The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Decision Makers

GovExec is posting a series of articles profiling the leadership of key federal agencies [hat tip: Defense Industry Daily].  You can learn about the men and women heading the Defense Department, the Intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department.

A Tale of Two Recommendations

Over the years, the D.C. area has grown used to dashed hopes-- the Washington Capitals, the Washington Wizards, and just about every politician since the Sixth Congress moved here from Philadelphia in 1800 has shown great promise with less-than-great results.

With yesterday’s Goverment Accountability Office report: "Additional Data Reporting Could Improve the Suspension and Debarment Process," we were careful not to get too excited given our astute historical knowledge of the region.

POGO has been arguing this point for some years now– the suspension and debarment process is horribly flawed, we need more inter-agency communication, and Contracting Officers (COs) need to look more closely at the track records of corporations before deciding responsibility. This is why POGO came up with it’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (soon to be seriously revamped and updated). Initially, POGO hoped the government would take over this project and have a centralized source of information for COs to look to for deciding responsibility issues. This clearly has not happened, but when we saw this GAO report POGO let out a collective gasp– "Could this be it?" Nope.

Unfortunately, GAO’s effort doesn't go far enough. Two recommendations are made: 1) identification numbers should be required in the Excluded Party List System (EPLS is a database which simply gives the names of contractors who can’t do business with the government); and 2) administrative agreements need to be shared between agencies.

But, why just nibble around the edges when you can take a big bite out of the center? POGO recommends that the government also collect and publish information that would help to inform its decisions about whether contractors are responsible; specifically data on criminal, civil, and administrative actions involving contractors. Our database would be a great starting point for CO’s in deciding from whom the government should buy goods and services as well as a wonderful tool for preventing taxpayer dollars from going to irresponsible contractors with a track record of misconduct.

Missing Link

Yesterday POGO learned that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled down a link to a FDA memo on adverse effects from the military’s anthrax vaccine. The memo is still there, it’s just very hard to find now.

Marguerite Armistead, president of Protecting Our Guardians, a group of concerned citizens [ed. note: originally this blog said POG was a group of National Guard spouses] critical of the anthrax vaccine, discovered the change. Originally this page contained a link to the memo. According to Armistead, after a lengthy piece by David Goldstein in the Kansas City Star (registration req'd) referenced the memo which lists 16 reported deaths after injection of the vaccine from 2000 to 2004* [ed. note: originally this blog entry incorrectly stated 1990] (note: this doesn't necessarily mean the deaths were caused by the vaccine), the page which had the link to the memo was taken down. The article appeared on July 25, 2005. Prior to the article, only 11 reported deaths were publicly known to have occurred after injection of the vaccine.

POGO was able to find an archived version of the page which was found via Google’s cache feature. Also, the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) anthrax vaccine website contains a link to the same report on that website.  Just in case, POGO has in turn also saved the cached page and the FDA memo.

Since May, half of the military and civilian personnel at the Department of Defense offered the vaccine have refused it under the current voluntary program, Global Security Newswire reported this summer.

Bad Mitosis

This may be a bit belated, but it still deserves a mention.  The conclusions of an Energy Department Inspector General report (pdf) released this July are that there is no entity to coordinate biological select agent (read: nasty diseases that have been deemed serious threats) activities within the Department and there is no Energy Department "plan for the development, construction, and operation of the [eight] BSL-3 laboratories" that DOE has built or is building.  As the DOE IG notes, because there is no plan or responsible entity there's no way to know whether the labs are being built where they should, whether security concerns are addressed or whether we need all the labs in the first place.

So if there's no plan, and thus there is a possibility of waste and poor security, why is the Energy Department building eight labs?  Could this be part of a larger disorganized scramble for biodefense dollars?

AMPle Money

Air Force spokesman Doug Karas says that theoretically a budget shortfall can happen to any organization. In reality, it happened to the Air Force’s Avionics Modernization Program (AMP) to upgrade nearly 500 C-130 transport aircraft. The program is on schedule to run out of money in about two weeks – by latest count on September 9, 2005, according to Karas.

Although Karas said the program will likely find money somewhere and be refunded in the fiscal year 2006 budget, the financial shortfall is the latest in a series of difficulties for the program. The $4 billion C-130 AMP (not to be confused with the newer C-130J model) drew some flak last year when former Air Force acquisition official Darleen Druyun confessed that she was not “objective” in awarding the AMP contract to Boeing. A court statement of facts said that Druyun admitted she selected Boeing from a list of four qualified competitors because she was “influenced by her perceived indebtedness to Boeing for employing her future son-in-law and daughter.”

Druyun’s admission set off an ugly chain of events for Boeing and the AMP, including a formal protest filed with the Government Accountability Office by the three losers in the competition. Although GAO did not order the Air Force to rebid the entire contract, it asked the Air Force to do an analysis as to what can be done. Karas said it’s likely that Boeing will retain the Engineering and Design portion, but there will be another competition for the remaining $3.3 billion production and installation phase slated to begin in 2009.

Karas could not explain the reason for the shortfall, but he predicted the program probably won’t experience any work stoppages as a result. “It’s not the end of the program or it doesn’t mean it’s a failure,” Karas said.

While some in the defense acquisition community say that shortfalls do happen from time to time, these days they make people more nervous than usual. Procurement money is very tight due to such factors as low-ball initial weapons systems cost estimates, costly schedule and testing delays, and misguided business and contracting strategies.

“I’ve seen it (budget shortfall) happen before, but not very often,” said one source. “But money is harder to come by now, almost to the point of saying, 'let’s have a bake sale,' or 'hey guys pick up every nickel and dime you see on the street.'"

The "Duke" of Hazzard

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo has been following the Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham scandals closely.  He even created a Duke Cunningham Shenagin Program and Worksheet contest.  The winning entry can be found here.

Among the exchanges the worksheet will help you undertstand are: in June, the San Diego Union-Tribune revealed that Rep. Cunningham had his Del Mar house purchased by MZM Inc. head Mitchell Wade at a $700,000 loss to Wade (Cunningham didn't even put the house on the market).  MZM then won tens of millions of defense and intelligence contracts, with the support of Cunningham.  Cunningham is a member of the defense appropriations subcommittee and the intelligence committee.  Also, it was discovered that Cunningham had been living on Wade's boat called the Duke Stir.

A Waste of Time?

You have to give Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, an “A” for effort in her attempts to wrap her arms around the extent of Pentagon waste, fraud, and abuse. For the past four or five months, her staff has been trying to find out just how big the problem is – to the penny.

But so far, Lee has been running into a brick wall. No wonder. The last time the Pentagon’s inspector general checked, more than $2 trillon in Defense Department bucks could not be tracked. And defining waste is a little bit like arguing over religion or politics. What one person might call a wasteful program, can be another person’s engine for a local economy.

In the beginning, Lee had hoped the Government Accountability Office could give her a precise dollar figure for the overall cost of “wasteful, fraudulent and abusive processes and practices at the DoD.” (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made a wild guess that it’s about $15 to $18 billion – a wildly low guestimate in our opinion, although he is referring to duplicative activities within the DoD.) Lee also wanted to know how much is lost due to contracting issues, such as no-bid contracts, overcharges, poor oversight, etc.

That’s not going to happen, according to the GAO, which says it is not possible to quantify the cost of fraud, waste and abuse at the Department of Defense. So far, that hasn’t discouraged Lee, who still has a staffer hard at work on the topic.

We at POGO certainly applaud the effort, no matter how Quixotic it might be, and wish the numbers could be compiled. But we’re not holding our breath. For decades, there have been attempts to bring the DoD’s books into line. Auditors can’t even seem to track the money the Pentagon spends. So how can they put a number of how much it wastes?

Fraud has delayed the V-22

From all appearances, testing of the V-22 Osprey has gone well in recent months, but its troubled history has been expensive and delayed its development for years. A federal fraud trial in upcoming months promises to unravel the details behind one of those costly delays when the Marines grounded the entire V-22 Osprey fleet for 10 days in 2003.

Two Michigan men who worked for a military supplier that federal prosecutors say provided faulty hydraulic titanium tubing for Bell-Boeing’s tilt-rotor aircraft face an array of federal charges. They are expected to be tried in Detroit (the case was transferred this week from Philadelphia), but a date has not yet been set.

Andrew Maliszewski, 53, and his brother Alan, 41, were indicted in June on charges related to falsifying the testing of the tubing. The two men worked for the now defunct Dearborn Heights-based Anco-Tech from 1994-2000.

“Tests were skipped, protocols were ignored, inspection procedures were not followed, documentation was either incomplete or falsified, and all of this was not only tolerated but sanctioned and condoned by the company,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan said in a news release.

The V-22 fleet was grounded in March 2003 while Bell-Boeing removed and replaced all the tubing supplied by Anco-Tech.

Federal investigators say a two-year probe of the company concluded that the faulty tubing did not contribute to a December 2000 crash that killed 23 Marines. The Marines said the crash that grounded the V-22 fleet afterward for more than a year was caused by a hydraulics failure caused by the rupture of a line.

“An independent expert retained by the Department of Justice did not find any notable flaws or defects in the tubing that would have caused the rupture at issue, and that the rupture was most likely due to external forces unrelated to the condition of the tubing,” the press release said. “Thus, there is no evidence that the defendants’ conduct was a factor in the crash, and the indictment does not allege that their conduct caused or contributed to the crash.”

Andrew Maliszewski’s attorney, Allen Wolf of Lake Orion, Michigan, said his client did nothing wrong. “He appears to be a scapegoat for the government in light of the many problems that the V-22 has had,” Wolf told the Detroit News.

Not So Fast?

New York Times reporter Michael Moss has been a bulldog in documenting the failures of the Pentagon to get the right lifesaving equipment to the troops in Iraq. His latest story in Sunday’s Times, “U.S. Struggling to Get Soldiers Updated Armor,” did an excellent job keeping the outrageous story alive.

But Moss continues to allow the Pentagon to blame the failures on a “string of delays in the Pentagon’s procurement system.” We see evidence to the contrary: It seems that contracting officials do have the tools to act in a speedy manner when it comes to getting the troops what they need to fight the war in Iraq.

In fact, less than a month after 9/11, contracting officials were sending out instructions on available contracting techniques to quickly supply troops what they needed to fight the war on terrorism.

One such detailed instruction came in an Oct. 5, 2001 four-page memo (pdf) from Air Force Brig. Gen. Darryl A. Scott, who chided people in the contracting community for being nay sayers. “During the past couple of weeks I’ve heard lots of folks say that the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) and statutes such as the Competition in Contracting Act hinder us from responding quickly to warriors’ requirements,” Scott wrote. “This is nonsense. In nearly all cases we have all the authority we need to do the right thing, we just need to get on with it.”

Meals not-so-ready-to-eat

We’ve heard about the Pentagon delays in getting the troops in Iraq body armor and armored vehicles, but what about such basic items as meals ready-to-eat, tires, tank tracks, helicopter spares, and radio batteries?

A Government Accountability Office report made public today (8/12/05) documented serious problems in the Department of Defense’s ability to get these and other supplies to the troops during the early stages of the war – problems dating back to Desert Storm in 1991. In general, the report said the logistical problems included “an insufficient capability to support combat forces during the early stages of a conflict, limited communications, a shortage of trucks and other transportation equipment, difficulties in distributing supplies within the theater of operations, limited visibility of assets within the distribution system, and problems with managing shipping priorities.”

In one instance, the supply chain problems resulted in 1.4 million meals-ready to eat being stuck at port because contractors responsible for moving meals ready-to-eat to the Theater Distribution Center were short of trucks. In another instance, about 1,500 insert plates for body armor were lost and 17 containers of meals ready-to-eat were left at a supply base in Iraq for over a week because no one at the base knew they were there. 

The Pentagon has made some efforts to address supply problems, but the GAO says some of them have been stymied because clear lines of authority and accountability have not yet been established among the multiple organizations involved in the supply process.

The Art of Anonymous Activism at IBWC

Federal employees should take heart upon hearing the story of International Boundary Water Commission (IBWC) employees and former employees who refused to take corruption at their agency. They mounted a sophisticated campaign to expose how the new head of the commission, Arturo Duran, abused his public office -- everything from hiring his crony friends to buying a Cadillac Escalade with "shale nuance leather seating surfaces" on the taxpayer dime. They did it all ANONYMOUSLY.

Now the El Paso Times reports that President Bush has asked Duran to resign. Do they have any tips for future anonymous activists? Hopefully, they'll drop a line here, anonymously, of course. In the mean time, we know that they contacted and worked with their member of Congress (Representative Silvestre Reyes), they got the State Department Inspector General to mount an investigation which confirmed their concerns, they kept the news media informed, they launched their own web site, and they reached out to public interest groups in DC (for example, see POGO's letter to Duran on the IBWC's excessive secrecy policies).

Congratulations to IBWC Anonymous. In this day and age when whistleblowers are crushed, IBWC Anonymous is a true inspiration. They exemplify what we call "The Art of Anonymous Activism."

MORE: One of the anonymous IBWC employees had this to say: "The best thing about anonymity is that it allowed employees to take risks and expose the wrongdoings of Commissioner Duran and his cronies.  It became our mission."

Looking Rather DAPA

It would be easy to quickly dismiss the Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment (DAPA) Project as another one of those study groups hand-picked by the Pentagon and unlikely to turn the multi-billion-dollar weapons procurement process upside down.

After all, the DAPA federal advisory committee panel appears to be stacked mostly with old-guard members of the retired military and defense contractor executives who still tend to make bad comparisons between defense budgets and giving the wife the credit card.

But wait a minute. Could this be a study not destined to gather dust on a shelf in some tawdry government office building? Will this panel be able to reform the system to avert another Air Force-Boeing-Darleen Druyun tanker scandal?

Of course, it’s too soon to tell. But at its public meeting Wednesday, the panel heard some candid testimony from retired Air Force General Lawrence Farrell Jr., president of the National Defense Industrial Association. Farrell made a number of unexpected observations. Here are a few:

– Although the defense industry is plagued with merger mania, the Pentagon must find a way to keep the game competitive, which will in turn help keep costs down. “Without competition, we’re in trouble,” he said. He even suggested that this might include encouraging competition from foreign contractors or breaking up larger contracts. For instance, although there is little competition for aircraft that could be converted into tankers, Farrell said there are a number of firms who could compete for the actual modification of an aircraft into a tanker.

– The government needs to quit low-balling the initial cost estimates of acquiring multi-billion-dollar weapons systems. And Farrell said, “We need to quit adding things we can’t afford” and “we need to kill bad programs.”

– A single military chief needs to be responsible for determining what weapons the military needs and for ultimately seeing that the weapons actually work. Those functions are now “scattered,” but accountability for both functions needs to rest on the shoulders of a single authority, Farrell said.

– The government is doing a bad job of selecting and training weapons systems program managers. There just aren’t enough career acquisition managers who are carefully selected, trained and mentored, according to Farrell.

– Farrell told the panel that the F-16 fighter jet program is his notion of the model weapons acquisition program. “The F-16 was the best program the department of defense has ever seen,” he said. The program used proven technologies, stayed pretty much on target in terms of scheduling and cost, and yet created new digital avionics, and out performed the F-4 fighter, he said. (By the way, POGO’s longtime friend, retired Air Force Col. Everest Riccioni, a member of the so-called "Fighter Mafia, " is one of the men behind the development of the F-16.)

Image by Helen E. Gilman, American, born 1913, Shop Figure: Dapper Dan, 1937, watercolor over graphite, National Gallery of Art.