The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Lobby Reform: Free Lunch Takes a Dive

The Senate passed lobby “reform” legislation tonight. Besides banning lobbyist-paid gifts and means, one item of interest – the legislation outlaws the infamous “K Street Project” or other efforts like it by banning Senators from tying to exert their political influence over lobbying firm hiring decisions.

Senator Tom Coburn issued a scathing statement in response to the Senate’s failure to clean house by completely eliminating earmarks. The Senate came pretty close by requiring 60 votes in a case where a single Senator objected to an earmark. It will be interesting to see how many objections to earmarks are invoked. The era of “Free Lunch” may soon to be coming to an end.

Of greatest concern to good government types is that strong independent enforcement was missing from the legislation.

Weapons Oversight Dwindling

An excellent Boston Globe story today details the dwindling state of weapon system oversight.  Here are some of the Globe's key findings:

• The Office of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) "has not publicly released an assessment in four years";
• "A Government Accountability Office report found that military contractors were seeking ways to relax the testing regimen for new weapons";
• "A Pentagon study commissioned by Rumsfeld's top deputy [pdf] recommended in January that some weapons testing be curtailed to speed up the process of getting new weapons into the field";
• DOT&E "has produced three assessments on the missile defense program since 2001, but those reports are classified."

Revolving Door Roundup 3/28/06

Here's a couple notable cases of former "public" servants moving to or from government to lobbying/consulting shops and government contractors that POGO has noticed in the news recently:

• In a move that appears to flout the U.S. Senate's Ethics Manual [pdf], a former Senate staff member has repeatedly passed through Capitol Hill's so-called "revolving door," moving between public jobs intended to help oversee and regulate U.S. nuclear firms and lobbying posts in which he pushes the industry's interests. ...Most recently, [Alex] Flint left his job as majority staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where he was a key player in legislation that provided billions in subsidies to the nuclear industry, to become the chief lobbyist for the industry's largest trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute.

  Flint was hired for the Senate post in 2003 after spending several years as a lobbyist representing a number of large firms with deep interests in the nuclear power field, as well as the NEI. Flint's boss on the committee was Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an unabashed booster of the nuclear power industry who has received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from employees of the companies that Flint represents.

  As a lobbyist, Flint was himself a frequent donor to Domenici's campaigns before being rehired by the senator. And many of Flint's qualifications to lobby for the nuclear industry in the first place were acquired through earlier jobs working for Domenici as a staff assistant, legislative aide and clerk of an energy subcommittee chaired by the senator. (MSNBC)

• Howard Baker, a former senator (R-TN) and US ambassador to Japan until last year, and three of his colleagues from Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz, have registered to lobby for Toshiba Corporation on "Consultations with eh [sic] appropriate members of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government, and the applicable agencies on CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States] and antitrust matters, all related to Toshiba Corporation's acquisition of Westinghouse Electric Company." "The revolving door certainly does spin fast," wrote TNR's John B. Judis on former Senator Howard Baker. (TPM Muckraker, The Plank, Political MoneyLine)

Going Deeper With the Cunningham Scandal

The Post's Walter Pincus reports that Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone has ordered a review of how Duke Cunningham earmark for MZM influenced Counterintelligence Field Activity's (CIFA) contracting.

Cmdr. Greg Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman, said Cambone has a "desire to understand the temporal relationship between the congressional earmark and contract actions taken by the department."

Pincus includes information that Laura Rozen and Justin Rood have discovered: that MZM employees served as consultants to the Robb-Silbermann Commission on WMD intelligence.  As Rozen noted on her blog, there's a potential conflict of interest here since the Commission made recommendations regarding the National Ground Intelligence Center, where MZM steered contracts from, and on increasing CIFA's role in intelligence gathering, and thus possibly increasing MZM's work there.

Sikorsky's Reverse FOIA

A major defense contractor has sued the Defense Department (DOD) to prevent documents responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from going public.  According to the reporter who made the request, the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) "tells me this is the first time a major defense contractor has sued DOD to prevent the results of a FOIA from going public." (late update--ed.'s note: After speaking with a knowledgeable lawyer on the topic of Reverse FOIA suits and looking through a number of cases of such suits, POGO has found that there are actually a number of cases where contractors have sued DOD and other agencies.  Nonetheless POGO feels this is an important topic, in fact it is even moreso with the discovery that Reverse FOIA suits occur often.)

New Haven, Connecticut WTNH News Channel 8 reporter Alan Cohn made a FOIA request on March 4, 2004 to the DCMA for Corrective Action Requests (CARs).  CARs are requests to contractors by the DCMA to fix the causes of recurring problems that put the contractor out of compliance with its contract with the military. 

After a series of appeals, first between Cohn and DCMA and later between Sikorsky and DCMA, it was decided by the DCMA in a letter dated December 1, 2005 to grant Cohn's FOIA request in part and to deny it in part.  DCMA notified Sikorsky the next day that it would release the redacted CARs on December 13, 2005 unless Sikorky filed a "reverse" FOIA suit in a US District Court before then. 

It did.  Sikorsky filed suit against the DCMA and DOD in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on December 12, 2005 on four counts: 1) Confidential Business Information--Exemption 4 of FOIA; 2) Trade Secrets Act; 3) Arbitrary and Capricious Agency Action; and 4) the Declaratory Judgment Act.  Sikorsky has argued that if CARs sent to Sikorsky are turned over to the public, then it may cooperate less with the DCMA in correcting problems, dispute the DCMA's opinion more often and share less information with DCMA.

Click here to view Sikorsky's "Reverse-FOIA" Complaint (pdf).

Though there clearly is an interest in protecting true proprietary secrets, Sikorsky's attempt to stifle information that may reflect poorly on their aircraft is something else.  It is a move characteristic of a company seeking to avoid public accountability and to hide deficiencies in the aircraft we entrust will transport our men and women in uniform safely, securely and effectively.

A Shield from Missiles or Oversight?

In 2002, POGO reported that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is insulated from the oversight that other defense programs receive.  At the time, POGO used two directives signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the basis for our report.  However, MDA's protection stems not just from policies laid out in directives, but from an attitude disdaining accountability held by the upper echelons at MDA.  Events around two recent Department of Defense Inspector General (IG) reports highlight this.

One report critical of missile defense information security was taken off the IG's website at the request of the MDA in order to perform "a security review."  (Here's that IG report. PDF) The other report said that the MDA has stymied IG audits of the agency over the last two years by flouting DOD policies on document access. (See pages 29-31 of this IG report. PDF)

By both requesting secrecy for a critical report and hindering IG audits, the MDA is actively preventing its own accountability within the Defense Department.  The Secretary of Defense should reign in MDA and ensure that the American taxpayer is getting their money's worth with the nearly $10 billion-a-year project.

GAO: No "Sound Business Case" for Future Combat Systems Yet

Defense Industry Daily directs our attention to a new Government Accountability Office report on Future Combat Systems procurement.  According to the Report's abstract:

...the elements of a sound business case for such an acquisition program--firm requirements, mature technologies, a knowledge-based acquisition strategy, a realistic cost estimate and sufficient funding--are not yet present. FCS began product development prematurely in 2003. Since then, the Army has made several changes to improve its approach for acquiring FCS. Yet, today, the program remains a long way from having the level of knowledge it should have had before starting product development. FCS has all the markers for risks that would be difficult to accept for any single system, much less a complex, multi-system effort. These challenges are even more daunting in the case of FCS not only because there are so many of them but because FCS represents a new concept of operations that is predicated on technological breakthroughs. Thus, technical problems, which accompany immaturity, not only pose traditional risks to cost, schedule, and performance; they pose risks to the new fighting concepts envisioned by the Army. (all emphasis POGO's)

Public Hearing Transcript Taken Off Line

The news media kicked off Sunshine Week yesterday. Still, darkness looms. In recent days, the Defense Department's NORAD reportedly ordered that a transcript be taken off the web from an open, public hearing which happened in January. That's a new one, with Big Brotherish overtones, we say. The topic of the public hearing was air attacks in the Washington, DC, area. The move prompted one angry individual to write us: "For those of you who attended the ADIZ [Air Defense Identification Zone] public hearings in January, you'll recall that the FAA panel moderator started each session by explaining to us that the verbatim transcript of all testimony would be posted on the DMS [Docket Management System] website, as well as be available for hardcopy purchase.  For a short period, the verbatim testimony transcript was in fact available online. It is now missing from the website in its entirety, nor is it available for hardcopy purchase." Cryptome helpfully provides direct links to where the transcripts used to be, now sadly linking to a blank page which simply says: “PER FAA’s REQUEST, ITEM IS PRESENTLY UNAVAILABLE.” Tomorrow, House National Security Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Shays takes up the topic of policies for handling classified and sensitive information.

The QDR is a Joke

The following was written by Ronald G. Garant.

As an individual who has participated at relatively high levels in prior Defense Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDR), I could not contain myself as I read Newt Gingrich’s defense of the most recent QDR in the Post’s 4 March OP-ED page.

He makes it look like it is a big decision making process when everyone involved in the process knows that is it one of the single most focused turf protection exercises in the hallowed halls of the Pentagon. He fawns over the Army’s restructure from 11 divisions to 77 brigades. This restructuring was an Army initiative sprung forth during last year's Iraq war supplemental and all that we are looking at in the QDR is an affirmation of the Army’s decision.

I find it curious that the Army took this long to adopt the organizational structure that the Marines have had in place for several years. The Marines were several years ahead of the Army in recognizing that it was important to train to fight in an urban environment. Once again, the Army may be behind the power curve. The Marines are finding that agile brigades need more structure to support the long deployments in Iraq. So once again, it looks like the Marines are more adept at adapting to the situation at hand.

Rasor Follows the Money

We'd like to welcome the new Follow the Money Project blog dedicated to discovering where all the taxpayer money for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and reconstruction is actually going.  The Project is housed out of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and is headed by POGO's founder and current board member the indefatigable Dina Rasor. 

Besides investigating why the system is broken, Rasor is collecting the stories of how soldiers are doing the best they can despite the unnecessary problems they face.  From her latest blog entry:

Perry Jefferies, several months after President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier and declared "mission accomplished," was forced to commandeer the rare shower trucks that came to Camp Caldwell so his hungry and desperate troops could drink the water. Ray Kimball will tell you how he frantically tried to keep his group of helicopters flying, while based at the Baghdad Airport, even though he did not get a single spare part delivered for two months after the war started.

POGO to Tipster: Help Needed

We receive tips, anonymous and otherwise, here at POGO all the time. Last year, we were told by one anonymous tipster that, to follow a certain story, we would "need to be prepared for some complexity and sleight of hand." We want to get in touch with this anonymous source who's given us some savory morsels of information. If you could create an anonymous email account (so you can protect your identity) and email us at [email protected], we will email you back.  We would love to have a dialogue with you about the information you’ve sent us.

CIA IG to Investigate Foggo

ABC News reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Inspector General has opened an investigation into the CIA's third highest official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, and his relationship to defense contractors Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes, who were involved in bribing Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA).  Foggo oversaw contracts involving at least one company accused of paying off Cunningham.  Foggo and Wilkes are long-time friends who named their children after one another.

MORE: Laura has some hints for CIA investigators.