The Center for Public Integrity

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.

For years, the U.S. has pursued a reliable missile defense shield. But major parts of the program need better management or the entire effort will experience serious delays, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

Cost estimates and timetables for five key missile defense programs are “either not reliable or the program is missing information that could make it more efficient,” according to the report, released Friday.

Systems analyzed by the GAO were the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IIA, Aegis Ashore, Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD), Precision Tracking Space System (PTSS), and the Targets and Countermeasures Extended Medium-Range Ballistic Missile.

GAO lists ten “best practices” that the programs should be following, and found only four cases — out of a possible 50 — where the programs “fully” met these criteria. In ten cases the criteria were just “minimally” met. To help improve the “transparency and needed accountability” of the programs, GAO recommended that they be directed to “improve their compliance” with best practices. For long term solutions, managers need to do a better job of overseeing and pacing the work, the report said.

In its response to a draft version of the report, officials at the Pentagon said they agreed with GAO’s overall findings and recommendations.  

The GAO's review included a reminder that the agency has “consistently reported … troubled acquisition histories” for the missile defense effort. One such report came in April. That study found that President Barack Obama’s administration was repeating a mistake made by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

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.

A government watchdog is calling for tighter — and more coordinated — cyber security efforts by federal agencies to protect the U.S. electricity grid, a potentially vulnerable target for U.S. enemies.

The volume of malicious software and online attacks targeting overall U.S. computer networks has tripled in the last two years, raising the possibility of an eventual threat to the flow of electric power to homes, businesses, and the Internet itself, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.

“Terrorists, hackers, and other non-government groups all have the desire and are trying to gain the ability to get into our electricity infrastructure,” Gregory Wilhusen, the director for information security issues at GAO, said in an interview. “The impact of widespread outages could have national security implications. And, in residential areas, it not only affects homes and customers. It also has major effects on commerce.”

According to a report three weeks ago by the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Response Team, reported attacks on organizations in the electrical energy sector in the U.S. have increased from three in 2009 to 31 in 2011. These amounted to 21 percent of the total reported in that time period.

Several of the attacks cited in the report were carried out through spear-phishing, an attempt to steal information for monetary gain. In one case, an employee at what the report identified only as a “bulk electric power organization” opened to door to hackers merely by clicking on what appeared to be a PDF of an e-mailed industry newsletter; the attachment then released malicious software onto the company computer. Homeland Security’s response team was called on to deal with what it labeled as a “sophisticated threat.”

The official in charge of monitoring America’s $51 billion effort to reconstruct Iraq has estimated that $6 billion to $8 billion of that amount was lost to waste, fraud and abuse.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) for the past eight years, gave that estimate in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity on Monday, shortly after releasing a new summary of his office’s many grim discoveries since it began work in in 2004.

In Friday’s report, Bowen said the exact funds lost to fraud and waste “can never be known,” largely because of poor record-keeping by the U.S. agencies involved in the effort. These include the Departments of State and Defense, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

According to the report, auditors repeatedly found that the State Department and Defense Department failed to properly review invoices from government contractors, often approving billions of dollars in services without checking if costs were accurate or efficient. “I think the consistent theme throughout our eight years of oversight work has been the inconsistent availability of records and information on contracts and costs,” said Bowen, a former Texas lawyer.

Bowen said his efforts were hampered from the outset by the ineffectiveness of a clearinghouse created in Iraq for government departments to submit reconstruction bills and contracts for review and oversight. Known as the Iraq Reconstruction Management System, the system was often ignored, with the result that nearly a third of all the contracts could not be monitored adequately. 

Republicans and Democrats in Washington may disagree about cutting the defense budget, but their constituents are generally in accord that it should shrink next year by a fifth to a sixth of its present size, according to a public opinion survey by the Program for Public Consultation, the Center for Public Integrity and the Stimson Center, a nonprofit think-tank.

The three groups first reported the existence of a broad public consensus in favor of military spending reductions in May, after conducting a unique nationwide survey in which respondents received information about the defense budget and had the chance to read multiple pro and con arguments about the military budget like those circulating on Capitol Hill.

Now a more detailed analysis of the results of that survey has shown that majorities in both red and blue congressional districts — those with Republican and Democratic representation, respectively — strongly support the idea that the defense budget should be cut more than politicians in Washington are considering.

The Obama administration has only proposed to reduce planned military spending increases, leaving the budget mostly flat over the next decade. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has instead called for returning to the steady military spending growth seen over the past decade.

Both parties have decried a potential annual spending reduction of around 10 percent, under “sequestration” legislation approved last year aimed at cutting the overall federal deficit. A military cut of that magnitude would take effect automatically only if lawmakers are unable to agree on an alternative pathway to balanced budgets.

But the survey indicates that the public generally supports an even greater whack, no matter where they reside.

Defense spending cuts slated to take effect automatically in January if the two parties cannot agree on a more balanced budget would still leave the Defense Department with more funding than it received six years ago, according to a report Wednesday from the Congressional Budget Office.

It projects that the so-called "sequestration" of military and other funds, ordered by a law enacted last year, would cut the Pentagon’s requested FY 2013 budget of $526 billion to $469 billion, an amount it said was still “larger than it was in 2006 (in 2013 dollars) and larger than the average base budget during the 1980s.”

Sequestration would cut spending for the Pentagon by about $1 trillion over the next decade. The pending cut has prompted panic from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who said it would cause “an unacceptable risk in future combat operations.” Lawmakers such as House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) have said they want to block any cuts to defense spending — whether through sequestration or through President Barack Obama’s plan to keep the defense budget mostly level over the next 10 years.

Gordon Adams, a former Office of Management and Budget associate director for national security and international affairs under President Bill Clinton who is now at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit think tank, said he doubts sequestration will happen at all but that “the fact is Defense would not really suffer under those automatic cuts. 2006 was a very healthy level for defense spending.”

The CBO report Wednesday also claimed the Pentagon had underestimated many of its own costs for health care and pay for soldiers and civilian personnel. Although the Defense Department’s five-year projection through FY 2017 sets aside $615 billion for these costs, CBO predicts $738 billion, or 5 percent, more will be needed.

While civilian salary increases have slowed to a crawl in the last five years, a new Pentagon report shows rapidly-growing military payrolls have proved immune to the economic pain felt in the private sector.

The Defense Department’s latest Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation confirms that after years of special benefits provided by Congress, it's now much more lucrative to be a soldier than a civilian. While average pay for civilians with a two-year college degree rises $3,000 between their tenth and twentieth year in the workforce (to reach $45,000), comparable enlisted Defense personnel see their salaries increase $15,000 in that time (to reach $73,000).

In fact, at every point in someone’s career, pay in the armed services tops that of civilians. In their first year, military officers make $20,000 more than private sector workers with a bachelor's degree, according to the review by representatives from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, National Guard and various Defense bureaus. By their twentieth year, that difference has grown to $60,000. And the shortfall is larger for civilians with some college experience or a high school diploma.