A new report claims that an agency that Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency just shuttered was on a satirical level of corruption, living like wealthy aristocrats off taxpayer funds.
Trump ordered seven federal agencies either to be downsized or to be eliminated altogether last week, and The Daily Wire accuses one, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), of being particularly egregious in its unconstitutional and unconscionable waste. Supposedly, FMCS is an “independent agency” that mediates between businesses and unions, with a workforce of 230, of which 60 supposedly worked in a massive D.C. office building (when they showed up to work at all).
FMCS official George Cohen ordered champagne, $200 coasters, and his wife’s oil paintings using agency money. Why should Hunter Biden be the only “artist” surviving off corrupt handouts? The paintings were of agency employees “like they were reigning kings or something,” one employee put it. And $2,402 was spent just on retouching the painting of one who was the acting agency head for a brief period only. As small as the agency is and as vague as its relationship to the president and the executive are, the agency has long operated as if it had no oversight, Luke Rosiak said on The Daily Wire.
[FMCS] occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director [Scot Beckenbaugh] as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.
Rosiak explained that in a year of research, he found numerous shocking instances of FMCS corruption and fraud, from hiring practices to credit cards to contracting to vacations on the taxpayer dime. What he did not understand after all that research is why the agency ever existed to begin with.
“Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself,” one employee confessed to Rosiak. “Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?” We the People sure can.
FMCS employees “unblocked” their government credit cards to turn off typical abuse protections, then used them to apparently fund personal expenses and simply bill anything they’d like to the government. One employee leased a BMW; another (IT director James Donnen) billed the government for his wife’s cell phone, cable TV at both his home and his vacation home, and even his subscription to USA Today.
Employee Dan W. Funkhouser used his FMCS card to rent a storage unit… Funkhouser also spent $18,000 at a jewelry store near his house, and “destroyed all purchase card records upon leaving the agency,” an audit said.
Charles Burton retired from FMCS only to incorporate as an LLC which was listed as providing a “Call Center Service” when an FMCS employee disbursed $85,000 to it, despite the LLC having neither a website nor even a working phone. One accountant tried to become a whistleblower, but Cohen reportedly forced her to retract her statement.
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The fraud is endless. Cohen directed work to a previous employer after signing forms swearing he would not do so. Human Resources official Paul Voight lived in Wisconsin but claimed to live in D.C. so that he could obtain a higher cost of living salary. His boss Arthur Pearlstein briefly left FMCS to be a professor, was involved in a plagiarism scandal, and returned to terminate an investigation into FMCS.
The agency paid for a “Grammar Refresher course,” had an office in Honolulu, and flew employees to many locations around the world for no apparent reason. Allison Beck flew to Italy, Switzerland, and Tunisia, and pretended it was agency business because she did a video business call. She also charged the agency for a trip to her own vacation home. The agency claims to be unbiased but hired numerous former union employees and gave grants to increase union membership. The waste was egregious and unending.
One purchase was for $30,000 on trinkets marking employees’ anniversaries. The agency’s office was absurdly oversized, but it refused to move. It hired a consultant for a “Hallway Improvement Project” to decorate. It had an in-house gym for employees, and purchased a $1,000 TV for the gym, a $3,867 ice-maker, and a $560 stereo.
Applicants for grants simply had to have some sort of vague union pretext to obtain taxpayer money from FMCS.
It gave $63,000 to a hospital that went bankrupt; $51,000 to a childcare company to help it pay government licensing fees; and $57,000 to a company to “strengthen of culture of continuous improvement to drive us to world class excellence!”
Some “trainers” were paid $1,500 a day per employee to provide services to the agency, along with an extra $163 hourly for travel.
Thank God Trump and DOGE shut FMCS down, and hopefully it stays extinct. If ever there was an example of exactly what is wrong with the D.C. Swamp, this cesspool of an agency is it.
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