On August 28, Mark Esper held the first televised press briefing by a sitting secretary of defense in over a year. His predecessor, James Mattis, had stopped televised press briefings altogether, favoring informal but on the record conversations with reporters. While the reintroduction of press briefings is a welcome development, the reality is that it will take much more than that to pry open doors nailed shut under Mattis.
There are already signs that despite Esper’s touted commitment to openness, he is continuing some of Mattis’s more secretive practices. Across the DOD, basic information is becoming harder to find, forcing journalists and the public to rely on leaks, whistleblowers, and the official narrative.
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A timeline created by POGO shows that under Mattis and the Trump administration, a wave of increased secrecy swept through the Department of Defense. The timeline documents the changes to Department of Defense and national security policy that may undermine public access to information and harm transparency.
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It has been more than 1,000 days since the Bureau of Land Management has had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director. In that almost three-year period, four acting directors have cycled through the Bureau of Land Management, including current acting-director William Perry Pendley.
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Giving Tuesday
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Thank you so much to everyone who gave to POGO’s Giving Tuesday campaign this week! We are so excited to announce that, thanks to the generosity of all our crucial supporters, we raised over $43,000 on Giving Tuesday.
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New Newsletter on Impeachment
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Our new e-newsletter on impeachment, Indispensable, has been recognized by The New York Times! 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. |
POGO in the News
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Many major news organizations offer impeachment newsletters, including CNN, PBS, The Washington Post and, of course, The New York Times. But there are also those created by less traditional news publishers, like the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight or Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of American history at Boston College who offers her take on Facebook and in a newsletter titled “Letters From an American.”
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"Horowitz has done a great job of navigating politically fraught and complicated issues. But if it’s true, that would be an interesting imbalance if the preponderance of their work is what the executive branch is asking them to look into rather than what Congress is looking into," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan independent government watchdog. "I think it is as important for any IG to be tending to congressional requests. They're as important a constituent of his as the executive is."
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“The business of the Pentagon is not actually fighting and winning the nation’s wars, it is spending vast sums of taxpayer money buying big, expensive glitzy hardware,” Dan Grazier, a military analyst at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told Quartz. “And so that almost always takes priority over maintaining the older stuff.”
Grazier, who served as a captain in the US Marine Corps, said the Navy has invested tens of billions of dollars developing new, unproven systems while proven systems like the Super Hornet can’t get all the parts they need to keep operating. He pointed to the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer, a defect-riddled money pit that was canceled by the Navy after just three were built, as one example. Another, the Navy’s highly anticipated Littoral Combat Ship, has been called a “complete failure.” That program, which has also been curtailed, cost the Navy some $30 billion.
But the program perhaps most directly connected to the Navy’s current spare parts problem is the F-35, said Grazier. The military’s next-gen fighter jet is its most expensive ever, yet has suffered from delays, cost overruns, and underperformance. The Navy canceled various contracts to continue purchasing spare parts for the Super Hornet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, expecting to have an operational F-35 in the 2010-2012 timeframe. That, of course, hasn’t happened.
“The plan and the promises that were made about the F-35, its capabilities and its original cost estimates were wildly wrong and hugely unrealistic,” said Grazier. “They’re now suffering the consequences of that because the F-35 still isn’t ready to go.”
[...] “Defense contractors want to be able to maintain control of their products, because where they make their real money is on the back-end, after we purchase it, in long-term sustainment contracts,” explained Grazier. “The issue of intellectual property rights is a really, really big deal. It sounds really mundane, but it has enormous consequences to the military.”
When a defense contractor retains the intellectual property rights to something like a fighter jet, it becomes the only firm that can perform long-term sustainment and maintenance for the aircraft.
“The only way that you can upgrade the aircraft, the only way that you can handle a lot of the basic maintenance functions of it, is having access to all that data,” Grazier continued. “And so the government can’t go out and do a competitive bid each year for the sustainment of a system, because only one firm has the necessary information. It means that [defense contractors] have the American people over a barrel. They can basically charge whatever they want for the sustainment contracts because there’s nowhere else that we can go to get the services done.”
In a response to the DODIG report, the Navy says it is taking steps to rectify the spare parts situation plaguing the Super Hornet.
“It’s definitely an issue,” said Grazier. “And it’s one that the service needs to address sooner rather than later.
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The Pentagon tends to be overly ambitious when it comes to new technologies, going for a great leap forward rather than incremental progress, said Mark Thompson, who spent decades covering defense as a journalist before becoming a national security analyst for the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
Instead of an exquisite solution that accomplishes 95 percent of the desired capabilities, accept something less risky that meets 80 percent of the criteria, Thompson recommends. The results will be vastly cheaper and still get most jobs done.
“That’s where the Congress, increasingly bereft of veterans, doesn’t have the gumption, the courage or the knowledge, to say, ‘OK, that’s good enough.’ That’s how we end up with these boondoggles,” he said.
It has become increasingly hard for Congress to conduct oversight of the way the Defense Department buys weapons, Thompson said. “You cannot say anything against military procurement without being viewed as either a defeatist or someone who doesn’t care about the troops.”
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The American Conservative
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“For privacy advocates, this is such an obvious choice,” Jake Laperruque, senior counsel for the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, said in an interview with The American Conservative. Because the CDR program vacuums up all the phone call records of anyone within “two hops” of a “specific selection term,” a few dozen FISA warrants can lead to the phone call records of millions of Americans.
“It’s incredibly privacy invasive,” said Laperruque. “There’s tens of millions of phone records that are caught up in this. There’s hundreds of thousands of Americans that are caught when they have a warrant for one person.”
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Is this industry-standard acceptable? Deloitte seems to think so, at least for itself. Deloitte has the lowest failure rate in the Big Four between 2009 and 2017 of 27.6%. While other Big Four firms have kept silent, Deloitte has boasted about its “positive trajectory” in audit quality. Analysts at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) would disagree. They reported the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has been empowered to be a watchdog for audit firms but is not doing its job. They calculated the PCAOB had fined the Big Four only $6.5 million out of the $1.6 billion they could have for performing defective audits.
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"A reasonable person could believe that he (Sen. Paradee) did, in fact, do something nefarious and shady, and did misuse his position of power in a way that would benefit his brother." and "It's understandable why some might view it as a little bit of a conflict of interest in and of itself."
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In their letter to DHS and other agencies, the California Democratic lawmakers asked for information on how ICE crafted its solicitation for detention center bids.
Their chances of getting a quick response are unclear. ICE has long faced criticism over its handling of public record requests, which it is supposed to respond to in 20 days or less. The agency was sued earlier this month by the Project on Government Oversight for allegedly withholding information over how it used facial recognition and other technology in surveillance and data collection programs.
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