The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Pentagon Contractors Defend Their Own Interests

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

The dominant voices in the debate over Pentagon spending have been the major contractors who receive an ever-growing share of what the government spends on the military. But their arguments have not been focused on the needs of the U.S. military, but instead on their own interests to keep profits up and CEO salaries high.

POGO's Ben Freeman had a new piece in Politico yesterday arguing that the need to have a real debate about the future of the U.S. military has been supplanted by hyperbole from the defense industry giants over potential job losses.

...the big Pentagon contractors have an overwhelming self-interest in keeping Pentagon spending artificially high. They’re pulling out all the stops to protect their profits — launching advertising campaigns, sending their congressional proxies on speaking tours and indulging in fear-mongering rhetoric — all designed to scare the public into thinking that any reductions in Pentagon spending whatsoever would be catastrophic.

More than anything, they manipulatively claim that any reshaping of our military would mean job losses — an argument primarily aimed at making members of Congress who are running for reelection afraid to make responsible decisions.

Infographic: Myth of Pentagon Spending as Job Creator

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

Major defense contractors have been going around saying the sequestration cuts to Pentagon spending will cause widespread job losses, but history tells a different story.

Over a five year period, the five largest defense contractors received 10 percent more in federal contracts, but at the same time they fired three percent of their workforce. Now they are arguing a 10 percent reduction in Pentagon spending will be devastating to jobs, even though the Pentagon already has a bloated budget worthy of reductions.

POGO is fighting against the myth of Pentagon spending as a job creator, but we need your support to do so. Consider donating to POGO today to show your support for sensible defense policy. Then share our new infographic with your friends to spread the word.

Andre Francisco is an online producer with the Project On Government Oversight.

Follow @andrefrancisco

Navy's Littoral Combat Ship: "Big Bucks, Little Bang"

By BEN FREEMAN

The Navy’s newest ship, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), is woefully inferior to comparable ships, according to an article written by John Sayen for Time magazine’s Battleland blog.

Sayen, a Marine Corps veteran who has written extensively on the military, says that the LCS “cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much.” Even with its mission modules, which won’t be fully finished or tested for years, it compares poorly with similar ships in foreign navies. Sayen provides several examples (excerpted below with permission of Time):

The new Russian Steregushchy-class frigate, for example, is (at 2,200 tons) about 30% smaller than an LCS and cost only 20-25% as much. Yet, it carries a 100mm automatic gun, 14.5-mm machineguns, close-in defense “Gatling gun” systems (AK-630), medium range surface to air missiles (S400 series), SS-N-25 anti-ship missiles (sub-sonic and shorter ranged than the US Harpoon but far more capable than the Griffin), 533-mm (21”) torpedoes, 324mm anti-submarine torpedoes and a helicopter. The ship is not only in production for the Russian Navy but also for the navies of Algeria and Indonesia. A version is also being built for China.

The Swedish Visby-class corvette was one of the models on which LCS was based. It carries the same 57mm gun plus antisubmarine rockets and torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, a radar-deflecting hull, and a helicopter pad (but no hangar, apparently). It can also reach 35 knots but it is only a fifth as large.

The Chinese have more than 80 Houbei-class fast-attack boats in service. Each costs only $40 million to build and displaces only 220 tons (one-fifteenth as much as an LCS). Yet they carry C-801 series anti-ship missiles that greatly outrange any weapon the LCS has.

About the only threat the LCS might handle is the “swarms” of Iranian machinegun and RPG-carrying speedboats in the Persian Gulf. Apart from the fact that the Iranian crisis will have been resolved for better or worse before most of the LCS fleet can be built, these Iranian small craft lack weapons big enough to menace any serious warship.

Video: CBC Investigates Canada's Purchase of F-35 Jets

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

Canada is on the hook for $25 billion worth of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. As the price for the jets continues to rise while questions mount on the effectiveness of the plane, some Canadians are questioning the process and decision to buy the F-35.

POGO's Winslow Wheeler, the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, and defense expert Pierre Sprey appear in this investigative report from the CBC on the history of Canada's acquisition of the F-35.

Andre Francisco is an online producer with the Project On Government Oversight.

Senate Investigation Found DHS Intelligence Centers Wasted Money and Violated Civil Liberties

By MIA STEINLE

Updated October 5, 2012.

A Department of Homeland Security effort to improve the sharing of terrorism-related intelligence among state and local governments and with officials in Washington has yielded “shoddy” information and civil liberties violations, according to a Senate investigation.

The two-year bipartisan investigation by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that the Department of Homeland Security’s poor oversight of “fusion centers”—local intelligence-sharing hubs it created in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11—led to “hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars” being wasted.

“The investigation found that top DHS officials consistently made positive public comments about the value and importance of fusion centers’ contributions to federal counterterrorism efforts, even as internal reviews and non-public assessments highlighted problems at the centers and dysfunction in DHS’ own operations,” the report said.

Up to $1.4 billion of federal funds has been spent on fusion centers since 2003, according to the investigation.

“But the report documents spending on items that did little to help share intelligence, including gadgets such as ‘shirt button’ cameras, $6,000 laptops and big-screen televisions. One fusion center spent $45,000 on a decked-out SUV that a city official used for commuting,” The Washington Post reported.

Inspector General Report Warns of Budget Overruns in Nuke Refurbishment

A W76 warhead is launched from a submarine

By MIA STEINLE

Government officials overseeing the refurbishment of nuclear warheads that date to the Cold War say they can keep the work on budget. But they can’t explain how.

That’s one of the findings of a new report issued Sept. 26 by the Department of Energy inspector general.

The effort to extend the shelf-life of warheads designed for submarine launch is running years behind schedule, and unless the government can find a cheaper way to complete the job, it’s on track for “large cost overruns,” the audit concluded.

The work is the responsibility of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an agency within the Department of Energy. A senior official there “expressed confidence” that the agency could make up for lost time without going over budget, the inspector general reported.

However, the report said officials working on the program “could not provide plans detailing actions necessary to achieve the needed cost reductions.”

Based on estimates from its fiscal year 2012 budget, NNSA will receive about $1.5 billion to complete upgrades to the W76 warheads by 2016. The project is now estimated to cost almost $1.8 billion, according to the audit.

That would put the agency over budget by $221 million, the inspector general’s report said.

A House of Pentagon Pork

Today the House of Representatives will send a strong message to America (er, rather, to their campaign contributors): It will still be business as usual at the Pentagon, and insane profits made from taxpayer dollars will still be up for grabs.

This afternoon, the House will vote on two bills that together would increase Pentagon spending beyond what it requested and prohibit the Pentagon from reshaping the military to meet 21^st Century threats, which is necessary to make us safer, stronger, and support the troops.

The National Security and Job Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), is a proposal to eliminate sequestration, the congressional mechanism to automatically reduce government spending by more than $1 trillion. While West’s bill doesn’t say precisely how sequestration should be replaced, it takes Pentagon spending off the table. The bill explicitly prohibits “reductions to direct spending for the defense function.”

Lockheed Campaign Cash Has Flowed to Members of House Panel Probing F-22 Problems

By JACOB WASHKURAK, JOHN PARKER and BEN FREEMAN

When members of a House subcommittee convene today for a hearing on the troubled F-22 stealth fighter, they’ll have more in common than just an interest in the mysterious symptoms that caused some pilots to declare the plane unsafe to fly earlier this year.

All but one of the 25 subcommittee members have received contributions in the current election cycle from individuals or political action committees associated with Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the F-22, according to a Project On Government Oversight (POGO) analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The one exception, Pennsylvania Republican Todd R. Platts, is retiring from Congress. In a 2010 op-ed piece, he said that as always his campaign was being funded solely by contributions from individual citizens and that he refused to accept contributions from special-interest groups. There are no records of his ever having accepted any funds from employees of Lockheed Martin during his congressional career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The other subcommittee members received between $1,000 and $10,000 each, for a total of $153,250, according to the POGO analysis (see table below).

Some Senators Want to Waste Big Bucks on Unnecessary Nuke Facility

Congressional attempts to fund a new nuclear weapons facility are “alarming,” given that experts say the facility is unnecessary, according to a letter the Project On Government Oversight sent yesterday to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

Several senators did an end-run around Chu earlier this summer when they wrote letters to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta urging him to fund the nuclear weapons facility, known as the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Chu’s Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.

The facility, which would enable the nation to increase its production of a primary component of nuclear weapons, has seen its estimated cost increase from $375 million to nearly $6 billion over the course of a decade. And experts—including former nuclear weapons facility officials—have said the facility is not necessary to ensure national security, POGO reported in January.

Pentagon's Testing Czar Questions F-35 Program Test Plan

By BEN FREEMAN Ph.D

The Project On Government Oversight is making public for the first time a memo from the Pentagon testing czar questioning the testing program for the Joint Strike Fighter, the military's most expensive weapons program.

As first reported by AOL Defense, the memo expresses the grievances of Michael Gilmore, Director of Operational Test and Evaluation at the Pentagon, regarding the Test and Evaluation Master Plan for the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) program.

Amongst other issues, Gilmore is concerned about unduly rushing tests and limited funding for testing of the aircraft program.

“The plans for and content of testing must be determined by the data that need to be obtained to support a comprehensive and rigorous operational evaluation—not by budget targets set by the program office,” writes Gilmore.

POGO applauds efforts like this to ensure proper testing of military weapons. Cutting corners in F-35 testing is penny-wise and pound-foolish—the Pentagon may save a few million dollars now, but taxpayers will have to pay billions later. With a price-tag of $1.5 trillion, the F-35 is already the most expensive weapons program in history. The Pentagon should do everything it can to make sure these costs don’t continue to increase.

You can see the full memo below.

The Politics of Pentagon Profiteers and the Truth about Jobs

The big Pentagon contractors have been trying to scare lawmakers, the public, and the troops with dramatic claims that there will be massive job losses. For nearly a year, these contractors and their lobbyists have likened potential cuts in the Pentagon budget to the sky falling.

Their threats to send layoff notices—right in time for the November elections—have been admonished from many corners—and are among the more desperate political stunts of recent memory. But just to be sure they’ve got the attention of all candidates, they’ve cooked up hyperbolic job loss numbers based on convenient, if completely faulty assumptions—these are available by state or congressional district, don’t you know.

Some are taking the bait. Certain members of Congress have been parroting these scaremongering talking points during town halls and other events this month during the congressional recess. In their very scary “sequestration roadshow” they are talking about jobs, but fail to mention some essential information about how exactly these contractors have been living large on the largess of taxpayer dollars. 

10 Questions for the 2012 Candidates

By ANGELA CANTERBURY

Click to see our 10 Questions for 2012 Candidates

There are a lot of distractions during election season. There are more and more gotcha ads, and increasingly less discussion about what really matters. At POGO, OpenTheGovernment.org and the American Society of Newspaper Editors we spend a lot of time thinking about how our government can be more transparent, accountable, and effective. We'd love to be having conversations with every candidate to help educate them and to inform the work that we do in Washington---no matter the results of the election. Perhaps together we can!

POGO, OpenTheGovernment.org and ASNE have put together some questions we hope will spark important discussions about our government and democracy. These questions cover a lot of ground--on issues ranging from how to balance national security with rights like free speech, how to know who's influencing elections and government policies, how to protect whistleblowers, how to follow the money the government spends, and more. What interests you?

Over the coming days and weeks candidates will be out shaking hands, kissing babies, and making appearances at county fairs, town hall meetings, debates--maybe in your neighborhood. If you have an opportunity to ask a candidate a question, check out the 10 Questions we'd most like to ask in 2012. Then tell us about the conversations you have with candidates about making our government more open and accountable!

Angela Canterbury is the director of public policy at the Project On Government Oversight. Image by Flickr user IowaPolitics.com.