USDOL ASSISTANT DEPUTY SECRETARY SHELBY HALLMARK ACCUSED OF SCHEMING TO LIMIT COMPENSATION FOR SICK AND DYING FEDERAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS WORKERS

Time may be quickly running out for the terms of Shelby Hallmark the USDOL Assistant Deputy Secretary of Labor and fellow constituents. The US DOL oversees the federal workers compensation program to compensate federal workers whose illnesses and deaths are tied to radioactive and toxic materials at federal nuclear weapons plants such as the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver. In an article dated March 10, 2007 the Rocky Mountain News reports that internal e-mails from Hallmark show that federal officials secretly schemed to limit payouts for those sick and dying weapons workers including thousands of workers from the Rocky Flats plant.

In internal e-mails Hallmark worries about compensation costs soaring in "an arms race among members (of Congress) jockeying to demonstrate their ability to bring home "special" benefits to their constituents". Hallmark's boss, Assistant Secretary of Labor Victoria Lipnic complains "There is not a fiscal conservative left anywhere."

Hallmark, in other memos, wrote in 2005 that it would be unfair to pay claims to "undeserving" workers. In a response memo the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) agreed with Hallmark and said the White House would work to recommend ways to "contain growth and the costs" of the compensation to those sick and dying workers.

In October 2005 Labor Department officials expressed concern about approving compensation for whole groups of workers, called "special exposure cohorts." Congress ordered these special cohorts if records on workers' radiation exposure were so incomplete, missing or destroyed that scientists could not reconstruct the radiation doses to link them to workers' illness.

In a January 31, 2005 e-mail Hallmark worries that NIOSH was about to make it easier for sites such as the Rocky Flats plant to get special exposure cohorts status. NIOSH had already received written notice granting the status when Hallmark wrote: "We have revised the attached version of the notice . . . to require that NIOSH DENY (the petition)."

In 2006, Hallmark complained in an e-mail to OMB that he was "uncomfortable with even an unofficial sharing of my briefing piece for today's meeting with my second-floor people (the US secretary of labor's office) since I am not at all convinced they will be willing to argue directly for any or all the actions it proposes.... But if you promise not to spread it, and if you don't use the language in your document such that NIOSH will know where the verbiage came from, I'll share it."

Subsequently Hallmark denied to the U.S. Congress any allegations of a covert cost containment effort and also denied to Congress that the Labor Department was trying to prevent approvals of compensation.

Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said, "Clearly, the administration put dollars above honoring the nation's promise to the Cold War veterans." He added this is "almost worse" than the bad conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. That was negligence, Udall said, where "this seems to be a pretty callous plan that the administration knew could harm sick veterans." Udall, of Colorado, said the documents "confirm what many of us suspected was under way, which was the administration tried to override science to cut costs at the expense of sick workers. And it might have succeeded if the plan hadn't been exposed."