WASHINGTON, D.C., December 10, 2008 — The eight-year tenure of the Bush administration was marked by more than 125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government. That’s the bottom-line conclusion of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity’s Broken Government project, an in-depth digital report that illuminates each breakdown with a separate story tracking its causes, effects, and implications.

The project is a comprehensive assessment of executive branch failures over the course of the Bush presidency; the failures occurred in areas as diverse as education, energy, the environment, justice and security, the military and veterans affairs, health care, transportation, financial management, consumer and worker safety, and more. While some of these failures are, by now, depressingly familiar, many are less known but equally troubling.

Among the examples:

• a Food and Drug Administration unable to guarantee the safety of food or drugs
• a National Aeronautics and Space Administration inspector general who blocked multiple investigations
• a budget deficit that ballooned to $455 billion for fiscal year 2008, and could reach $1 trillion in fiscal year 2009
• an Environmental Protection Agency that ignored and underutilized its own office and task force on children’s health
• a Securities and Exchange Commission that sat largely on the sidelines, allowing little-understood new financial instruments to undermine the pillars of the economy
• a Federal Labor Relations Board with neither a general counsel nor the quorum needed to handle hundreds of complaints regarding unfair labor practices
• a terrorist detention system based at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, whose legality has repeatedly been challenged by the courts

Many of the failures are rooted in recurring themes: agency appointees selected primarily for ideology and loyalty, rather than competence; agency heads who overruled staff experts and suppressed reports that did not coincide with administration philosophy; agency-industry collusion; a bedrock belief in the wisdom of deregulation; extensive private outsourcing of public functions; a general failure to exercise government’s oversight responsibilities; and severely slashed budgets at understaffed agencies that often left them unable to execute basic administrative functions.

“The Center for Public Integrity has sought to compile a damage assessment of the past eight years as part of an accounting process for the American public,” said Center Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. “The project also has important implications for a new administration and Congress as they seek to avoid these problems and improve the regulatory process.”

The Center’s Broken Government project features a searchable online list of the executive branch failures — with a story accompanying each one. The project involved a team of 13 reporters, researchers, and editors that sifted through hundreds of inspectors general reports, Government Accountability Office assessments, congressional investigations, and news stories to document a comprehensive list of federal government failures across 15 categories. The team interviewed more than a hundred experts, congressional staffers, and leaders of government watchdog organizations, and sent e-mails to more than 4,800 federal government employees to solicit nominations for inclusion in this project. Some 250 failures were nominated for inclusion in the project, from which editors selected more than 125 for the Center’s initial report — those that elicited bipartisan criticism, but also had a discernible impact on ordinary people.

The project’s website is searchable by category, federal agency, and individual failure. The Center also invites the public to submit additional executive branch failure nominations, which may be added to the list. Another online feature: a Broken Government breakdown by the numbers.