The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Must have read Matthew Lesko

In a $741 million contract to hire 60,000 screeners for the TSA, $303 million of NCS Pearson’s expenses were unsubstantiated and largely due to a lack of subcontractor oversight, according to a Defense Contract Audit Agency audit cited in the Washington Post. One of the major subcontractors, Eclipse Events Inc., received a no-bid contract before it was even incorporated and could not provide documentation for $15 million of its $24 million in expenses. It turns out that Eclipse Events Inc. spent money on a $5.4 million paycheck for its president, as well as cash advances, dry cleaning, and first-class plane tickets for employees.

The dilution of accountability via subcontracting has become increasingly common in recent years. The federal government is awarding larger and larger contracts to private companies, necessitating the use of subcontractors. Most contractors do not exercise sufficient oversight over their subcontractors because they are not legally required to do so, and there are far too few DHS contract officers to perform a supervisory role. A manager of one of Pearson’s screener-assessment centers told the Washington Post that he “never saw any government people” during his employment.

Fortunately, measures are being taken to better ensure accountability. A proposed revision to the Federal Acquisition Regulation would require agencies to consider how their contractors manage subcontractors when awarding future contracts. Additionally, the DHS Financial Accountability Act should help hold the Department of Homeland Security accountable once implemented.

Private Interests Inc., formerly known as Congress

According to a new report by Public Citizen, 43 percent of the members of Congress who have left office since 1998 have gone on to a lucrative career in lobbying. That’s 85 former legislators who have shelved the interest of the public in favor of the interest of whoever is writing the checks.

These former public servants are in high demand because of their unrivaled access to the Hill. Former members of Congress, for example, retain access to the House and Senate Floors as well as to members-only restaurants and gymnasiums. These benefits afford them more opportunities to make a case on behalf of their clients.

This means that corporations who employ lobbyists with the right connections are more likely to receive a government contract (or other legislation that suits them)—regardless of whether or not it is in the public interest. Effective lobbyists are, in turn, rewarded handsomely for their services.

Ultimately, this practice eradicates the incentive for a politician to act in the public interest. Why should legislators be afraid of losing an election when they can look forward to a lucrative lobbying career? The only lobbying that legislators should set their sites on is that which they were elected to do: lobbying on behalf of their constituents.

Links for Lobbying and the Revolving Door:

The aforementioned report by Public Citizen

Find a lobbyist, with the help of Public Citizen

See the scope of lobbying and find out how much money is going where with the Center for Public Integrity’s Lobbywatch (please see this note on Lobbywatch's methodology)

Senate Lobby Filing Disclosure Program

The Center for Responsive Politics

PoliticalMoneyLine, the money in politics database

POGO’s report on the politics of contracting, which includes analysis of the affects of the revolving door

May the Force be with You

This Tuesday, POGO’s Nick Schwellenbach attended a personal briefing by Brig. Gen. Allison Hickey on the Air Force’s Future Total Force plan. FTF is a set of transformational initiatives to increasingly blend active-duty Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserves forces. The plan exists to more efficiently use the Air Force’s weapons systems and human resources. One way this will be done is to consolidate units, giving the Air Force greater flexibility. An additional part of the plan is to discard the practice of passing down active duty systems to the Guard and instead procure them the same brand-new equipment the active duty forces receive. The rationale behind this move is the reality that the Guard is often deployed as much as active duty.

FTF attains heightened importance, according to the Air Force, because of numerous factors: increasing cost of weapons which reduces the number of planes purchased; the assumption by the Air Force that defense spending will plateau; the changing requirements of the military (e.g. more UAVs versus fewer manned fighters); and the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process and the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).

While there has been criticism of FTF from some lawmakers and elements of the National Guard leading to a hearing last week before the House Armed Services Committee (most of the hearing was actually on BRAC), we are withholding judgment of the program until we know more.

The Air Force approached POGO first; we really haven’t looked at FTF until now. It is part of their new media strategy to initiate dialogue with bloggers.  The Air Force's attempt to reach out beyond the mainstream media is a good idea in our opinion, but, of course, we’re a little biased.

Uranium Tailings to get MOAB-bilized

It’s final: the Department of Energy (DOE) has recommended the uranium mill tailings of the Moab [Utah] UMTRA Project be relocated. Though the department announced this recommendation as part of a draft back in April, DOE made it official by publishing its Final Environmental Impact Statement.

The report calls for the relocation of 11.9 million tons of contaminated materials by rail and is, by the way, in complete accordance with what POGO has been recommending since the late 90s.

The tailings (which are harmful byproducts of a now defunct uranium processing operation) currently lie in an unlined impoundment that is a mere 750 feet away from the Colorado River—a source of drinking water for some 25 million people in Arizona and California. Among other problems, the site emits radon gas and soil surrounding the impoundment now has contaminant levels above EPA standards.

It’s sad that it took so long to publish Environmental Impact Statement because analysis of the Moab problem has been years in the making. Back in 1999, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report estimated the cost of relocation to be between $72 million and $103 million. Now, DOE’s estimated costs have ballooned to anywhere from $329 million to $464 million.

Is the increased cost a result of a more thorough analysis or government foot-dragging? At least instead of looking forward to another draft statement, we can look forward to real progress.

Fangs Not Included

Of late some commentators have opined that Congress has dropped the ball on its role in providing oversight over the Executive Branch.  If anyone in Congress needs help the Congressional Research Service has produced a handy Congressional Oversight Manual.  It's kind of a "How-to" guide for Congress.  With sections like "Improve the Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Economy of Government Operations" and "Protect Individual Rights and Liberties" the Manual lays out what Congress should be striving to achieve.  The manual goes further and gives Congress direction on how to achieve oversight through investigations, hearings, the media, etc.  If this CRS report isn't enough on its own, Appendix D lists a series of Congressional Oversight videos for those more right-brained types. 

Hopefully, if Congress puts this guide to good use, it'll add some bite to Congress' bark.

Patch up the holes in Clinicaltrials.gov

The birth control patch Ortho-Evra may be more dangerous than people once thought. After filing a FOIA request for federal drug safety reports on the birth control patch, the Associated Press discovered that “the risk of suffering a survivable blood clot while using [Ortho-Evra] was about three times higher than while using birth control pills.”

What’s alarming isn’t so much the findings of the FDA study, but rather the fact that the AP had to submit a FOIA request to obtain them. Why weren’t these studies made available to the public? How can a person be expected to make a decision about their health if they don’t have all the facts?

In order to help protect the public (and in order to regain some of the credibility lost in the past year) the FDA needs more transparency. Unfortunately, legislation that would help to remedy this problem, such as the Fair Access to Clinical Trials Act (some information is currently and more will hopefully be posted at www.clinicaltrials.gov), is held up in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. What are they waiting for?

Without any level of suspicion

An ACLU lawsuit contends that that FBI possesses thousands of pages in files on civil rights and anti-war protest groups that contain evidence of politically-motivated counterterrorism investigations. The organization requested the files in a December 2004 Freedom of Information Act request that went unanswered.

Keeping politics out of domestic intelligence has historically been a problem for the FBI. In 1976, the Church Committee reported that the agency had infiltrated numerous peaceful groups including the NAACP, NOW, and Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, the FBI began investigating every member of SDS, stating that the information would be necessary if SDS members applied for government jobs.

The response was a higher standard for opening FBI investigations, the “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity; however, former US Attorney General John Ashcroft did away with this guideline in 2002 by authorizing FBI agents to enter public places (including meetings) without any level of suspicion.

Combine the history with the fact that a document on protest coordination for the 2004 Republican National Convention was sent to the FBI’s counterterrorism unit, and it’s clear that a better system of Congressional oversight is necessary. Americans shouldn’t have to rely on lawsuits to guard against unjustified civil liberties violations. But until then it's partly up to groups like the ACLU to keep the public informed about their own government.

Defensonomics 101: Guns vs. Guns

As any cursory student of economics knows, you can never completely escape the condition of scarcity.  Choices and thus trade offs must be made.  The world of defense is no different.

Although the military slice of the budgetary pie is ever growing, the military still has to make decisions.  Some of these include: present needs versus investment in the future; new hardware versus training people; and certain types of weapons systems versus others.  It's not that we should spend nothing or everything on one thing or another--it's how much we should spend on A versus B given what we know and think about the world.

For the most part, this work is not POGO's forte.  However, in particular cases, the F/A-22 Raptor most notably, we have drawn upon the view that World War II and Cold War-style confrontations are not the most likely kind of conflicts the United States faces in the 21st century.  (We have argued that the F-15 and F-16 are more than adequate to deal with the foreign aerial threat for the next several decades.  This is a contentious point that many vehemently disagree.)  Many subscribe to this interpretation, arguing that asymmetric warfare--such as terrorism in its many iterations or guerrilla warfare--is the most likely threat the US will have to battle.  Yet it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of war with nations with large militaries.  Although one hopes none of these possibilities materialize, war with Iran, North Korea, China and/or other countries is not simply in the realm of fantasy.

These are the kinds of issues the military is currently grappling with now as it conducts its Quaddrenial Defense Review.  But, as Fred Kaplan pointed out last week, will the Defense Department make any radical new choices or will they dodge the hard questions with some artful wordsmithing?  Does the US need to change its military priorities or is the current set of choices the right one given what we face in the world? 

Increasingly it looks like the military needs some changes, sooner rather than later.  A new Army study, conducted by the RAND Corporation's Arroyo Center, a federally-funded research center, says that the US Army is so strained by its deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq that the US will "need to decide what military capabilities the Army should have and what risks may be prudent to assume." We'd like to also point out that the Army should not be seen in isolation from the other armed services.  For instance, is the Air Force being lavished with more than enough monetary attention while the Army is underfunded relative to their respective workloads?

It may be true that, to quote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "You have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."  But it would be nice to have the military we want to face the threats we believe we will likely confront in the years ahead.   Will we make the right choices to build that military?

Something's Fishy at NIH

Jonathan Fishbein, who worked in the NIH’s AIDS research division, was fired on Friday. Fishbein claims he was fired because he accused supervisors of sexual harassment, creating a hostile working environment and because he complained about the safety of a few studies. His supervisors claim he was fired because of poor work performance.

Several congressmen, however, have called his dismissal a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. But they aren’t the only ones who have sided with Fishbein: an internal review conducted by the NIH determined there were “turf battles and rivalries between physicians and Ph.D scientists,” and that the supervisor in question did indeed use “sexually explicit and colorful language.” Furthermore, the review found no documentation that questioned Fishbein’s performance until he raised safety concerns.

This is just another example of the fact that the Whistleblower Protection Act needs reform. Many are left unprotected and cases often get delayed unnecessarily at the Office of Special Counsel. While it’s nice to know that members of Congress are voicing concern for whistleblowers, they must realize that this is a systemic problem.