WASHINGTON, D.C., June 10, 2009 — Despite the Pentagon’s hefty budget, Department of Defense personnel routinely accept free flights, accommodations, and hospitality from private and foreign interests that do business with the Pentagon, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of thousands of travel disclosure records. From 1998 through 2007, the Center’s year-long analysis found, outside sources paid for more than 22,000 trips worth at least $26 million. The travel was sponsored by an array of companies, foreign governments, and other groups.

These free trips have become riddled with conflicts of interest and are in need of stronger oversight and stiffer regulations, say watchdog groups. “This is the kind of behavior that should be barred without a loophole,” says Winslow Wheeler of the nonprofit Center for Defense Information.

The Defense Department does not have electronic records of the travel disclosure forms; the Center for Public Integrity is making a searchable database available for the first time.

“Our mission is to make hidden financial dealings public, and in that way make institutional power more accountable,” says the Center’s Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. “The Pentagon Travel project, like the Center’s groundbreaking work on lobbyist-paid Congressional travel, provides government transparency that is sorely needed when billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake.” To that end, the Center’s staff is delivering copies of the report to every member of Congress this morning.

The Pentagon travel records were originally submitted in paper form to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The documents were digitized and sorted in a joint project by the Center for Public Integrity and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Using computer-assisted reporting techniques, Center staff then compiled the records and analyzed the trends.

Among the Center for Public Integrity’s findings:

• The medical industry paid for more travel than any other single interest – over $10 million for some 8,700 trips, or about 40 percent of all outside sponsored travel. Among the targets: military pharmacists, doctors, and others who administer the Pentagon’s $6 billion-plus annual budget for prescription drugs;
• Foreign governments paid more than $2.6 million for 1,500 trips. The biggest sponsors: U.S. allies Australia, Singapore, and Japan, but the list also includes China, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates;
• Manufacturers of retail goods paid for more than 500 trips, at a cost of about $470,000. Their targets included buyers at on-base retail outlets, which sold more than $12 billion of merchandise in 2007. Among the sponsors: Nike, Skechers, Mattel, and Sony;
• Thousands of the trips took place to popular vacation spots such as San Diego, Las Vegas, Honolulu, San Remo and Venice, Italy, and Jeju Island, South Korea. Among the guests were spouses, who participated in at least 240 of the trips.

The stories, “Thousands of Free Trips Taken by Pentagon Staff“ and “Medical Industry Showers DOD with Free Travel,” were written by Center staff writers M.B. Pell and Aaron Mehta.