The Center for Public Integrity

The Pentagon’s budget is almost assuredly going down in coming years, under heavy pressure from those who wish to trim the federal deficit and see the agency – whose budget increased by two-thirds over the last decade – as a ripe target. But it looks like a specific type of weaponry,  the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, is also headed down, with Barack Obama’s reelection.

This is not a great surprise. Obama promised in a 2009 speech in Prague, after all, that the U.S.-Russian arms control treaty he was then negotiating “will set the stage for further cuts.” But the administration’s planning was not detailed publicly before the election to avoid creating controversy.

Now that the voting is past, a group of independent advisers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has publicly urged her to consider pursuing an informal accord with Russia aimed at lowering the number of nuclear weapons the two countries might deploy under existing treaties. Its report, issued Nov. 27, has also acknowledged official support for deeper cuts inside the administration.

The idea of an informal agreement would essentially sidestep the need to obtain formal congressional approval for cuts deeper than those authorized in a 2011 U.S.-Russian arms treaty known as New Start. The accord, which caps strategic deployments by both countries at 1,550 warheads, was approved by around a three-quarters margin in both legislatures, but only after months of political debate.

The Environmental Protection Agency imposed a new penalty for wrongdoing against the BP oil company on Nov. 28, but it may fall heavily on the Defense Department, an unflaggingly loyal client that has kept buying fuel from BP since the company’s errors caused its well to disgorge nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The agency’s order temporarily bars new contracting with the oil giant by all federal agencies, although it does not interrupt existing government contracts, including the many large ones it has with the military. It also leaves the door open for BP to prove that it has reformed itself enough to requalify for federal contracts at some point in the future.

But the Pentagon might find itself scrambling if the ban is prolonged, since BP has been the military’s principal single fuel supplier for years and collected billions of dollars for fuel used by U.S. forces in the Middle East and elsewhere, a practice that drew criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and others.

“When someone recklessly crashes a car, their license and keys are taken away,” Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.), the senior Democrat on the Natural Resources committee, said in a prepared statement yesterday. “Suspending BP’s access to contracts with our government is the right thing to do.”

EPA acted two weeks after the corporation entered guilty pleas in federal court to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, related to the spill. It was not a speedy decision, however, since EPA employees began considering a contracting ban years ago in response to a BP oil spill in 2006 and a refinery explosion in 2005.

“What can you do with a general, when he stops being a general?” crooned Bing Crosby in the 1954 movie “White Christmas.” “Who’s got a job for a general when he stops being a general?”

Alas, the answer, 58 years later, is now clear. Retired generals don’t open ski resorts in Vermont.  Instead, they hunker down in Washington as the paid employees of corporations that draw most of their income from the service branch in which the generals worked. Once there, they work to maintain a stream of funding from the public treasury.

The revolving door between government service and private companies for those with beribboned chests is now an entrenched feature of life in Washington, according to a new report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

Updating a 2010 Boston Globe report that documented the practice, CREW found that over the last three years, 70 percent of the 108 three-and-four star generals and admirals who retired “took jobs with defense contractors or consultants.”

What’s more, CREW found, some of these same retirees were then appointed to Pentagon advisory boards, such as the Defense Policy Board. The study did not cite examples of improper decision-making, but said the retired generals’ advice to the Pentagon may not be “unbiased,” due to their new financial interests.

The Pentagon’s rules only require a one-year wait before retired generals can contact former colleagues still at the Pentagon on behalf of their new employer. But even before that brief period ends, they can provide useful advice to new bosses about how to tap into fresh revenue streams and tip them on  upcoming contract opportunities.

What do scientific experiments involving babies and robots have to do with excessively costly elementary schools and low-priced grocery stores for the elderly?

The answer is, these endeavors are all financed by the Department of Defense’s $629 billion annual budget, in what one Senator depicts as a spending free-for-all that adds to the federal deficit while diverting resources from genuine military needs.

The examples are cited in a 73-page report issued last week by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., that describes how cash-rich the Pentagon is and how distorted some of its spending priorities have become. “We highlight, as in every other agency, a lot of the stupid things that are happening,” said Coburn, a blunt-spoken family physician, at a press conference last week.

Coburn’s report suggests that the massive infusion of funds into the military budget over the past decade — it grew by two-thirds from 2000 to 2009 — has prompted some scientific researchers to treat the Defense Department’s budget like a piggybank for questionable projects.

He mentions the Office of Naval Research’s recent effort to track how babies interact with robots, which concluded after much observation that “if you want to build a companion robot, it is not sufficient to make it look human … the robot must be able to interact socially.” The Pentagon defended the study, funded under a $450,000 grant, as necessary to “enhance and improve warfighter ability” to work with robots. But Coburn’s report called it a useless confirmation of “common sense,” with no connection to national security.

Fred Humphries does not fit the stereotype of an FBI agent as cool and unemotional. In person, the man who helped initiate the investigation of CIA Director David Petraeus comes across as a passionate and empathetic person.

Until this week, Humphries was best known as the FBI agent who gleaned critical intelligence from an al-Qaida trained bomber in months of interrogations before the World Trade Center attack. Both a federal prosecutor and defense lawyer praised Humphries for the rapport he developed with Ahmed Ressam, the man convicted of a plot to detonate a bomb in the Los Angeles International Airport.

Humphries interrogations are credited with saving lives, most notably in helping authorities defuse the shoe bomb smuggled onto a commercial jet by Richard Reid. But Humphries raised a few eyebrows when he was called by defense lawyers to testify at sentencing that Ressam provided useful information.

Humphries sat down with a reporter from the Center for Public Integrity last year to talk about his personal beliefs opposing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques employed after 9/11. Humphries described torture as both immoral and ineffective.

In the interview, Humphries said brutal techniques only lead to bad information. While he stressed that he does not condone Ressam’s actions, he said the key to getting cooperation was to try to put himself in Ressam’s shoes.

“As an agent, it’s not my position to judge,” he said. “I’m just there to find facts.”

President Obama and Congress now have just over seven weeks to reach an agreement on the federal budget that would avert a round of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts in defense and social programs that members of both parties have depicted as draconian.

Jan. 1 is the deadline set by the so-called “sequestration” law of 2010 that imposes substantial cuts automatically – over a ten-year period – if the government fails to whack away at the federal deficit. Front and center in the punishment will be the Defense Department, which accounts for a fifth of all federal spending and about a half of so-called “discretionary” funds, or those that lawmakers review and approve annually.

Fifty program areas at the Pentagon would collectively take a roughly $500 billion hit, which seems like a lot but would actually be less than ten percent of the $5.8 trillion that the Obama administration wants the Pentagon to spend from 2013 to 2021. Military leaders have complained fiercely, partly because the Obama administration last year chose to halt a planned 16 percent increase in defense spending, keeping the military’s budget essentially level after a decade of steep growth.

Only a few Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they want to cut defense programs deeply, but both parties agreed in the legislation to hold the military’s budget hostage to force a deal. The Democrats’ aim, in particular, was to force the Republicans to raise taxes on the wealthy by threatening to kill military programs that the party faithful traditionally cherish. The Republicans supported the deal because it pushed the issue beyond the election – now just concluded – and because they knew that a disagreement would also harm social programs that Democrats cherish.  

A culture of cheating pervades the guard force at America’s premier processing and storage site for nuclear weapons-grade uranium, according to a new report this week by the Energy Department’s inspector general.

Contract officers and supervisors of the force at the Y-12 plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee, shared advance copies of test materials with patrolmen, said inspector general Gregory H. Friedman, rendering their responses unreliable. But he put the blame squarely on the Energy Department for mismanaging the facility’s operations.

The abuses he cited are not new. Eight years ago, Friedman blew the whistle on even worse cheating by the Y-12 guard force, disclosing that for years they obtained advance word of mock assaults meant to test their capabilities, and carefully redeployed their forces to produce impressive but faked results.

But this time, Friedman suggested the problem was not isolated. A contract official who works both at Y-12 and another “high-security DOE” site told Friedman’s staff that the official “had taken similar actions” to share written test materials in advance with the managers of that site’s guard force, his report stated.

Friedman’s report did not name the second site, but two government officials confirmed it is the sensitive facility known as Pantex, in Amarillo, Tex., the government’s principal factory for assembling, taking apart, and storing plutonium triggers for its nuclear arsenal. As a result, the reliability of the protective force for key components of that arsenal in two locations can now be considered open to question.

Closely-fought presidential campaigns can confound expectations by constricting — rather than broadening — public debate about significant policy issues, a phenomenon most recently on display during the debate between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Rep. Paul D. Ryan.

The two men, offering a preview of the foreign policy issues expected to arise at the Oct. 16 and Oct. 22 debates between President Obama and Mitt Romney, mostly competed to demonstrate the muscularity of their teams’ approaches to a vexing set of international challenges.

Each vowed their party would play tough with Iran and stick by the current hard line leadership in Israel; spend whatever is needed for critical U.S. military operations and forces; safely extract U.S. troops from Afghanistan; and efficiently engineer the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Ryan argued that Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapon has been relentless, and that it is closer now to achieving its goal than it was when Obama won election. Biden responded that Iran is more isolated now than ever before, and said international sanctions are seriously harming the Iranian economy.

Both men were actually right, but their convictions masked the fact that much mystery remains about how the drama over the Iranian program will play out.

Will the toll of tough sanctions eventually cause Iranian citizens to sack their leadership and reverse course? Could that happen soon? Will the sanctions — or the threat of the government’s ouster by its own citizens — convince Iran’s leaders never to mate fissile materials with the other components of a working bomb? Or will the heightened foreign pressures only goad Iran to move faster and farther along the nuclear path?

President Barack Obama signed an executive order last week creating new protections for national security and intelligence community whistleblowers, effectively sidestepping a congressional impasse provoked by the reservations of congressional Republicans.

The order — formally known as "Presidential Policy Directive 19" and signed by Obama out of public view on Oct. 10 and without a White House announcement — directs intelligence agencies to establish procedures for the protection of employees reporting waste, fraud and abuse.

The order is meant to address longstanding concerns that whistleblowers in the intelligence agencies lacked legal protections like those available to employees of the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

The new order bans retaliation against whistleblowers in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other intelligence organizations. Until now, these agencies were not specifically prohibited from retaliating against whistleblowers. 

A House bill aimed at improving protections for most federal employees, known as the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act and passed by that chamber in September, lacked the safeguards ordered by Obama. Angela Canterbury, from the Washington, D.C. watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said House Republicans had narrowed the bill’s focus due to worries that its provisions might encourage Wikileaks-type disclosures of sensitive information.

She called this a "red herring," explaining that by protecting those with security clearances who want to blow the whistle on wrongdoing at intelligence agencies, a new law could have encouraged them to “use safe internal channels.” The Senate has yet to take up its own version of the bill.

An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department’s “fusion centers” created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report’s tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The centers were created with great fanfare over the past decade by Washington with the aim of redressing gaps in intelligence-sharing among local, state and federal officials — gaps documented by probes of the period before the Sept. 2001 attacks, when some of the attackers were stopped by police for traffic violations or other reasons, and then released.

In July 2009, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called the fusion centers “a critical part of our nation's homeland security capabilities.”  About 70 of the centers now exist, located in major cities and nearly all states.