|
On November 9, in response to a large caravan of migrants from Central America slowly traveling through Mexico towards the U.S. border, President Donald Trump’s administration issued a proclamation seeking to forbid migrants who cross the U.S. border anywhere but at an official port of entry from applying for asylum.
But even as it tells asylum-seekers they must go to a port of entry, the Trump administration has been turning them away from these very same ports for months, claiming that they are “at capacity.”
Based on an investigation by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO)—including a review of recent court documents, government reports and statistics, and interviews—DHS’s claim is disingenuous at best. The evidence shows that the increasing wait times at ports of entry are not a function of a sudden surge of migrants, but of deliberate policy decisions by the Trump Administration to detain as many asylum seekers as possible for as long as possible.
|
Just like with military spending, inspector general reform, or whistleblower protections, we want transparent, ethical, and sustainable policies that respect both the rule of law and the taxpayer footing the bill.
|
On Wednesday, November 28, Lydia Dennett, Investigator with the Center for Defense Information at POGO, spoke to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) hearing regarding their access to information needed to provide safety oversight of nuclear weapons facilities.
|
Upcoming Event
|
The Council for Court Excellence & The Constitution Project at POGO are co-sponsoring an expert panel to discuss the increasing attacks on American judges, our justice system, and respect for the rule of law on Tuesday, December 4th in Washington D.C. Sarah Turberville, the Director of The Constitution Project, will be speaking at the event.
|
Top Reads from 2018
|
In July, we reported that the fly-off test between the F-35 and the A-10 was rigged. Congress mandated this testing three years ago, with stringent requirements of the F-35 to show its close air support abilities. But the test was designed by someone with a vested financial interest in the F-35 program, rather than by people whose primary interest is its performance in combat.
|
In August, we reported that a former snack food and corn syrup industries lobbyist appointed by the Trump Administration to set food policy at the USDA is in close contact with her former employers on major and wide-ranging nutrition policies.
|
In September, a POGO investigation into compliance with a rule that requires Congressional witnesses to disclose their financial ties to foreign governments has found numerous loopholes that keep Congress and the public in the dark about the extent of foreign governments’ financial relationships with Congressional witnesses.
|
POGO in the News
|
|
These matters are particularly troubling given newly available information on pilot programs that employ Rekognition technology, and recent revelations that your company is actively marketing this product to law enforcement entities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to reports [from the Project On Government Oversight], law enforcement officials have begun using cameras to collect raw video footage of bystanders and transfer that data to Amazon servers for facial recognition analysis.
|
|
|
|
|
The private company that received a separate $202 million contract to manage the overall Tu Hogar Renace program, Adjusters International, was itself run by a former senior FEMA official, Daniel A. Craig, who worked at the agency during the Bush administration and was the Trump administration’s nominee to be deputy director of FEMA last year. He was forced to withdraw after the Project on Government Oversight let some members of Congress know that the inspector general’s office had investigated Mr. Craig for going on job interviews with companies that had received no-bid contracts after Hurricane Katrina.
|
|
|
|
|
Sarah Turberville, the director of The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, said the domain registrations likely do not violate rules for federal employees engaging in political activity since there is no indication that Whitaker used them to support any campaigns, but she said they raised questions about his impartiality as a US attorney.
"There's a unique trust in the role of the United States attorney," she said. "When it comes to concerns about the perception of impartiality, this raises a lot of red flags."
|
|
|
|
|
Nick Schwellenbach, the director of investigations at the Project on Government Oversight and an employee of the OSC from 2014 to 2017, said he felt the guidance likely crossed a legal line, saying the Hatch Act was meant to be narrowly focused on political activities around parties and candidates.
“The way OSC has traditionally balanced its enforcement of that statute with the First Amendment is [focused on] supporting a candidate or political party for election. I think once you start talking about more general political views, you’re starting to infringe upon people’s rights,” he said. “This one, I think, goes too far for them. It runs the risk of turning the OSC into an Orwellian enforcer inside the federal workforce.”
Schwellenbach said he believed the guidance could be successfully challenged in court on its constitutionality.
|
|
|
|
|
The American Civil Liberties Union in May blasted Amazon for marketing the service to law enforcement agencies. Another civil rights group, the Project on Government Oversight, criticized the company in October for offering the software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
|
|
|
|
|
Organizations including the Environmental Protection Network, Union of Concerned Scientists, Project on Government Oversight and Greenpeace published a joint report Thursday on threats to science under the Trump administration, called "Federal Agencies: How Congress Can Help."
|
|
|
|
|
One final point: It’s probably worth noting that others have questioned whether throwing more money at the Defense Department is the right way to address the strategic issues raised by last week’s National Defense Strategy Commission report. “Obviously if we’re vastly outspending Russia and China and we’re losing our competitive edge, our problem is not spending,” Dan Grazier, a fellow at the nonpartisan watchdog Project on Government Oversight, told the Washington Examiner.
|
|
|
|
|
Nick Schwellenbach, who spent three years at the OSC, told the Post that the guidance “runs the risk of turning the OSC into an Orwellian enforcer inside the federal workforce.”
|
|
|
|
|
Immigrant rights groups in New York are outraged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement met with Amazon over the summer to discuss its facial recognition surveillance software, Rekognition. The technology can pick out faces in a crowd by scanning video feeds.
Details of the meeting were obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and published last month in the Daily Beast.
|
|
|
|
|
“I’m for any more oversight we can add to this process to make sure that the American people’s interests are being represented,” said Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight, which endorsed a September proposal from McGovern and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) that would recreate the Senate procedure in the House. Such a bill has almost no chance of becoming law under Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate, but it signaled a desire among Democrats that party leaders can act on by enshrining, in their rules for the new House session, the right of any member to demand a floor debate on an arms deal.
Opposition to arms sales is generally seen as a human rights issue, but Grazier pointed to another concern he wants to see raised if there are more debates over such deals: the waivers often involved that effectively mean the trade is subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
|
|
|
|
|
“The political connections of this firm looked fishy,” said Nick Schwellenbach, the director of investigations at the watchdog group Project on Government Ethics.
[...] “It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to think that might have played some part in why Definers got the contract,” Schwellenbach said.
|
|
|
|
|
Dan Grazier, a fellow at the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, believes the current U.S. military budget is more than enough as it is.
Grazier is a former Marine Corps captain who served multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, Grazier deployed to Al Anbar province, Iraq, where he lead a team of 16 Marines and four tanks through over 200 combat missions. After returning stateside to train armor officers, Grazier deployed to Helmand province, Afghanistan in 2013, serving as the Marine Corps’ Senior Watch Officer for Regimental Combat Team 7.
A critic of the “military-industrial-congressional-complex,” Grazier’s research at POGO is focused on issues of national security and Pentagon reforms.
Following the release of the NDSC report, The Defense Post spoke to Grazier about the future of the U.S. military and the role of the defense industry in influencing U.S. policy.
TDP: The National Defense Strategy Commission published a report last week calling for greater increases in military spending. As it stands now, the United States already spends by far the most of any country on its military – significantly more than Russia and China combined, for example. To the extent that there are effectiveness issues within the military, what’s your reaction to the notion that buying more and better and nicer and newer equipment is the answer to those problems?
DG: Well, it’s completely ridiculous. There’s a major logical fallacy involved. In the commission’s report, the idea that they’re trying to convey is that Russia and China are gaining on us in a technological sense – that we’re losing our edge as far as military technology goes. If that were true, they’re doing it by spending a fraction of what we are on military equipment.
So, obviously our problem is not one of resource levels. That being said, I don’t necessarily accept the premise that we’re losing our technology edge. And also, I don’t think the premise of the report is correct in the first place. Thinking of Russia and China in a strictly conventional military sense – that’s not the right paradigm.
It’s impossible for two nuclear powers to fight a conventional war. It just is. Any war that we would have with Russia or China – God forbid – would almost immediately go nuclear. So any discussion about conventional weapons in regards to Russia and China is ridiculous. That’s a major issue that we need to deal with in the first place. But again, the logical fallacy of us not spending enough is just glaring and it made me laugh out loud when I read just the executive summary of the report.
The report was done in true Washington fashion. Congress mandated this in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act and it was just a transfer of responsibility. Elected officials in true Washington fashion wanted to avoid responsibility for something they knew was going to be politically unpopular. So they created a blue-ribbon panel that was going to outline the unpopular policy items – either raising defense spending or raising taxes to pay for it. That way they could say, “look, we didn’t want to do this but this blue-ribbon panel of experts said this is what we needed to do.” It’s just gross politics. They’re not accountable to the voters, so they can take the blame for the unpopular proposals. It provides them a political alibi.
Read the full interview
|
|
|
|
|
Despite conflict of interest laws and regulations, the phenomenon of military officers who head straight for the defense contracting industry, and contractor executives confirmed for high level Defense Department jobs, never seems to stop. In the view of Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, it might be getting worse than ever. She joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin for more.
|
|
|
|
|
Retired Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., was striving to avoid partisanship when he spoke on Friday at the first “Oversight Summit” organized by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
After presenting a state lawmaker (South Carolina Republican Rep. Weston Newton) with Levin’s new namesake award for effective oversight, the 36-year veteran of running investigations in the U.S. Senate acknowledged that he would pause and be “partisan but factual” about Washington’s recent approaches to the art of congressional oversight.
|
|
|
|
|
Considering its mission, the National Security Agency and ‘transparency’ aren’t often mentioned in the same breath, but its inspector general is looking to shine a light on the agency’s business where he can.
That journey starts with answering some of the easy questions. Like, for starters, how many people work in the NSA Office of the Inspector General?
“I’d been told at one point that the size of our office wasn’t a public number,” Robert Stoch, the NSA IG, said last Friday at a Project on Government Oversight event in Washington.
|
|
|
|
|
Nick Schwellenbach, an investigator and whistleblower specialist at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight (and former OSC employee), wondered how OSC would apply the rules to employees, including senior officials, who make pro-Trump statements or argue against impeachment.
“It will chill protected federal employee speech because OSC's guidance is far too nuanced for a typical employee to navigate in everyday conversations and emails with coworkers,” he told Government Executive. “It's unworkable for OSC and puts it in the position of being an Orweillian speech cop in the federal government, which Congress has said in statute it does not want it to be. OSC's Hatch Act enforcement will be easy to paint as motivated by politics, even if that's not truly the case.”
|
|
|
|
|
At a Nov. 16 event hosted by the Project on Government Oversight, Storch did not confirm that an investigation of the matter is underway, but he said he has the power to subpoena documents from companies who work on or participate in NSA programs, but only limited ability "to compel people from outside the agency who are employed privately to talk to our people."
|
|
|
|
|
A lack of incentives for House members, and a declining count of professional committee and member staff with the necessary experience, are combining to dampen oversight activities in the House, panelists said Nov. 16 at an event organized by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).
[...] “Oversight is really hard work and takes a lot of time,” added Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at POGO’s Center for Defense Information.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Comments
Post a Comment