The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Secrecy's Price

Discussions of the cost of government secrecy are usually about secrecy's use in covering up abuse or embarrassing information, or its effect on democracy.  But secrecy's has a very real price tag in dollars, too.

The federal government's Information Security Oversight Office, located in the National Archives and Records Administration, has attempted to determine this cost in its 2004 Report on Cost Estimates for Security Classification Activities (ISOO has estimated costs in past years as well).  [Hat tip to the invaluable Secrecy News for bringing this to our attention.]

The government spent $7.2 billion protecting secrets in Fiscal Year 2004, an eleven percent increase from FY 2003.  The bulk of the expenses were for "Information Security"-- the guarding of information and controlling dissemination--$4.3 billion. 

Part of the reason for the soaring dollar cost of classification is the increasing use of classification, as the OpenTheGovernment.org Coalition has shown in its Secrecy Report Card.

By the way, a tiny slice the $7.2 billion is categorized as "Declassification." It stands at $48.3 million--a nearly six million dollar drop from the year before.

Bloch's Bravado

We wonder what fabled NYPD officer Frank Serpico would say if he read Scott Bloch’s recent op-ed in the Federal Times. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel, the agency charged with investigating and remedying abuse of government employees, drops Serpico’s name as part of his effort to talk up his agency – an agency that, under Bloch’s 18 month tenure, has come under increasing fire.

Serpico’s story is simple in the telling: he saw widespread corruption in the NYPD, reported it, was rebuffed again and again, leaked it to the New York Times, and then, after he was shot in the face while on the job, people took notice. Serpico’s allegations helped spurn the Knapp Commission – the 9/11 Commission of the NYPD at the time.

Back to Bloch: it’s funny he cites Serpico because, like Serpico, so many contemportary would be whistle blowers (or “lamplighters” as Serpico prefers to call them) are being ignored. To fix a backlog of cases, Bloch had his staff summarily close out 500 complaints without even calling the complainant to see if there was any meat to their accusations. He claimed, in his op-ed and before the Senate, that these cases were slated for removal by his predecessor – which is false.

You can’t blame Bloch for the woes of today’s whistle blowers/lamplighters. Fact is, Congress and the courts have severely limited federal employees’ ability to disclose wrongdoing and fraud without getting theirs heads handed to them by their superiors. But you can blame Bloch for fudging the numbers and by doing so, wounding the credibility and integrity of the best shot federal workers have at getting due process.

MORE: Here's the POGO response to Bloch as it appeared in the Federal Times.

FOIbles

Remember this post?  To jog your memory the FBI would only use computerized searches to look up documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.  Therefore many documents that could only be found via a paper search were missed. 

Here's the intro to a story in yesterday's Washington Post:

Ordered by a court to search harder, the FBI has found more than 340 internal documents that it once said couldn't be found under an open-records request. But the bureau still wants to avoid or delay releasing them.

The FBI says it will take a while to review the documents before release, which may be true, but as Rebecca Daugherty, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press FOI Center, opined, it probably would take less time to review documents for exemptions than going to court.

Screening Homeland Security

Waste and abuse in contracting are rampant in the Department of Homeland Security, according to a two-part series in the Washington Post.  Two weeks ago the New York Times ran a related story on the ineffectiveness of many of security systems DHS procured.  All three articles are complementary.   Whereas the Times narrows in on billions wasted on systems that don't work (there is a bit on the lack of competition, including procurement requests naming specific contractors), the Post concentrates on how this happened. 

Here's some examples cited by the Post:

• "The contract to hire airport passenger screeners grew to $741 million from $104 million in less than a year. The screeners are failing to detect weapons at roughly the same rate as shortly after the attacks."
• "The contract for airport bomb-detection machines ballooned to at least $1.2 billion from $508 million over 18 months. The machines have been hampered by high false-alarm rates."
• "Radiation-detection machines worth a total of a half-billion dollars deployed to screen trucks and cargo containers at ports and borders have trouble distinguishing between highly enriched uranium and common household products. The problem has prompted costly plans to replace the machines."

Though wasted taxpayer dollars and gaping holes in security are serious problems, they are really symptoms of the government's perilously crippled ability to oversee its own procurement of goods and services. The real story is how and why government officials now refer to corporations as "partners," rather than "contractors."

D. Kent Goodger, a veteran contracting official, put it simply to the Post, "We have allowed the contractors to totally take over the process, and as a result, the costs are getting totally inflated."

Federal Acquisition Regulations, a set of contracting oversight guidelines, were sidelined to speed up the process.  Far, far too few government officials actually oversee the contractors.  DHS's Office of Procurement Operations has 19 employees overseeing an average of $101 million each, while the Coast Guard, a DHS component with its own contract office has 332 officials each reviewing contracts worth an average of about $6 million.  And among those few oversight officials, not enough have appropriate expertise to do their job.  The GAO found that only 22% of DHS contracts are overseen by those who are qualified to do so. 

Because there was little oversight, systems were acquired that don't work well (if they were acquired at all).  Now DHS has to go back and replace them.  Was time saved?  Not really.  Because it was done wrong on a massive scale (think billions of dollars) time and money were and are being wasted.

It's a long article, but start off with part one in the Post's series.  Go read.  And then check out POGO's contract oversight archives for more.

C-130J flip-flop

Tough-guy Donald Rumsfeld has backed down to whiny members of Congress and the back-room dealings of defense contractors who stand to gain billions of dollars by keeping the C-130J assembly line open. It’s too bad, because the interests of the taxpayers and the military have been ignored.

The bottom line is that the C-130J, a problem-plagued transport aircraft, is back in the defense authorization budget after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a May 10 memo that “new information” had become available.  “While the decision during the Department’s fiscal year (FY) 2006 budget process was based on information available at the time, new information has become available regarding the contract termination costs,” Rumsfeld wrote to Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner. There was no explanation of what the “new” information was, but it’s obvious. Members of Congress have been wildly inflating the termination costs, with some manufactured estimates as high as $2 billion. The contract clearly limits the termination cost to $383 million.

Earlier the Pentagon green shades had estimated that canceling the C-130J program would save the taxpayers $5 billion and end the production of a lemon-of-an-aircraft. Looks like another flip-flop story ripped right from the pages of a political science textbook. The Pentagon threatens to cancel a weapons system, Congress goes on the attack as cheerleaders for a contractor, and the Pentagon relents.

Defense Science Board: Nothing Preventing Another Druyun Now

Inside Defense has a story on, and has made available, the Defense Science Board report on oversight of Defense Department acquisition in response to the Darleen Druyun case.  Druyun was found guilty several months ago for improperly steering DoD contracts toward Boeing while she, her daughter and future son-in-law were negotiating with Boeing for employment.  DSB chairman's William Schneider's verdict on the situation now:

"One of the Task Force’s key findings is that while current acquisition practices make an incident on the scale of the Druyun case unlikely, there are currently no structural or policy mandates in place that would prevent this situation from recurring." (emphasis POGO's)

The DSB recommends both better and more transparent oversight and processes in acquisition such as requiring, say, written justification for source selection.  Here's what the DSB says contributed to the Druyun situation:

• Exceptional expertise in contracting;
• Long tenure in her position;
• Gradual accretion of acquisition and personnel management authorities;
• Little oversight because of no immediate supervisor (or her supervisor delegated acquisition authorities to her);
• Abusive behavior to subordinates and contractors that was not apparent, or viewed as “tough, but fair” by supervisors;
• “Behind closed doors” decisions;
• Employment of her daughter and future son-in-law by Boeing.

Stryker!: The Movie

After POGO released an Army report showing major problems with the Stryker, we got a lot of fan mail – positive and negative. When the Army released a puff piece video on the Stryker, we called it propaganda – after all, during a time of war what business does the Army have doing promotional nothing-burger videos? We think that money is better spent fixing problems with the Stryker – like the fact that soldiers have to tie sandbags around the gunner hatch to protect themselves, or the fact that the Stryker weighs so much, soldiers hook extra gas tanks on the back which creates a serious fire hazard. After the Army video, more fan mail came. One email said “Why won't you post the Army new Stryker Video, giving it the same attention you did to an old report?  Is your mantra only report bad things?” And so, POGO with a very small nonprofit budget of $1 million has spent its own money to post the Army’s video here. Decide for yourself.

The Army has invited us to Fort Lewis to see the Stryker. We are going (and paying our own way). We look forward to continuing the dialogue. In previous posts we’ve asked for soldiers who’ve used the Stryker for their opinions.  Some comments have been thoughtful, and others, well, not so much.  Much of the disagreement has revolved around whether problems with the Stryker have been serious deficiencies or minor kinks.  Regardless, the Army should be concentrating on fixing the issues, whatever their magnitude, rather than spending our taxpayer dollars to sway the media with one-sided videos.

The Army’s Stryker video is available for viewing in Quicktime or RealPlayer video formats (you may need to download Quicktime or RealPlayer).  Disclaimer: this is a large file and, depending on your connection speed and computer, may take some time to load.

POGO remembers Col. David Hackworth

Col. David Hackworth died this week at 74 from cancer. He was a great man.  A great warrior who took his job as protector of the troops into his lives beyond the Army as a journalist and military reform activist.  He filled every endeavor with a passion that is rarely seen anymore.  No one gets angry anymore -- not in the Congress, not in the Administration, not in the media -- the way Hackworth would when contractor interests were placed before the guys on the ground.  I'm proud that years ago, POGO hosted his Washington book party for the release of, "About Face." I was always struck that such a brave man, the mostly highly decorated living soldier, also had the voice of a poet.

Our condolences to his wife and to the troops he represented,

Danielle Brian and everyone at the Project On Government Oversight

The Pentagon Money Spigot

This GovExec story on out-of-control weapon costs gets it mostly right:

[Rep. Duncan] Hunter and other [House Armed Services] committee members are concerned about the skyrocketing costs of weapons systems, a byproduct of defense officials tacking on expensive -- and sometimes unneeded -- requirements to its priciest platforms.

Sometimes that's the case, but often costs fly sky high, while capabilities and requirements are decreased.  The American taxpayer gets less bang for more buck.  This process is likened to moving the goal posts or lowering the bar so that defense contractors can meet the lowered requirements.

For example, while the V-22 Osprey's budget has kept increasing, some of its requirements have been dropped.  One of the V-22’s selling points until 2001 were plans to build it with protection against Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) weapons. The two planned means of protecting the V-22 from NBC warfare were overpressure and filtration systems. However, in 2001, the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) dropped these plans citing the difficulty and expense of incorporating these enhancements, as well as operational problems and weight penalties.  The per unit cost of the V-22 has shot up from $33 million-a-piece in 1986 to $110 million-per-vehicle today. (All amounts in 2004 dollars.)

Sometimes the military cheats a little to meet operational requirements. Case in point: (originally estimated to cost less than a million dollars-a-copy) the $4 million-a-copy Stryker Armored Vehicle. Operational requirements call for the Stryker to travel up to 300 km on missions. But since the Stryker’s internal fuel tanks won’t allow it to go that far, the Army decided to externally strap on 20 extra gallons of fuel in four five-gallon cans. The result is that the cans are an easy target for enemy fire, which can ignite the fuel and potentially cause serious injury or death to troops.

CRS has 'JTRS' when it comes to FCS

DefenseTech points us to a new Congressional Research Service report on the Future Combat Systems program:

Congress, in its authorization, appropriation, and oversight roles may wish to review the relevancy of the FCS program in terms of current and potential future threats, the overall viability of the program, program management and contractual agreements, and program “off ramps” into the current force should the FCS program be modified or curtailed.

By the way, 'JTRS', pronounced 'jitters,' is the troubled digital radio system that is supposed to weave FCS together.