WASHINGTON, D.C., January 7, 2009 — As America approaches a historic transfer of power, it is becoming ever-clearer what a daunting set of tasks awaits the new administration. When President-Elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office at noon on January 20, he inherits not only a collapsing economy and two wars, but also a federal government whose machinery should bear an “out of order” sign.

Broken Government, a project of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, provides an inventory of just what’s broken — an inventory that can serve as a blueprint for what needs fixing. The Center found that the eight-year tenure of the Bush administration was marked by more than 125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government. The in-depth digital report, first released in December, illuminates each breakdown with a separate story tracking its causes, effects, and implications. Broken Government also includes an interactive feature asking readers to rank what they believe are the top 10 government failures.

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:

• An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission whose budgetary constraints, hiring freeze, and imposing caseloads have created a massive backlog of employment discrimination complaints.
• A National Aeronautics and Space Administration inspector general who blocked multiple investigations.
• A Consumer Product Safety Commission that has lacked the needed budget and quorum to protect citizens against dangerous products.
• An Environmental Protection Agency that ignored and underutilized its own office and task force on children’s health.
• A Federal Labor Relations Board with neither a general counsel nor the quorum needed to handle hundreds of complaints regarding unfair labor practices.
• A Department of Homeland Security that is tracking the arrival of millions of international visitors to the United States each year — but cannot figure out when or if they have departed.

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’s list of 128 systematic Bush administration failures reflects some recurring – and troubling – themes,” said Center Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. “While every administration has its share of political debacles, the past eight years of the Bush administration appear especially stark – lack of effective and independent oversight, agency appointees selected for ideology and loyalty over competence, support for business and special interests over citizen and consumer interests, and overall, an executive branch that has proved unable to meet many of its most basic obligations to the American public.”

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 100 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 online its own executive branch failure nominations, which may be added to the list.