WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Greg Walden, R-Ore., ranking member of the committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, this week asked the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Health and Human Services and Office of Personnel Management to explain how certain civil servants are able to make more than the vice president of the United States.

HHS was given special pay authority under Title 42, Section 209(f) of the U.S. Code as a recruiting or retention tool to pay scientific employees much higher salaries than they could earn under the Civil Service system. However, Barton and Walden question whether the EPA is legally even able to cash in on the special HHS pay authorities.

“EPA is an independent agency, not part of HHS or the Public Health Service,” Barton and Walden wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. “We are curious how EPA can legally use statutory authority explicitly committed to the Public Health Service and the Surgeon General, particularly the special consultant authority in 209(f).”

“It looks like the EPA has dug into a Clinton-era personnel statute that was meant to retain a handful of key scientists at the Health and Human Services Department and found a cash cow living there, and used it to concoct an alternative pay system for themselves that’s miles away from any public accountability,” Barton added in a separate statement. “As a consequence, some employees get tens of thousands of extra dollars on top of the hefty retention bonuses they’ve collected. If EPA can cash in, anybody can, and salary schemes will grow like kudzu throughout the federal government. I understand the need to hang on to world-class scientists for their distinct value in government service, but paying anybody else more than the vice president makes is both a distortion and not right.”

A copy of the letters can be found here.