A former Energy Department official assisting President-elect Donald Trump’s transition voluntarily accepted a demotion in 2020 after admitting that he had made sexual advances toward a female colleague during a government trip to Vietnam, according to an inspector general’s report obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News.
An investigation by the department’s Office of Inspector General “identified evidence indicating” that Joseph Uddo, then a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of International Affairs, had violated DOE’s prohibition on sexual misconduct in 2019, the report said.
The probe also turned up hundreds of dollars’ worth of irregularities in Uddo’s expense reporting, and concluded that he had failed to properly report a relationship with a foreign national and had used an e-cigarette inside his office at DOE’s headquarters in Washington, according to the document.
The inspector general report doesn’t explain the exact reason for Uddo’s demotion to GS-15, the highest classification for civil servants. A closing memorandum issued in August 2020 as part of the inspector general report concluded that “there was evidence of wrongdoing of an administrative nature on the part of Uddo, including multiple Federal Travel Regulation Violations and failure to report clearance-related information.” It did not mention sexual misconduct among the violations.
