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James Madison believed that impeachment was "indispensable ... for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the chief magistrate." We hope our newsletter is an indispensable companion to help answer your questions about impeachment processes, the pressures on the figures involved, the facts uncovered, and their consequences.
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What is impeachment, how does it work, and what’s going to happen? Check out our live roundup of frequently asked questions, updated regularly.
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This Week at POGO
Our reporting sparks legislation to curb ICE's use of solitary
Citing our reporting, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Kamala Harris (D-CA) today introduced legislation to combat the rampant and unnecessary overuse of solitary confinement in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated and ICE contract facilities. |
POGO & Whistleblowers
POGO has a long history of working with whistleblowers and protecting their rights. We believe that whistleblowers are our first line of defense against corruption and abuse by the federal government. We’ve spent years protecting these truth-tellers and the mechanisms to hold government accountable, and today we’re seeing why all of that work matters.
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It is possible to fight wrongdoing from within without sacrificing your career. This survival guide, intended to help and empower conscientious government employees when they encounter wrongdoing in the workplace, covers what federal sector employees should know before blowing the whistle.
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We distilled our survival guide into this e-course, delivering key lessons and tips to your inbox each week.
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POGO in the News
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Outing the Ukraine whistleblower “who followed the law completely undermines the process Congress created to ensure members of the intelligence community disclose wrongdoing through legal channels,” said Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy at the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan independent federal watchdog organization.
Calls to expose the whistleblower amount to a double smokescreen. They distract from the main issue regarding Trump’s push for a Ukrainian investigation into the son of former vice president Joe Biden and divert attention from the numerous officials who have corroborated the initial information.
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When Warren pressed him, Esper commented that he thought the exchange was “a good debate.” Warren cut him off: “I’m not trying to have a debate,” she snapped. For the analysts Mandy Smithberger and William D. Hartung, the Esper appointment was more of the same: “During the Trump administration,” they wrote during the confirmation process, “the post of secretary of defense has been passed from one former defense industry figure to another, as if it were literally reserved only for key officials from major weapons makers.” Esper did ultimately recuse himself from the Pentagon’s cloud computing contract because his son is employed by IBM, which was one of the initial bidders. “It was a good decision,” Smithberger told me. “It shows that the secretary knows the rules.”
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But the agency’s heavy reliance on contractors — spanning nearly two years and drawing on multiple political operatives — alarmed current and former CMS officials and government ethics experts, who questioned the appearance and justification for outsourcing a substantial portion of the agency's communications duties. By early 2019, CMS also had hired multiple political appointees to help manage Verma’s communications.
“It's the classic revolving door,” said Scott Amey, who leads investigations into government contracts for the Project on Government Oversight. Amey added that the number of consultants with ties to the White House or the Trump campaign raises further concerns. “If there's pressure from the top of the agency to hire these people, you worry about whether this is payoff for old friends.”
[...] Government ethics experts said that the consultants’ work still deserved additional scrutiny.
“There are real questions about the need for these services and are these services duplicative of what PR people inside the agency are already doing,” said POGO’s Amey. “There are quite a few red flags that go up here, in terms of the services that are being outsourced, the rates that are being paid and the connections of the people being hired that are worth an HHS inspector general investigation.”
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Jake Laperruque, senior counsel for the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, said of the document: “The ‘threat estimates’ focused on protesters are highly disturbing. Cataloging individuals protesting government policy creates serious risk of abuse, and even without misconduct, monitoring protesters is likely to chill the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
“‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t mean returning to J. Edgar Hoover-style surveillance,” Laperruque wrote in an email.
[...] Laperruque said of the data, “I don’t know why some of this information is needed – some of the activities (where protesters are coming from, sponsors, other activities outside the border, etc) have no connection to ensuring safe interactions. I can’t think of any reason for cataloging that information other than to monitor protesters activities more broadly, and potentially identify them.”
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There will likely be legal challenges to the legitimacy of Wolf’s appointment and Cuccinelli’s expected promotion, Rebecca Jones, policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, said. To appoint Wolf as acting secretary, she said that McAleenan would have likely had to rearrange the line of succession at DHS, but it’s not clear that he had the power to do so since he was not Senate-confirmed.
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Significantly, while the text of the research solicitation doesn't mention the F-35, the acquisition program that the project is intended is listed as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In addition, the F-22 is included in the list of keywords at the bottom of the solicitation.
"I'm sure it isn't a coincidence," says Dan Grazier at defense watchdog Project on Government Oversight. "The F-35 is quite vulnerable to ground fire, especially since the designers decided not to include self-sealing fuel tanks."
[...] Some experts question whether the Air Force should even be putting its aircraft in harm's way. "The interesting thing to me is they still think in terms of sending the delivery vehicle, whether manned or unmanned, into contested air space," Grazier says. "With all the discussion of standoff weapons, AAA shouldn't be that much of a concern anymore."
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National Journal (login required)
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White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told reporters earlier this month that Wolf would replace McAleenan as acting secretary as soon as this week. But the Trump administration will likely once again have to change the succession order to install Wolf as the department s acting head. Three Senate-confirmed officials Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs, Undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis David Glawe, and Transportation Security Administration Administrator David Pekoske rank above the undersecretary for strategy, policy, and plans.
That change would be implemented by McAleenan, who, unlike Nielsen, leads the agency in an acting capacity. Legal scholars were split over whether that wrinkle could provoke a successful legal challenge.
"For me, in order for them to now designate Chad Wolf s position ... as acting [secretary], then there would have to be a confirmed secretary to make that switch," said Rebecca Jones, policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight.
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“The Littoral Combat Ship program has been unnecessarily complicated from the beginning,” the Project on Government Oversight explained in 2016. “Initially the Navy aimed for each ship to cost $220 million, but the Government Accountability Office estimates procurement costs for the first 32 ships is currently about $21 billion, or about $655 million per ship—nearly triple what they were supposed to cost.”
“The program’s three mission packages, according to the latest select acquisition report, add about $7.6 billion.”
In the decade and a half since the program was first sold to Congress, the LCS has already been forced into multiple major program changes, initially driven by large cost overruns, the lack of combat survivability and lethality discovered during operational testing and deployments, the almost crippling technical failures and schedule delays in each of the three mission modules.
Now the Navy has announced it is abandoning the two fundamental concepts behind the program: a multi-mission ship with swappable mission modules and a radically new way of manning it. Instead, each LCS hull will have a single mission and a significantly larger crew assigned a single primary skill set.
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“Ending the [Call Data Records] authority is absolutely necessary, but Congress needs to do much more than ending a dysfunctional system that the NSA can’t provide any justification for,” said Jake Laperruque of the Project on Government Oversight. “Any reauthorization bill has to include a broad set of serious reforms. You don't get a five star restaurant review just by taking arsenic off the menu.”
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“Despite the confirmation that the program achieved initial operational capability, the F-35 basic design still remains a prototype,” Dan Grazier, a military fellow at the Project for Government Oversight, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s very concerning to me that the services have prematurely pressed these into a combat role when the basic design hasn’t been proven yet.”
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The Project on Government Oversight is suing for the release of records related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data collection, facial recognition programs, and other surveillance.
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Project on Government Oversight (POGO) Hatch Act complaint Against Mulvaney and Sondland (October 30, 2019)
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The Project on Government Oversight had previously sent Congress a letter, asking the body to investigate why the Pentagon cannot properly account for F-35 spare parts and who is responsible. POGO says issue has implications on other current and future acquisition programs.
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What's a whistleblower?
It's a government employee who reports fraud, waste, crimes, or threats to public safety. The origin of the term is uncertain, but it's probably a reference to policemen or referees who blow whistles when they see a crime or foul play. As far back as 1778, the Founding Fathers called reporting official misconduct a "duty," commending 10 sailors and Marines for alerting Congress to the Navy's abuse of British prisoners. But the term "whistleblower" wasn't applied to this kind of truth telling until the 1970s. It was during that tumultuous decade that military analyst Daniel Ellsberg disclosed the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the Vietnam War's false premises. A year later, The Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal, thanks to leaks from "Deep Throat" (who turned out to be disgruntled FBI Associate Director Mark Felt). To encourage such truth tellers to come forward, Congress passed the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which outlined a process for federal employees to report misconduct and challenge retaliation they might face for doing so. Despite that law, whistleblowers often pay a steep price for reporting misdeeds by superiors, said Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan organization. "One has to go in with the assumption," she said, "that it's career suicide."
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The Pentagon’s F-35 program office recently announced an agreement with Lockheed Martin for the next batch of nearly 500 of the hi-tech planes. The unit price will be under $80 million — a record low. But Dan Grazier argues the real cost of that next batch is quite a bit higher. He is military fellow at the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, and he joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk more.
Listen to the broadcast |
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Facial recognition technology concerns public advocacy groups, policymakers and others so much that its use by police and other public agencies has been banned in three Bay Area cities and one in Massachusetts. But federal government agencies use it, and they're not being forthcoming about how, according to a couple of lawsuits filed in the past couple of weeks.
The Project on Government Oversight sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thursday over what it says is the agency's inadequate response to the group's request for information about its use of facial recognition. That follows a lawsuit filed by the ACLU last week against the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration over the same thing. Both groups submitted Freedom of Information Act requests because they want to know how the federal agencies are using the technology, and what safeguards they're employing to prevent abuse.
The records would be likely to contribute to public understanding of ICE’s system for collecting data absent knowledge of consent of citizens, as well as civil rights and civil liberties complaints, said the POGO complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C
[...] The ACLU and POGO are asking the courts to force the federal agencies to comply with their requests for information. ICE and the Department of Justice have not returned requests for comment.
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LIZ HEMPOWICZ of the Project on Government Oversight joins us to talk about the whistleblower law and its protections.
Listen to the broadcast |
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Delaware Online (login required)
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For years, government transparency advocates have called for a more rigorous reporting process, partly because the statements offer little detail on monetary amounts. Moreau said that the disclosures are meant to focus on who a public official does business with, not the amount of money involved.
But the amount is relevant to a public official's motives, said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, a policy analyst with the Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that advocates for federal government transparency.
"When you’re talking about large sums of money, you have more incentives for people to do things that may not be strictly ethical or may not abide by conflict of interest rules," Hedtler-Gaudette said. "If you don’t know the amounts we’re talking about, then you don’t really know where there could be entanglements.”
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