The Center for Public Integrity

The disastrous hurricane season of 2005 caught the Small Business Administration (SBA) napping. The SBA’s disaster loan program is the primary way homeowners and small-business owners receive federal funding to recover after a catastrophe. The SBA, however, never considered how it would react to an event the size of Hurricane Katrina, which was followed within the next 60 days by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma. Collectively the storms wreaked an estimated $118 billion in property damage, only a small portion of which was eligible for SBA action, across the Gulf Coast region. Within four months, SBA had a backlog of more than 204,000 applications for assistance.

Each application represented a hurricane victim waiting for the capital to rebuild. “I was amazed at how the delays, affecting the livelihood of my small business, did not seem to be important,” one owner told the House Small Business Committee in March 2006. “Time is critical in these situations. . . . [W]e still have nothing!” In April 2006, the SBA’s administrator, Hector Barreto, announced his resignation. When the SBA’s inspector assessed the situation in May 2006, the SBA was taking about 74 days on average to process an application, far longer than the 21 days the agency had set as its goal. Ultimately, the agency dispersed more than $6 billion in loans.

Follow-up:
In response to a request for comment, an agency spokeswoman noted that, under the SBA’s new administrator, Steven Preston, the application backlog diminished. The agency says it has positioned itself for future disasters by adding an Executive Office of Disaster Strategic Planning and Operations, drawing up a “comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan, and setting up an online system for loan applications.”

More than a decade after the creation of its Office of Children’s Health Protection, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has marginalized the agency’s only center for assessing risks to children, according to government auditors. Children are particularly vulnerable to environmental hazards: Asthma and autism are on the rise, while four children’s diseases of environmental origin cost the nation an estimated $55 billion per year. The Office of Children’s Health Protection was founded in 1997 by the Clinton Administration, which also that year issued an executive order creating the Presidential Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children. Neither group has fared well.

A September 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation found that the EPA had failed to effectively engage or value the input of the office’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC). And President Bush allowed the task force to expire in 2005, leaving the EPA with no “high-level infrastructure or mandate” for children’s environmental health and safety, according to the GAO. Largely ignored by EPA officials, the committee on its own wrote more than 70 letters with hundreds of recommendations over the past decade. The GAO looked at three air quality standard proposals on particulate matter, ozone, and lead, and found that EPA officials either “did not acknowledge, was noncommittal, rejected, or offered only to consider [CHPAC recommendations] along with comments from the general public.” The EPA argues that much of the committee’s value comes from its verbal input during presentations and discussions. An EPA spokesman said the agency does indeed appreciate and rely on the committee’s advice and will “continue cross-agency collaborations to address the recommendations.”

America’s air traffic control system has essentially not changed much since the 1960s — and that’s more than a little alarming. Numerous attempts to upgrade the system have failed, so the nation still relies on decades-old technology at a time when American aviation is suffering from some of the worst delays in its history. And the situation will only get worse, say experts: Airlines have turned to smaller airplanes and are putting them in the sky more often — with the load expected to either double or triple by 2025. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) first moved toward a modernization program in 1981, but attempts to make major technological leaps forward have fallen short, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has listed modernization of air traffic control as a “high risk” project since 1995; One attempt at modernization went so poorly that it has been taught to students as “a case study for failure,” according to an FAA press officer. Experts have said that multiple obstacles hindered previous efforts — such as an FAA culture resistant to change, a shortage of technical expertise, and cumbersome federal budget rules. The Bush administration and Congress agreed on a new concept in 2003 known as NextGen, a computerized system relying on global satellite positioning that significantly boosts capacity by enabling planes to safely fly closer together on more direct paths. NextGen, which is expected to cost between $15 billion and $22 billion by 2025, could face a host of challenges. Despite the potential for saving up to $10 billion annually on fuel, air carriers have raised objections and expressed wariness at relying upon unproven technology. Air traffic controllers, who historically have had a rocky relationship with the FAA, would face fundamental changes in their job duties under NextGen.

The fine particle pollution that blasts into the air from diesel vehicles and power plants is a health threat well-understood by scientists — causing an estimated 20,000 deaths a year and hospitalizing many more in the United States. But faced with this issue, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the first time in three decades ignored the advice of its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) on air quality standards. Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson said his 2006 ruling on National Ambient Air Quality Standards for fine particulate matter was “based on the best available science,” as required by the Clean Air Act. But it wasn’t clear what science he was referring to. The CASAC’s disagreements with the parent agency were echoed by the American Medical Association, American Thoracic Society, American Lung Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and American Public Health Association. EPA did issue a rule requiring that daily exposure levels to fine particulate matter be cut nearly in half by single or multi-county “areas,” to fit just within the revised window recommended by CASAC. But when the committee also recommended toughening the annual air standard for fine particulate matter, EPA disregarded the request.

Critics believe a lack of government regulation helped fuel questionable accounting practices — practices that allowed the huge energy trading firm Enron to report profits of hundreds of millions of dollars ($979 million in 2000, alone) before collapsing in 2001, in what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. The erosion of accounting practices was believed to have begun in the 1980s, as firms tried to balance strict standards with a desire to please clients and expand consulting business, but the scandals burst into public view under President George W. Bush. Certainly by the time Bush was elected, there was ample reason to question the overall validity of corporate financial statements, given that restatements of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings had skyrocketed from just three in 1981 to 270 in 2001. (The SEC says some of the blame lies with the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the private nonprofit organization it designated to set rules for corporate financial disclosure. In 2000, for example, it adopted a rule allowing companies, including Enron, to keep certain holdings off their balance sheets.)

In October 2008, a draft intelligence assessment found that, despite the seven-year presence of U.S. troops, Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” as the Taliban renews its influence over the country it once controlled. The draft National Intelligence Estimate, a formal document that reflects the consensus judgments of all 16 American intelligence agencies, faults the Afghan central government for the deteriorating situation, including rampant government corruption, as well as the country’s booming and destabilizing heroin trade. The New York Times reported that the assessment’s “conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.” Critics have long said that the war in Iraq has distracted from the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and that a lack of troops has hampered attempts to fully secure the country. Furthermore, the Taliban has established the border area in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas as a base for incursions into Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has weak control over these areas and violence in Afghanistan has increased markedly, starting in 2005. A U.S. effort to encourage the Pakistani government to control Taliban and Al Qaeda militants has failed to end the safe haven.

On March 27, 2002, President George W. Bush quietly signed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, commonly known as “McCain-Feingold” or “Shays-Meehan,” but a major loophole in the legislation effectively replaced one problem with another. The bill banned “soft money” — a type of unlimited contributions from individuals, committees, and corporations to national political parties and candidates — but left in place a weak enforcement system that has resulted in little regulation of contributions to independent committees, including so-called 501(c)(4) and 527 groups. With large donors no longer permitted to donate millions of dollars to the national parties, wealthy activists on both sides began to create external groups that drew more and more of the political contributions — groups such as America Coming Together, the Progress for America Voter Fund, Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund. The Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) slow, deliberative investigative process appeals to the independent groups, enabling them to have a major impact during the election cycle while risking only after-the-fact legal action. These tax-exempt groups raised large amounts of money from supporters, spent millions of dollars on advertising, and ultimately were fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by the FEC — but not until more than two years after the election, when the groups had largely ceased their activity. Paul S. Ryan of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center told the Center that under the current system, he finds it “difficult to envision these groups seeing fines as more than the cost of doing business.” And the proliferation continues. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, national 527s spent and raised roughly $200 million in the 2008 election cycle.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) lengthened and complicated the government’s process for assessing the potential dangers of toxic chemicals, according to a March 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Though hundreds of new chemicals enter the marketplace each year, the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) database, which is used to develop human risk assessments, includes information on only about 540 of them. The GAO found that while the EPA set a goal for finalizing 50 such chemical risk assessments annually, the agency had fallen well behind, with only four finalized over the previous two years. Yet recent changes to IRIS not only delayed the process, according to the GAO, but swept away transparency. The new rules allow other executive agencies to sit in from the beginning of the assessment process, including the Department of Defense, which has a multibillion-dollar interest in the decision to regulate and clean up certain chemicals.

The U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has held hundreds of detainees without charging them with a crime. The White House conceived of Guantanamo as an extralegal zone for hardened terrorists whom it unilaterally declared were exempt from the Geneva Conventions. There, terrorists would have no recourse to the American legal system, lawyers at the Department of Justice argued; instead, they could be imprisoned for as long as the government saw fit. In June 2004, the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s plan and declared that the foreign nationals held at Guantanamo had the right to petition for their release in U.S. courts. Once forced to confront the legal status of its prisoners, the Department of Defense (DOD) began releasing or transferring many of the inmates. By October 2004, the United States had released 202 detainees from the prison camp and between late 2004 and March 2005 the remaining 558 detainees passed through “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” which determined that 520 of these prisoners were "enemy combatants." By 2008, however, after further review of cases and intervention by U.S. courts, the number of prisoners held at Guantanamo dropped to approximately 255, according to the Pentagon. Another 60 or so have been cleared for release but can not be repatriated because their home country refused to accept them or due to other diplomatic complications. Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have struggled to obtain documents from the U.S. military believed to contain evidence against their clients, and in some cases, the United States has had to drop prosecutions of Guantanamo inmates because much of their case was built on evidence obtained through interrogation methods widely considered to be torture.

Few incidents have done more damage to America’s image in the world than the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. In late April 2004, Americans got their first glimpse of the haunting photographs of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad: scenes of naked, humiliated prisoners piled on top of one another, some forced to assume sexual positions, all while American soldiers posed nearby, smiling at the camera. The photos provoked an instant outcry around the world. In addressing the scandal, President Bush insisted that it was the fault of a few dishonorable soldiers, not a systematic problem with how the U.S. was managing the war in Iraq — but investigations suggest that the blame likely rises higher up the military’s chain of command. Some senior officials, such as General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military prisons in Iraq, were reprimanded and suspended. But the blame mainly fell on low-level soldiers, who were convicted and sent to prison for participating in sexual abuse, beatings, and other brutal acts. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said news of the abuse “stunned him.” But a military report by Major General Antonio Taguba found that the prison was overcrowded, undermanned, and short of resources, making accountability for prisoner treatment rare. Taguba also noted in 2004 that the Central Intelligence Agency had serious concerns about the kinds of interrogation techniques military forces used on detainees. But Taguba wasn’t permitted to delve much deeper; an article in The New Yorker in 2007 reported that military investigators were not allowed to look into the role of Rumsfeld and other Department of Defense officials. What is known is that the Pentagon found out about the existence of the photos in January 2004 and Taguba filed his report in March. President Bush knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib at least by March, but he did not address the issue until the media publicized it in late April.