| Martha Johnson | |
|---|---|
| Administrator of General Services | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office February 16, 2010 |
|
| President | Barack Obama |
| Deputy | Susan Brita |
| Preceded by | Stephen Leeds (Acting) |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1952 (age 59–60) |
| Political party | Democratic Party |
| Alma mater | Oberlin College Yale University |
Martha N. Johnson (born 1952) is a former official in the administration of President Bill Clinton who currently leads the U.S. General Services Administration as the Administrator of General Services.
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Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Johnson earned a bachelor's degree in economics and history from Oberlin College in 1974.[1] She then earned an MBA degree from the Yale Business School (now the Yale School of Management) in 1979.[2]
From 1979 until 1985, Johnson worked as a manager for Cummins Engine Company, first in Columbus, Indiana and then in Jamestown, New York. She worked from 1985 until 1987 as the CFO for an architecture firm, in 1987 and 1988 as a recruiter for a staffing company, and from 1988 until 1992 as a consultant in a diversity consulting firm. During 1992, she was an executive recruiting consultant with Ben & Jerry's for several months.
After working on the Clinton-Gore transition team, Johnson worked in the White House Office's Office of Presidential Personnel until October 1993, and then served as an Associate Deputy Secretary of Commerce from 1993 until 1996.[3]
In March 1996, Johnson joined the General Services Administration, working there as a chief of staff from 1996 until January 20, 2001.[4]
In November 2001, Johnson became vice president of the Council for Excellence in Government. In January 2003, she left the Council for Excellence in Government to become a director at Touchstone Consulting Group, which was purchased by SRA International in 2005. SRA then employed Johnson from March 2005 until November 2007.[5]
Johnson left SRA to become a vice president of culture at Computer Sciences Corporation, a role she held until February, 2010, when she was confirmed by the Senate to join the Obama Administration as the Administrator of the General Services Administration. [6]
In late 2008, Johnson became a co-leader of the Obama transition team evaluating the GSA.[7]
In April 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Johnson to serve as the Administrator of the GSA. On June 8, 2009, Johnson's nomination was reported out of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Johnson's nomination languished for months after Missouri Sen. Kit Bond placed a hold on her nomination over concerns he had about why the GSA wasn't closing down the federally owned Bannister Complex outside Kansas City, Missouri and relocating staff to leased space in downtown Kansas City.[8]
On January 28, 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed for cloture on Johnson's nomination.[9]
On February 3, 2010, Obama, in an unusual move for a sitting president, sharply criticized Bond and Republican senators for blocking Johnson's nomination, and complained that Republicans were blocking nominees for reasons that have nothing to do with their qualifications for their prospective jobs.[10] While at a retreat for Democratic senators, Obama made the comments in response to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy about his judicial nominations. Obama expanded his answer to include not just blocked judicial nominations but also executive nominations as well:
| “ | Nobody can tell me that there's anything particularly wrong with her. They're blocking her because of some unrelated matter. Don't hold this — this woman hostage. If you have an objection about my health-care policies, then let's debate the health-care policies. But don't suddenly end up having a GSA administrator who is stuck in limbo somewhere because you don't like something else that we're doing.[11] | ” |
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—Barack Obama |
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The full United States Senate voted 82-16 for cloture on Johnson's nomination on February 4, 2010.[12] Immediately afterward, the Senate voted 94-2 (with four abstentions) to confirm Johnson. Subsequent to the vote, the two senators voting against Johnson, Jim Bunning and Jeff Sessions, asked to change their votes to "yea," making the confirmation vote 96-0.[13]
In a letter to Martha Johnson dated November 30, 2010, Missouri Senators Kit Bond and Claire McCaskill and Representative Emanuel Cleaver assert that GSA Public Buildings Service employees failed to ensure and maintain a safe working environment for employees and tenants at the Bannister Federal Complex in Kansas City, Missouri. The letter directed Martha Johnson to take the appropriate steps to identify those responsible for the lax safety culture at the Bannister complex and take the appropriate steps to hold those individuals accountable.[14][15]
The letter came after three weeks of phone calls and e-mails from NBC Action News in Kansas City to GSA media contacts. Despite numerous requests from NBC Action News for an interview with Martha Johnson regarding the health concerns at the Bannister complex, Johnson failed to respond to the requests for interviews. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request turned up documents that indicated senior GSA officials knew of the health concerns, including a list of more than 100 sick and dead former employees of the complex; however, senior GSA officials originally denied knowledge of the information.[16] Emails later obtained by NBC Action News proved that high level Public Buildings Service officials had actually obtained the list of sick and dead former employees three months before the NBC investigation began. In a later FOIA request from NBC Action News, GSA also withheld a letter from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources that was critical of the GSA’s investigation into contamination near a day care center at the Bannister complex. After weeks of requests for interviews, Martha Johnson failed to comment on the situation regarding GSA's withholding of information or the subsequent Inspector General report that indicated GSA officials misled employees about health concerns at the Bannister Complex.[17]
Additional investigations revealed that GSA paid $234,000 to a Kansas City public relations firm to manage negative publicity that GSA was receiving as a result of mismanagement of the investigations into the Bannister complex. As a result, Senator Claire McCaskill announced that she would launch an investigation into the use of tax dollars used by federal agencies to hire public relations consultants to “spin” their images. In a November 2010 letter to Martha Johnson, Senator McCaskill reminded GSA that "publicity experts" cannot engage in "publicity and propaganda" unless authorized by Congress and requested a detailed report of the government's use of these services.[18][19][20][21]
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Stephen Leeds Acting |
Administrator of General Services 2009–present |
Incumbent |