The leadership of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday announced that the panel would investigate whether Trump administration officials lied in congressional testimony about the legality of the controversial proposal to eliminate the Office of Personnel Management and send most of its functions to the General Services Administration.
In June 2019, then-OPM Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Billy told lawmakers at a House hearing that the legal analysis of a proposal to merge OPM and GSA and send OPM’s policy functions to the Executive Office of the President was “still ongoing.” In documents provided to the Oversight and Reform Committee at the time, all information under the heading “Legal Authority” was redacted.
But according to a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight published in The Daily Beast, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel informed Trump administration lawyers that such a plan would be illegal during an April 2019 conference call, two months before Billy’s congressional testimony. Billy is now a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget.
After the report’s release, Democrats on the committee accused the administration of “covering up” this legal opinion and effectively lying to Congress. OPM denied the allegations through a spokesperson who declined to be named.
“This story is false,” an OPM spokesperson told Government Executive last week. “The Office of Legal Counsel never issued an opinion prohibiting the proposed reorganization of GSA and OPM.”
Now, Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., are ..
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