Write-In Candidate for Employee of the Year

Sometimes fraud is good:

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits  over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his lies were a "crime of massive proportion" that were “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA...

...Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses -- including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.

 The EPA is tasked with keeping the environment  clean and safe. They're like those German bathroom attendants. They will clean up when necessary but they're also there to enforce the Bathroom Rules. Paper towels go in the trash can, bitte!

The EPA is like that except that they've learned that they can also keep the floors clean by not letting anyone into the bathroom. They routinely discourage industry via regulations.

They're like an anti-prosperity machine; seemingly unconcerned with economic impact. So maybe it's not such a bad thing when an EPA employee shirks his duty. I'd rather pay for London vacations than put up with the regulations Mr. Beale could have been writing. In fact, we should do an economic impact study to determine what would happen if we sent the entire EPA off to London.

OK, so London couldn't possibly accommodate all of them. But we could spread them out. Deputize them as junior-CIA and send them out to hobble our enemies for a change.

As for Mr. Beale's hutzpah, I say huzzah! Who among us hasn't claimed to be a CIA operative when confronted by authority in the middle of our drunken transgressions? "I know this appears to be a crime, officer, but I cut the head off the statue in order to install a monitoring device for the CIA. Now please leave before you blow my cover." 

Elaborate falsifications are Climate Change experts' raison d'etre. Mr. Beale was doing his job, just in an area where the EPA hadn't requested deception.

Free John Beale!