The emotional toll of sexual harassment and feeling her agency didn’t care could no longer be contained. She described how a supervisor, whom she named, offered to give her a promotion to grade GS-13 in exchange for sex. In a 2015 letter to President Barack Obama, Carolyn Lerner, who was then special counsel, criticized USDA for slow-walking civil rights complaints against top managers. A USDA report substantiated allegations by whistleblowers and concluded that “almost 50 percent of civil rights complaints filed against high level USDA officials were not acted on within the legally required time frame.”The department’s civil rights office was “seriously mismanaged, thereby compromising the civil rights of USDA employees,” Lerner wrote. “By the end of fiscal year 2017, USDA reduced its average processing time to 177 days and are continuing to make improvements.

Source: Washington Post February 20, 2018 22:35 UTC