The Center for Public Integrity

For six years, the Air Force has relied mostly on a single, high-cost rocket manufacturer to loft its reconnaissance, communications, and GPS satellites into space and it is about to double down. In the fall of 2013, it plans to give the company a new $19 billion contract for all of the Air Force launches scheduled through 2017.

Some members of Congress are upset by the pricetag, however, and key lawmakers — acting with the support of an array of upstart rocket firms — are starting to push back against the Air Force’s plan to reward its contractor with a five-year lock on all launches.

The latest salvo comes from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and ranking member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., who complained in an Aug. 2 letter that the Pentagon’s largest launch project “lacks domestic competition and is unable to compete internationally due to high costs.” The Air Force satellite project is known as the Evolved Expendable Vehicle Launch (EELV) program.

The firm that the Air Force favors is United Launch Alliance, a joint project formed in 2006 by the Pentagon’s top two contractors, Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The Air Force plans to award the $19 billion deal between June and October 2013.

Two senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee called on Monday for the Defense Department to consider suspending or blocking its ties to a major weapons contractor that admitted illegally helping China develop a new attack helicopter.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), its senior Republican member, asserted in an Aug. 6 letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that a series of export violations by the Canadian branch of helicopter engine manufacturer Pratt and Whitney and its parent company United Technologies “may have caused significant harm to our national security.”

Although Pratt, United Technologies and another firm agreed to pay a total of $75 million in fines when they publicly admitting wrongdoing in June, Levin and McCain complained that “no individual manager or employee has been held personally accountable.” The senators said that although the State Department has restricted some licensing privileges for Pratt’s Canadian branch, “we believe that the Defense Department should itself evaluate this case for the appropriateness of contract suspension or debarment.”

In its settlement with the Justice Department and the State Department, Pratt and United Technologies acknowledged that Pratt knowingly sent critical software to China for use with a military attack helicopter, the Z10, because it hoped to win a lucrative contract for a civilian version. “We find the crime to which P&WC [Pratt & Whitney Canada] pleaded guilty enormously troubling,” the two senators said.

The Pentagon has pumped billions of dollars into programs to counter the dangers of improvised explosive devices over the last decade but still lacks a way to track whether its initiatives are meeting their goals — a circumstance that a government watchdog warns could lead to overlap and wasted taxpayer funds.

Poor record keeping has hindered the Defense Department’s ability to monitor more than 1,300 individual anti-IED projects, complicating any effort by outsiders to assess whether the funds have been well spent, a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office said.

“DOD has not determined, and does not have a ready means for determining,” just how many anti-IED projects it is currently funding, the report said. Although GAO accounted for $4.8 billion in Pentagon spending, it called that estimate “understated,” because many anti-IED initiatives weren’t properly recorded.

“DOD has funded hundreds of C-IED initiatives but has not developed a comprehensive database of these initiatives or the organizations conducting them,” the report stated.

The report is a follow up to a February 2012 GAO study that concluded DOD does not have “full visibility” over its anti-IED projects.

The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), which oversees all this work, has become a symbol of the organizational mess that can ensue when huge government sums are thrown at an urgent project. Improvised Explosive Devices, better known as IEDs, remain a weapon of choice against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, where 16,500 IEDs were detonated or discovered being used against U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2011.

A bill proposed by a bipartisan group of senators Thursday would punish Pentagon agencies for failing to meet a series of deadlines for conducting proper internal audits, marking a major ratcheting up of congressional pressure about a good-government goal first set in legislation enacted 18 years ago.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a member of a subcommittee on federal financial management, is leading the effort to provide new incentives to the military services, which have moved slowly to comply with a target of completing successful audits of their expenditures by 2017. He was joined this week by five other Republicans and two Democrats.

Under their bill, military branches that don’t meet the 2017 deadline would see the development of weapons systems blocked before reaching the production and deployment stage.The bill would also reward agencies for meeting deadlines by conferring more control over their own budgets, including the ability to shift between $30 million and $60 million annually between accounts to pay for more weapons procurement, operations and maintenance, research or personnel, all without congressional approval.

The bill would also insist that the military services appoint some top officials who have previously worked as a chief financial officer of a government agency or a public company that has received an audit during their tenure there.

Behind doors that can be opened only by spins of a combination lock or an electronic scan of fingerprints or eyeballs, Defense Department officials periodically work out the details of America’s plans to drop nuclear explosives on aggressive enemies.

Not many outsiders get to peer in, particularly those dispatched from another branch of government, like Congress. But twice in the past 20 years, a few analysts at the Government Accountability Office have been allowed to get a rough sense from closed-door Pentagon briefings — not from actual documents — of the conditions and manner in which the United States could detonate its nuclear bombs.

The resulting reports to Congress have been highly classified, so they don’t offer much to a broader audience. An unclassified version, released July 31, says virtually nothing about what’s actually in the U.S. nuclear war plan. It is, in fact, even shorter and less detailed than its sketchy 1991 predecessor.

“To prepare this unclassified version,” said the agency, “we removed classified details such as references to stockpile quantities and operational requirements, information about potential adversaries, target categories, and the number and types of targets; and specific information related to the nuclear weapons targeting process.”

Nonetheless, the report makes a few general points worth noting, even if they seem familiar to those who already pay close attention to nuclear weapons policy.

In the Nangarhar province near Afghanistan’s eastern border sits an abandoned police base, built with $4.5 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars and completed just 13 months ago. The base, known as Lal Por 2, is badly needed but remains empty because it lacks any viable water supply. No efforts are underway to add one.

A neighboring base on the border, also built with U.S. funds, has some Afghan police, but lacks a fully-functioning septic system or air conditioning. Those shortcomings, along with drainage problems in the main buildings, put the base at risk for abandonment as well, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

John Sopko, a former deputy director at Homeland Security and prosecutor who just filled the inspector general role July 2, says in his quarterly report published Monday that these two bases are prime examples of rampant waste throughout the Afghan reconstruction effort. Costing a total of $19 million, the bases, along with two others in the Nangahar province facing their own problems, are meant to give Afghan police a watchful eye along the nation’s militarily-significant border with Pakistan.

Instead, they serve as a reminder that some of the $400 million the U.S. has sunk into “large-scale” construction projects in Afghanistan has gone to waste, according to the inspector general. The report also uncovered $12 million of grants for construction that was disbursed by the Department of State without adequate follow-up to ensure the money was being put to good use. Looking at one of those grants, the inspector general found that $253,432 had been wasted after a project was scrapped and no money was returned to State.

A former executive for the Pentagon’s top defense contractor collected $1.66 million in salary, consulting fees and retirement pay from two top defense contractors last year before becoming the Republican chief of staff for the Senate Armed Services Committee in February.

The appointment is the second by a Republican member of either the House or Senate Armed Services committee to provoke criticism from independent groups that consider it a conflict of interest.

Ann Elise Sauer, who was appointed to her present job by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., worked for more than a decade as a vice president and lobbyist for Lockheed Martin before leaving in Jan. 2011, according to a financial disclosure she made to the Secretary of the Senate in April.

In 2011, she was paid a salary and bonus totalling $660,390, deferred compensation of $769,574, and $232,872 labeled as “retired pay” on the financial disclosure form. Lockheed is the Defense Department’s largest corporate contractor, earning $28.3 billion, or 61 percent, of its sales from the department in 2011, according to the company’s annual report.

Federal officials in charge of detecting dangerous nuclear materials charted a new strategy at a House hearing on July 26, in the aftermath of the government’s failed attempt to build large, advanced radiation scanners for ports and border crossings.

Huban Gowadia, the acting director for the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, said her office will sharply increase the use of hand-held monitors, which she said are both cheaper and more reliable than the stationary scanners the government spent six years trying to develop.

But she emphasized that the task of preventing the importation of dangerous nuclear materials — including those that could be fashioned into  so-called “dirty bombs” — remained an “inherently difficult technical task,” and offered no near-term, comprehensive solution.

The nuclear detection office, part of the Homeland Security department, sunk $230 million into developing 13 Advanced Spectroscopic Portals that scientists and nuclear security experts assessed as a bad investment.

In 2011, the National Academy of Sciences reported that much of the nuclear detection office’s testing on its own product was “misleading.” The academy found that the new machines, despite their high price tag, offered little improvement over previous technology and even performed worse in some key areas, such as detecting radiation that would have been “masked,” or concealed in lead lining, for example.

The new machines cost $1.2 million each to develop — twice as much as older radiation monitors that the government deployed at nearly 600 locations after the 2001 terrorist attacks. According to the Raytheon Corporation, one of the developers of the new machines, the older ones were unable to distinguish between genuine threats and naturally-radioactive fertilizer or bananas — requiring costly second inspections whenever they alarm.

Multiple Pentagon efforts to account precisely for the flow of military spending are facing major delays and at least an $8 billion cost overrun, according to a new report by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

The internal watchdog, in a report last week, said that the military services have missed their deadlines for designing and integrating new accounting software meant to bring their bookkeeping up to modern standards and manage their parts and weapons inventories more efficiently. In the Army’s case, the launch date for its new accounting system has slid 12 years, from 2004 to 2016.         

The delays threaten to derail Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s goal of completing a major financial audit for the Pentagon by 2017, according to the inspector general’s report. The aim of such audits is give the Pentagon’s top brass a better understanding of how their funds are being spent and help avoid misspending and waste.

Accounting software systems for the Navy and Air Force have also experienced delays and cost overruns. Launch of the Air Force’s program, managed by Accenture, has been postponed from October 2009 launch to April 2017, and its cost has jumped from $420 million to almost $2.2 billion, according to the new report. The Navy’s program, developed by IBM, is to be launched in August 2013, more than two years behind schedule.

“As a result of the schedule delays, DoD will continue using outdated legacy systems and diminish the estimated savings associated with transforming business operations through … modernization,” said Amy J. Frontz, the principal assistant inspector general for auditing, in an introduction to the report.

The Obama administration’s top nuclear disarmament expert expressed concern Friday over partisan sentiments on Capitol Hill that could affect the passage of a key nuclear treaty.