Federal Reports

We initiated this report to address allegations on failures of the Department of Energy to provide effective oversight of travel card use by a political appointee. This report also presents findings related to a limited number of other political appointees and Department senior executives (collectively, “Executives”).

Our review substantiated four of the five items noted in the allegation regarding misuse or abuse of the rules and regulations related to the political appointee. We did not substantiate the allegation related to use of split disbursements.

Additionally, our review found that weaknesses were not just limited to the individual identified in the allegation but extended to a small number of other Executives within the Department. We found that certain Executives misused their Government-issued travel cards by making personal purchases using the cards and maintaining delinquent travel card account balances. Upon notification of travel card issues by the Office of Travel Management, we found that Executive leadership did not always act on the derogatory information provided related to travel card misuse. Notably, the misuse and lack of leadership action was not limited to any one program but identified across many Department program elements.

This report provides areas of consideration for the Department, specifically focused on enhancing controls in this area, including ensuring that timely and appropriate actions are taken in response to reported travel card misuse and delinquencies.

Priority Mail Express (PME), formerly Express Mail, was introduced in the 1970s as the U.S. Postal Service’s fastest product, and as the best option for customers to send time-sensitive documents and packages by offering a next-day to two-day service guarantee. Recent transformations to postal operations under the Delivering for America plan are changing the service standards for this premium product. Specifically, in October 2023, the Postal Service deployed a major operational change called Local Transportation Optimization (LTO) that reduced the number of transportation trips to and from select post offices. With LTO, mail collected at optimized post offices remained overnight, delaying its entry into sorting operations. As a result, most optimized post offices can no longer offer PME with a next-day service guarantee. To support this change, on April 1, 2025, the Postal Service revised PME to a one-to-three-day service guarantee.