to take
note and possibly mention it to the public. The Questions -

Mr. Ashe:

1. What was your role in the millions of dollars that were diverted from the
Federal Aid Funds during the 1990's?

2. Why were those funds not replaced in the State fish and wildlife agencies
budgets?

3. Who was held responsible for the diversion of the $45 to 60 Million as
identified by the GAO audit? Was anyone held accountable? How?

4. On what basis were the diverted funds used to introduce wolves to
Yellowstone National Park and to open an office that Congress had likewise
refused to authorize?

5. Who made the decision to transfer Beth Stevens to the California office
shortly after the source of funding for that office was made public?

6. What role did you play in the reportedly missing email messages that were
destroyed that would have implicated Jamie Clark in the Federal Aid
diversion of excise taxes that were intended for State fish and wildlife
programs?

7. You were responsible for a number of audits of the state use of the PR
and DJ excise taxes since the mid 1990's that found that over a hundred
million dollars were being diverted by State agencies and State politicians.

Why were only a small portion of these dollars recovered?

8. Do you believe that Congressional authority under the Constitution
precludes the redirection of federal funds by federal employees as was the
case in the established $45 to 60 Million identified in the GAO audit? What
should be done when this legal responsibility is violated?

9. How do you understand your degree in Oceanography meets the statutory
requirement for being the Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service?

In the spirit of "hope" I will leave this at that. There are many more
questions that could be asked but whether any will be asked or answered must
be left to the integrity of a whole bunch of politicians, bureaucrats, and
advocates that have spent a decade denigrating me and what I write about
this scandal. So if anyone out there knows "someone" tell him or her about
this and ask for consideration. Given the mania for "cooperation" and the
blind acceptance of any nominee today, I am not "hopeful".

"The company they keep", does indeed tell us a lot.

Jim Beers
25 January 2009

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This article and other articles written by Jim Beers since January 2009 can
be found at http://jimbeers7.blogster.com (Jim Beers Uncommon Sense)

Articles by Jim Beers written from March 2006 to January 2009 can be found
at http://jimbeers.blogster.com (Jim Beers Common Sense)

Jim Beers is available for consulting or to speak. Contact:
jimbeers7@comcast.net

Jim Beers is a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service Wildlife Biologist,
Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow.
He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and
Washington DC. He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western
Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. He has worked for the
Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security
Supervisor in Washington, DC. He testified three times before Congress;
twice regarding the theft by the US Fish & Wildlife Service of $45 to 60
Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to
expanding Federal Invasive Species authority. He resides in Eagan,
Minnesota with his wife of many decades.