GAO Eyes Outgoing NASA Chief

As Sean O'Keefe prepares to take the reins at Louisiana State University on Monday, Congress' investigative arm is looking into his tenure as NASA chief, including whether he misused government airplanes and went on too many expensive getaways with underlings, former and current senior NASA officials say.

The focus of the Government Accountability Office investigation is not fraud, but waste, one of the four NASA officials told The Associated Press. The four — two still with NASA, two recently departed — asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. Two said they had been questioned by the GAO.

At a news conference Thursday night, O'Keefe said he was unaware of any such investigation. Flanked by LSU President William Jenkins, the longtime high-level bureaucrat said: "To the extent there is such a thing underway, it will validate and confirm that the course of my entire career as a public servant and financial manager has been responsible," O'Keefe said.

However, the GAO's probe has been a matter of public record since last June, when it was requested by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, following testimony at spring hearings about "serious financial management problems" at the agency.

"I am concerned about whether NASA has an effective system of internal controls in place to prevent fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer resources," Collins wrote in her letter to the investigative agency on June 28, 2004.

LSU President Jenkins said he was unaware of Collins' letter, and of the testimony at the spring 2004 hearings.

Earlier, a NASA spokesman had declined to comment. "I don't think it would be proper or appropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation," NASA spokesman Glenn Mahone said.

O'Keefe is leaving NASA after three years as the space agency's administrator and will become chancellor of Louisiana State University's main campus on Monday.

When they hired him late last year, university officials showered praise on him for his budget-conscious management skills.

The officials familiar with the investigation told the AP that one area of interest to the GAO was O'Keefe's costly penchant for traveling on government airplanes, instead of flying commercially.

As a "basic principle," government employees are asked to use commercial flights, one of the officials said.

But O'Keefe "never, ever travels without going on a NASA airplane," one of a half-dozen small jets the space agency shares with other agencies, another official said. And to justify the flights, O'Keefe often would "fill the planes with ballast," the official said — other employees who might not have a need to travel.

"A lot of the times, at the last minute, Sean would be looking for people to put on the plane. We would call it baggage," an official said.

The officials said another area the GAO is looking into is O'Keefe's "retreats" with subordinates far from NASA headquarters in Washington, in contrast to the more sparing practices of his predecessor.

One official said these took place in Monterey, Calif., at the country club of O'Keefe's gated community in Virginia, and at Syracuse University in upstate New York, where O'Keefe taught.

O'Keefe's new job at LSU will pay him $425,000 a year, nearly three times what he made at NASA.

C. Stewart Slack, chairman of LSU's board of supervisors, said he knew nothing about the investigation. "Anytime you've got somebody in a position like that, I'm sure there's somebody who wants to take a shot at him," Slack said Wednesday.