[Senate Hearing 107-155]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 107-155
NOMINATION OF DANIEL R. LEVINSON
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
ON THE
NOMINATION OF DANIEL R. LEVINSON TO BE INSPECTOR GENERAL OF THE GENERAL
SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
__________
JULY 31, 2001
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs
_______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
75-476 WASHINGTON : 2002
____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpr.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512�091800
Fax: (202) 512�092250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402�090001
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan FRED THOMPSON, Tennessee
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TED STEVENS, Alaska
RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
MAX CLELAND, Georgia PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware THAD COCHRAN, Mississippi
JEAN CARNAHAN, Missouri ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah
MARK DAYTON, Minnesota JIM BUNNING, Kentucky
Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, Staff Director and Counsel
Michael L. Alexander, Professional Staff Member
Jason M. Yanussi, Professional Staff Member
Hannah S. Sistare, Minority Staff Director and Counsel
Ellen B. Brown, Minority Senior Counsel
William M. Outhier, Minority Investigative Counsel
Johanna L. Hardy, Minority Counsel
Darla D. Cassell, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
------
Opening statements:
Page
Senator Lieberman............................................ 1
Senator Thompson............................................. 2
WITNESS
Thursday, July 31, 2001
Daniel R. Levinson to be Inspector General of the General
Services Administration........................................ 3
Prepared statement........................................... 9
Biographical and financial information....................... 14
Pre-hearing questions and responses.......................... 22
NOMINATION OF DANIEL R. LEVINSON TO BE INSPECTOR GENERAL OF THE GENERAL
SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
----------
TUESDAY, JULY 31, 2001
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph I.
Lieberman, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Lieberman and Thompson.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN LIEBERMAN
Chairman Lieberman. The Committee will come to order. We
are here this afternoon to consider the nomination of Daniel R.
Levinson to be the Inspector General of the General Services
Administration. Mr. Levinson, welcome to the Committee. I know
that having been confirmed previously by the Senate for the
position of Chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, you
are no stranger to these arcane proceedings. Hopefully, we can
move with dispatch today.
As you already know, the IG's position at GSA is very
important to the overall operation of our government. GSA is
one of only three executive agencies with government-wide
responsibility. It is the Federal Government's central
management agency for administrative services and its
activities are vital to the ability of all agencies to achieve
their respective missions. GSA's anticipated budget for fiscal
year 2002 is $18.2 billion, and through its contracting
responsibilities, GSA will directly place another $37 billion
in commercial purchases for agencies across the government. The
Inspector General's role is to promote economy, efficiency and
effectiveness within GSA and to detect fraud, waste and abuse
in the agency's programs and operations. Given GSA's
relationship with all Federal agencies, the Inspector General,
obviously, is a key player in ensuring that literally billions
of dollars of taxpayer money are properly managed and accounted
for.
The previous IG's most recent assessment of the major
challenges at GSA identifies several issues, which this
Committee has raised through various channels, including under
the leadership of my distinguished predecessor and colleague,
Senator Thompson. They include management controls, information
technology solutions, procurement activities, human capital,
aging Federal buildings and, perhaps most importantly, the
protection of our Federal personnel and facilities. Helping GSA
adequately address these and other areas of concern will be a
major challenge of the IG.
Mr. Levinson, I am pleased that you have accepted this
challenge and I look forward to hearing your ideas about how
you will address some of these issues. I also look forward, as
is the custom of this Committee, to working closely with you in
your capacity as Inspector General, should you be confirmed by
the Senate.
Senator Thompson.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR THOMPSON
Senator Thompson. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, too,
want to welcome Mr. Levinson back into public service and I
express my appreciation to you for scheduling this hearing.
Hopefully, we can act on this nomination and Mr. Levinson can
be confirmed before the August recess. It is important that we
get inspectors general in place to carry out their mission that
has been established, as you said, to promote the economy,
efficiency and effectiveness, and detect waste, fraud and abuse
and mismanagement in government programs and operations.
GSA's mission, as stated in the fiscal year 2002 budget
justification, is to provide policy leadership and expert
solutions and services, space and products at the best value to
enable Federal employees to accomplish their missions. This is
implemented in a variety of ways through a variety of
organizations, including the Public Building Service, the
Federal Technology Service, the Federal Supply Service and the
Office of Government-wide Policy. The GSA Inspector General
will have an opportunity to evaluate these operations and
assist GSA as it seeks to adopt more business-like practices
and streamline its organizations, cut overhead, cut unnecessary
costs and re-engineer the processes to deliver quality goods
and services to its customers.
Dan Levinson has served as Chairman of the Merit Systems
Protection Board, General Counsel of the Consumer Products
Safety Commission and as Deputy General Counsel at the Office
of Personnel Management. He also was in private practice and in
academia. I believe that Mr. Levinson has the experience and
background to take on these challenges, and I am pleased that
after many years of public service, he is again willing to
reenter the public service. He is the kind of person we need
giving a portion of his career to government. I am pleased to
see that. Thank you and best of luck to you.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Senator Thompson.
For the record, Mr. Levinson has submitted responses to a
biographical and financial questionnaire, has answered
prehearing questions submitted by the Committee and additional
questions from individual Senators, and has had his financial
statement reviewed by the Office of Government Ethics. Without
objection, this information will be made part of the hearing
record with the exception of the financial data, which is on
file and available for inspection in the Committee's offices.
In addition, the FBI file has been reviewed by Senator Thompson
and me, pursuant to Committee rules.
Mr. Levinson, before we proceed I would like to give you an
opportunity to introduce family members that may be with us
this afternoon.
Mr. Levinson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would
like to introduce my wife, Luna, and sitting next to her--and
let me note that I understand you have among your children a
daughter named Hannah.
Chairman Lieberman. I do.
Mr. Levinson. To Luna's right is my younger daughter,
Hannah.
Chairman Lieberman. I was already inclined to support your
nomination. I am now more vigorously inclined, yes.
Mr. Levinson. To her right is my older daughter, Claire.
Chairman Lieberman. Welcome to all of you. You have a lot
to be proud of.
Mr. Levinson, our Committee rules require that all
witnesses at nomination hearings give their testimony under
oath, so would you please stand and raise your right hand? Do
you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give is
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help
you, God?
Mr. Levinson. I do.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you. Please be seated. Mr.
Levinson, if you have an opening statement, we would be happy
to hear it at this time.
TESTIMONY OF DANIEL R. LEVINSON \1\ TO BE INSPECTOR GENERAL OF
THE GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
Mr. Levinson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to
begin by noting that my parents were unable to make the trip to
Washington today, but please let me take this occasion to
express my deep love for and continuing gratitude to my father,
Gerald Levinson, and to my mother, Dr. Risha Levinson, of
Garden City, New York.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Levinson appears in the Appendix
on page 9.
Biographical and financial information appears in the Appendix on
page 14.
Pre-hearing questions and responses appear in the Appendix on
page 22.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Especially given this busy period for the Committee and the
Senate, I thank you for this opportunity to appear before the
Committee this afternoon. I also want to thank the Committee
staff for taking the time to meet with me last week. I have a
prepared statement that in the interest of efficiency--
important for a prospective IG--I would ask your consent to
have inserted in the record, and I would be glad to speak
briefly and then go right to your questions.
First, I would like to say that I am grateful to the
President for the honor of this nomination. As this Committee
knows well, GSA is charged by Congress to perform a very big
job on behalf of the American taxpayer. It is the Federal
Government's provider of office space, products, services and
technology affecting over $58 billion in transactions. It also
is responsible for protecting the life and safety of employees
and public visitors in Federal buildings. The job of Inspector
General is to a great degree defined by the agency's mission
and charter, and the very large responsibilities placed on GSA
in turn place large responsibilities on its Office of Inspector
General in the performance of its core audit and investigative
roles.
As I have noted in my prepared statement, I have had the
honor of serving in several senior posts in the Executive
Branch over the course of a 25-year career, and I very much
appreciate you and Senator Thompson noting that service in your
introductory remarks. If confirmed, I welcome the major
challenge and unique opportunity that this position affords in
contributing to the effective and efficient operations of the
Federal Government. As GSA seeks to improve on the ways in
which it carries out its mission, an effective Office of
Inspector General must be well-equipped and nimble to keep up
with the pace of change. I commit myself to working with the
agency and with this Committee and the Congress to ensure that
GAO's OIG not only maintains its core abilities to prevent
fraud, waste and abuse, but that it serve as a catalyst for
positive change.
I welcome your questions, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you for that thoughtful opening
statement. I am going to start by asking you certain questions
that we ask of all nominees. First, is there anything you are
aware of in your background which might present a conflict of
interest with the duties of the office to which you have been
nominated?
Mr. Levinson. No.
Chairman Lieberman. Do you know of anything personal or
otherwise that would, in any way, prevent you from fully and
honorably discharging the responsibilities as Inspector General
of the General Services Administration?
Mr. Levinson. No, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Do you agree without reservation to
respond to any reasonable summons to appear and testify before
any duly constituted Committee of Congress if you are
confirmed?
Mr. Levinson. Yes, I do.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you. I have just a few questions.
The first is about e-Government. As you may know, e-Government
is one of my personal priorities here on this Committee. I am
convinced that this is one of the keys to creating a more
efficient, cost-effective and citizen-accessible government, by
transferring more of the government onto the net, but also
using information technology more effectively. I am pleased
that you indicated in prehearing communication with the
Committee that if confirmed as IG, you anticipate an important
role for GSA's Inspector General as e-Government develops. I
wonder if you could elaborate briefly on how you view the IG's
responsibility in this area?
Mr. Levinson. Mr. Chairman, I view the entire IT arena as
an extremely important emerging area for activity, certainly by
IGs government-wide, and collectively, through the President's
Council on Integrity and Efficiency, as well as across agency
lines. We must work to ensure that as the significant
investments are made in e-Government, that they are made with
careful thought, both about how the networks will actually
deliver service and how those networks are protected from
unauthorized or improper access. It just so happens that we are
meeting on a day when a significant virus is expected to hit
the Internet. This underscores how timely, and in a sense how
timeless, this issue is, that it is not just a matter of coming
up with perhaps one specific fix for any particular problem
that may emerge on a particular day, but that, systematically,
we need to be prepared government-wide.
IGs, because of the mission that IGs have, have a unique
responsibility to ensure that through their IT audit work, as
well as through their work with PCIE, OMB and GAO, that they
work aggressively to make sure that those services are provided
with the appropriate controls.
Chairman Lieberman. I appreciate the answer. I hope you
will not hesitate as you proceed with your work, if it
generates thoughts that you have about how to improve e-
Government more broadly, that you would not hesitate to be in
touch with the Committee.
Mr. Levinson. Yes, I will. I appreciate that, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Let me go to the subject of building
security. Upgrading the security of Federal buildings continues
to be a major challenge for GSA. In July 1995, GSA launched a
multimillion dollar program to strengthen security at 8,300
buildings under its control. While GSA has made progress, the
GAO has reported that GSA cannot pinpoint the program's exact
cost or status. Also, GSA has not established program outcome
measures and, consequently, does not know the extent to which
completed upgrades have resulted in greater security.
I think that effectively monitoring GSA's progress in this
area is a key challenge that faces you as incoming Inspector
General. I know from my staff that you have expressed a
commitment to keep the issue of security for employees at our
Federal buildings right at the top of your agenda, and I just
wondered today if you have any preliminary thoughts about
working with other law-enforcement agencies in this effort.
Mr. Levinson. Mr. Chairman, in the most recent semi-annual
report of the GSA OIG, it was indicated that there is still a
good deal of work to be done in making more effective the
intelligence-sharing program that GSA has been an integral part
of. It does strike me that it would be of key importance,
again, to be working across agency lines, working with the
Justice Department, with the Treasury Department, with
resources around the Executive Branch to ensure that the
security provided is done in an integrated way.
Going back to my experience, having done Congressional
staff work in Conference on the 1996 anti-terrorism bill, and
having had an opportunity and, indeed, the privilege, of
meeting some of the families of the victims of the Oklahoma
City bombing--those instances really bring home in a very
personal way how much depends on our ability to address the
security needs around the country, and in some respects, around
the globe. I do not certainly, this afternoon, have any quick
verbal formula to share with you on that.
Chairman Lieberman. Understood.
Mr. Levinson. But I do think that there could be no more
important issue for the agency and for the Inspector General
than to ensure that this kind of security issue--certainly
computer security and other security issues are important, but
physical security never take second-place to anything else.
Chairman Lieberman. Absolutely. Thank you. My final
question is on the persistence of waste, fraud and abuse in
government. In your responses to the Committee's written
questions, you shared your belief that waste, fraud and abuse
will probably always be issues of concern to our government.
You also indicated that you would employ expertise in
management analysis to gain a more complete understanding of
the relationship between acute problems and the underlying
systemic issues. I thought that was a very interesting
statement, and I wonder if you wanted to elaborate on that a
bit today. I am interested whether you have utilized that
expertise to address systemic problems at other times in your
career in government.
Mr. Levinson. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I certainly
was afforded a wonderful opportunity to address systematic
issue as chairman of the MSPB earlier in my career. There we
integrated the important work of the Board in adjudicating work
place due process cases with the Board's merit studies
function, so that the studies were informed by the real world
experience of individual disputes in the workplace.
This is, as you know well, a very, very large enterprise.
When you deal with a couple of million people who are
exercising such a broad array of responsibilities, it is an
enormous challenge for executive leaders to understand where
the synergies are, where you can pinpoint how a change in a
particular system or a change in a particular management
operating method can have a ripple effect throughout an agency
and throughout the Executive Branch. We certainly tried to do
that at the board. More often than not, we probably were not
able to succeed as much as we would like, but by having the
issue presented, I think we laid a very good foundation for
better things to happen in the future.
Chairman Lieberman. That is a thoughtful response. Let me
just mention one other observation that we have made on the
Committee, which is the inclination of IGs in recent years, not
just to focus on the kind of independent watchdog role by which
they have performed such extraordinary service, uncovering
literally billions of dollars in waste and fraud or abuse, but
also in trying to play a proactive kind of preventive role, to
help the agencies avoid the difficulties in the first place. It
seems to me that the challenge--and I think that is a good
step--in combining those functions is obviously--or perhaps I
should say so evidently--to be certain that the independence
necessary for the first role as the watchdog is not compromised
by a kind of collegial relationship that might develop in the
second role, of being the preventive, the adviser to
proactively prevent problems. I do not know whether you want to
comment on that or not.
Mr. Levinson. I would, Mr. Chairman. It is an interesting
issue that you raise here, and in a sense, I think Congress was
struggling with exactly that in 1978, during its consideration
of both the Inspector General Act as well as the Civil Service
Reform Act. Coincidentally, the two acts were passed within 24
hours of each other. I think the language of the IG Act reveals
a struggle to incorporate, in one operation, a multi-tasked
list of very important structural duties. I think on the civil
service side, there was the struggle with the Special Counsel
and its relationship with the merit board. And some of the
language there is reflected in the IG Act, as well.
The language of the IG statute, codified as an appendix to
Title V, reflects an encouragement to IGs to make the case
internally and to work with the Congress to show how the day-
to-day issues involved in the investigative and audit work
draws connections with important, systematic or structural
reforms. The IG needs to carry that forward, not just do that
very important foundation work with the investigative and audit
responsibility, but then to ensure that the leadership in the
agency and the relevant committees of Congress are aware of
what systematically the implications of that audit and
investigative work really mean.
Chairman Lieberman. Again, a very thoughtful answer. I do
not have any more questions. I hope that we can put your
nomination on the agenda for a markup that we have this
Thursday, and move it out quickly. It should not be
controversial.
I thank you for your willingness to serve the public again
in the Federal Government. I thank your family for their
support and acceptance of the fact that you are returning to
public service. I say that on behalf of my wife and children,
who are not here today. I believe we have done it. Every
confirmation hearing should go this well.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:52 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
----------
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.001
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.002
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.003
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.004
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.005
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.006
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.007
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.008
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.009
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.010
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.011
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.012
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.013
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.014
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.015
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.016
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.017
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.018
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.019
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.020
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.021
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.022
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.023
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.024
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5476.025