The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

New Podcast: The Foreign Policy Auction

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

How much does it cost to change U.S. foreign policy? Project On Government Oversight investigator Ben Freeman just released a new book delving into that question. The Foreign Policy Auction looks at the countries seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy and the D.C. lobbying firms they hire to do the work. In this podcast, we talk with Ben about how foreign governments go about lobbying the U.S. and how foreign lobbying led to the U.S. reopening its embassy in Libya despite the country having had a history of sponsoring terrorism.

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

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New Podcast: Just How Secret is the Government?

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

How many secrets does the government have? And where are they keeping them? POGO's Joe Newman and Suzie Dershowitz sat down with Amy Bennett from OpenTheGovernment.org, which just released its annual Secrecy Report, to discuss how secret the federal government was last year.

Find out what agency takes three years to process certain FOIA requests and which agency known for being secretive supposedly only classified four new documents last year. Find the podcast below.

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Andre Francisco is an online producer with the Project On Government Oversight. Image by Pam Rutter.

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New Podcast: Winslow Wheeler on the Jet That Ate the Pentagon and Congress's Addiction to Defense Spending

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project.

By BRYAN RAHIJA

Several POGO staffers recently sat down with longtime defense analyst Winslow Wheeler, the director of the Straus Military Reform Project and latest addition to Team POGO, to discuss a range of defense issues—everything from the jet that ate the Pentagon to Congress's addiction to national security spending. Have a listen:

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You can read Winslow's latest work here. 

Bryan Rahija edits POGO's blog.

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Photo by POGO's Pam Rutter.

New Podcast: A Father Talks About His Quest for Justice at Camp Lejeune

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

For 30 years, Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina used water contaminated with known carcinogens to cook, clean, and bathe. Jerry Ensminger was a drill instructor at Camp Lejeune and his daughter Janey was exposed to the contaminated water during her first trimester. Janey died of leukemia when she was nine years old.

Since finding out that the water at Camp Lejenue may have been connected with his daughter's death, Jerry has been on a quest to learn the truth about Camp Lejeune and to get justice for the contamination victims--as many as one million Marines and their family members, according to some estimates. Jerry's story was recently chronicled in the acclaimed documentary Semper Fi: Always Faithful, which was short-listed this year for an Academy Award.

POGO recently sat down with Jerry to talk about his story and the contamination at Camp Lejeune.

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If you want to do something after listening to the podcast, you can go to POGO's Camp Lejeune Action Center to support Jerry's efforts and find ways you can help. For additional information, you can go to The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten, a website set up for the victims of the contamination.

Andre Francisco is POGO's Online Producer

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Photo by POGO's Pam Rutter.

New Podcast: Dissecting the President's FY 2013 Budget

By BRYAN RAHIJA

Ready for another POGO podcast? POGO staffers recently sat down to dissect the President's fiscal year 2013 budget request. Did the executive branch ask Congress to keep funding the Energy Department's billion-dollar boondoggles? Did costly weapons systems get curtailed? Will U.S. troops continue to keep a watchful eye on Italian beaches?

Have a listen to get the scoop on how the President wants to spend your tax dollars. 

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Bryan Rahija is POGO's Blog Editor. Photo by POGO's Pam Rutter.

New Podcast: Activists Talk to POGO about Human Trafficking and Government Contractors

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

You might not realize it, but U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used to fund labor trafficking. U.S. government contractors working in contingency zones often bring in laborers for various projects through subcontrators. But these laborers—usually men from poor, rural areas in places like India—are often taken advantage of. They're forced to live in appalling conditions, and sometimes promises of work never materialize, despite the enormous sums that the laborers pay to get to job sites. 

All of this is enabled by a lack of oversight from the U.S. federal government.

POGO’s podcast team recently sat down with Sam McCahon and Sindhu Kavinamannil, two activists who are making a documentary about this labor trafficking process.

McCahon is a former federal prosecutor, former general counsel for Agility (a major Pentagon contractor), and is currently in private practice with his law firm, McCahon Law LLC.

Kavinamannil  is a certified fraud examiner, has experience in establishing and maintaining compliance programs in Iraq, Kuwait, and India, and is the CEO of Compliance Consulting Services.

We ended up having a fascinating discussion about the intricacies of this often-overlooked issue.

Listen to the podcast here, and make sure to subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes for discussion on other important topics.

(Want to see what Sindhu and Sam look like? Check out our video trailer for this podcast below the jump.)

New Podcast: Discussing the Bad Business Report

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

For this week's podcast, POGO's blog editor Bryan Rahija and POGO's Beth Daley Impact Fellow Dana Liebelson sat down with Scott Amey, POGO's general counsel, and Paul Chassy, a POGO investigator. The topic was the recently released Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors report.

The report studied 35 occupational classifications to see if outsourcing federal government jobs to contractors was cost effective. To find out the results, and hear some analysis and special commentary, listen to the podcast.

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Andre Francisco is a POGO Communications Associate

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New Podcast: Get to Know an Agency: A Refresher Course on the Office of Special Counsel and Whistleblowers

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

For our latest podcast, the Office of Special Counsel's (OSC) Adam Miles gives an overview of how the OSC works with federal whistleblowers. Miles was a speaker at the July seminar in POGO's Congressional Oversight Training Series. The series is put on by POGO to train congressional staffers on the art of congressional oversight.

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Andre Francisco is a POGO communications associate.

Follow @andrefrancisco

Photo from a recent Congressional Oversight Training Series seminar by POGO's Pam Rutter.

New Podcast: Conflict Zone -- Increasing Transparency of NIH-Funded Researchers' Financial Conflicts of Interest

By BRYAN RAHIJA

In May 2010, leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a rule that would require NIH-funded researchers to publicly disclose their financial arrangements with drug and medical device companies.

This proposal would bring a much needed dose of transparency to federally funded medical research. Now, one thing stands in its way: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). POGO is concerned that OMB will weaken or block this proposal, and in July, we sent a letter urging OMB to leave the rule intact.

For this podcast, POGO Staff Scientist Ned Feder and POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian discuss why this proposal is so important. After we recorded this podcast, Nature News reported that the proposal has been dropped. Things aren't completely final just yet—but if the NIH's disclosure proposal does wind up on the cutting room floor, it would be a significant blow to transparency and taxpayer interests. Have a listen to learn more.

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Bryan Rahija edits POGO's blog.

Image by EssG.

New Podcast: Graveyard Shift: Why We Need to Change the Way We Store Spent Nuclear Fuel

By BRYAN RAHIJA

Despite containing some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, the structures housing the majority of U.S. spent nuclear fuel--our nuclear graveyards so to speak--are designed to withstand little more than a bad thunderstorm.

In this podcast, POGO staffers talk with Bob Alvarez, a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), about why this is a problem, and whether or not a disaster like the one at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could happen in the U.S. Alvarez is the author of a new report on storage of spent nuclear fuel that was released by IPS with support from POGO.

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Bryan Rahija edits POGO's blog.

Image: Michal Brcak.

New Podcast: Too Big to Debar? Contractors and the Government's Enforcement of Anti-Bribery Laws

By BRYAN RAHIJA

Is the government too reluctant to crack down on contractors that bribe foreign officials? A recent law review article by Professor Drury Stevenson and Nicholas Wagoner, both of the South Texas College of Law, suggests that when it comes to enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the biggest government contractors might just be too big to debar.

As we noted in our April coverage of the law review article, government enforcement agencies "have yet to impose a company-wide suspension or debarment on a contractor that violates the FCPA. Instead, the government continues to award them (or reward them?) billions of dollars in contracts, thus nullifying the deterrent effect of the FCPA."

For this POGO podcast, POGO staffers got on the horn with the article's authors to find out how this light approach to enforcement ultimately harms taxpayer interests.

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Bryan Rahija edits POGO's blog.

See also:

• Suspension and Debarment: The Government Goes After B(ad) A(pple) E(mployees), Not BAE Systems
• Corrupt Arguments in Opposition to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

New Podcast: Is Kazakhstan Funding Members of Congress?

By BRYAN RAHIJA

POGO staffers recently sat down to chat about our June letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, which called for an investigation into potentially unlawful foreign funding of Members of Congress.

As we wrote a few weeks back, this story "has all the twists of a Hollywood blockbuster: shadowy international figures, a plot to overthrow an oil-rich Central Asian country, an attempted assassination, allegations of kidnapping and murder, and a battle in an American courtroom for control of billions of dollars in seized assets."

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Bryan Rahija edits POGO's blog.