The Center for Public Integrity

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.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush referred to Social Security reform as the “test of presidential candidates” — a test he planned to pass by aggressively pushing his version of reform, without regard for the always touchy politics of Social Security’s finances. Experts agree the program demands changes to survive. “The baby boomers’ retirement, starting this year, ushers in a permanent shift to an older population — and a permanent rise in the cost of Social Security,” said the nonpartisan Concord Coalition. “Finding a cure for the challenges facing Social Security will require reduced benefits, increased revenues, or both.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has urged early action to ensure Social Security’s financial solvency and provide future generations with the same benefits as current retirees. The GAO has reported that trust funds supporting Social Security would be exhausted by 2042. In 2005, the president produced his plan, which would have partially “privatized” Social Security by allowing workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes into private accounts. But Democrats were adamantly opposed to the privatization plan, so Bush managed only to form a study commission on Social Security that ultimately yielded no real solutions. The administration also spent $2.8 million to campaign for its unsuccessful privatization proposal. Congress seemed to have no appetite for seriously addressing Social Security’s finances, so no meaningful action has been forthcoming. Mark Lassiter, press officer for the Social Security Administration, told the Center “there is a need for reform and it must be done in a bipartisan manner.”

In 2006, U.S. Customs and Border Protection decided to outdo the border walls of the past and build a great barrier of data — a system of ground sensors, remote-control cameras, and radars that transmit real-time data to border agents — along the U.S.–Mexican border. But as of late 2008, only 28 miles of the “virtual” fence, known officially as the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBInet, are up and running. The finished job is expected to run 6,000 miles along the northern and southern borders of the United States at a cost of $30 billion. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded the initial $2 billion contract for the project to Boeing, which promised to have large sections of the fence up and running by 2008. The first phase ran six months late and used commercially-available technology that was replaced almost immediately with fancier gadgets. In theory, border agents can use the information to intercept illegal transit, but after taking the pilot project for a test-run, border agents told the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that it was “not an optimal system” for their needs. From the program’s inception, the GAO warned about the vagueness of the requirements set out in the contracting order, a problem that plagued two predecessors, the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System and America’s Shield Initiative. Now land-management issues have delayed the project. A September 2008 agreement with the Department of the Interior over DHS’s use of government land should have come through last July, but DHS failed to file the necessary paperwork. The department also will have to grab private property from some border land owners by eminent domain. Testifying before Congress in September, Randolph C.

The nation’s airports have been plagued by an alarming rise in dangerous runway incidents, but the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) response has been criticized as inadequate by a host of oversight bodies. So-called runway incursions — incidents in which aircraft, vehicles, or persons create a collision hazard — have appeared on the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) Most Wanted list of issues demanding improvement ever since 1990. At least 112 people have lost their lives due to incursion accidents since the issue first appeared on the NTSB list. Thousands more have faced harrowing close calls; among airports, Los Angeles International and Chicago O’Hare experienced the most incursions between 2001 and 2007. After a substantial rise in runway incursions from 1999 to 2001 (from 329 incidents up to 407), the FAA acted to curb the trend through regionally-based runway safety efforts, an education program, and creation of a runway safety office at agency headquarters. But the incursion rate began to rise again after 2003, and 2007 saw a 12 percent increase in incidents over the year before. That prompted criticism from the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Office of Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the NTSB, which called the FAA response “unacceptable.” The FAA had not updated its runway safety plan after 2002 despite planning to do so every two to three years, and it let the director’s chair in its Office of Runway Safety sit unfilled for nearly three years as staff levels halved, leading the inspector general to name runway incursions as a Top Management Challenge of 2008.

A 2007 Center for Public Integrity investigation found that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program had lost critical momentum and massive amounts of funding since the turn of the century, bringing further risk to the quarter of the nation’s population living within three miles of a hazardous waste site. The Center found the start rate for site cleanups from 2001 to 2006 had fallen by two-thirds from the previous six-year period, and while EPA completed construction work at an average of 79 sites per year from 1995 through 2000, that rate dropped to an average of 42 per year from 2001 to 2006. Officials argued this was due to the increased complexity of newer sites after previous cleanups picked the “low-hanging fruit,” but that failed to explain the decline in money retrieved from industry to reimburse EPA for cleanups — from more than $300 million in 1999 to just about $60 million in 2006. When Congress created the Superfund program in 1980, lawmakers established a trust fund supported by a tax on petroleum products and chemicals, and enabled EPA to push responsible parties to reimburse the agency after cleanups. The Superfund tax comprised more than two-thirds of that trust fund until 1995, when Congress allowed the tax to expire. After that, the bulk of trust fund money came from Congressional appropriations, which have been declining when adjusted for inflation. As a result, the trust fund balance declined from $4.7 billion at the start of fiscal year 1997 to $173 million at the start of fiscal year 2007. Experts said the erosion of the trust fund meant the agency no longer had the money to clean up sites first and stick industry with the bill afterward.

Senior federal employees are leaving their jobs at abnormally high rates at agencies charged with fighting terrorism. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), senior-level employees left their jobs in 2005 and 2006 at a rate of 14.5 and 12.8 percent, respectively — double the average rate for such positions at all cabinet-level departments, according to the Government Accountability Office. The consolidation of 22 agencies under DHS is the biggest reorganization of the federal government since Harry Truman created the Department of Defense in 1947, and its growing pains are apparent. An internal survey that tracks federal employees’ satisfaction, the Federal Human Capital Survey, has measured low levels of job satisfaction at DHS since the department’s creation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also had trouble retaining staff for its counterterrorism operations. In 2007, the inspector general at the Department of Justice wrote that “the frequent rotations and turnover within its senior management ranks” is inhibiting the FBI’s transformation into an intelligence-gathering agency. A study by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2008 found that the FBI needed to fill 20 percent of supervisory positions in the section at FBI headquarters that deals with al Qaeda-related cases. High attrition rates in crucial spots weaken organizational memory and effectiveness; these civil servants are on the front line of homeland security and need to be running at full throttle.

The plan was to open the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — America’s largest embassy — in July 2007 at a cost of $592 million. But like so many other U.S. projects in Iraq, things went awry. The final price tag came in at $736 million; the building didn’t open for business until April 2008; and the project spawned at least one investigation. In the country where the American diplomatic mission is the largest and arguably the most critical in the world, the 1,000 U.S. government employees had to wait months for their embassy to be declared complete. The delay resulted from a controversy with construction contractors and safety concerns pointed out by State Department inspectors. The chief contractor for the embassy compound, First Kuwaiti, had never built an embassy before and said it did not know that certain building materials had to be approved by the State Department. Plus, internal documents suggest that officials in Baghdad rushed to meet construction deadlines, leaving safety risks unresolved. This delayed the project for months while State inspectors examined the embassy. What they found were hundreds of violations of the contract, along with bursting pipes and fire safety code violations. Repairs and remediation needed to address safety concerns added to the already climbing price for the embassy. The State Department is also investigating its Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which reportedly hired contractors whose charges were unjustifiably expensive. The State Department press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, told The Washington Post that he was pleased with the work done by First Kuwaiti. “The contractor has not shirked any of their responsibilities,” he said.