The Center for Public Integrity

Despite early promises of openness, the Bush administration has drawn widespread criticism for its stark lack of transparency. Rates of declassification under the Bush White House nosedived to a fraction of what was done under the Clinton administration, while new classification of documents reached a 15-year high. Open government watchdogs cite numerous examples of excessive secrecy, among them: an October 2001 memo by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed nearly 40 years of presumed openness under the Freedom of Information Act; an executive order allowed current and former presidents to delay the release of presidential papers indefinitely; widespread use of “Sensitive But Unclassified” markings prevented public release and interagency sharing of material; and the administration refused to share with Congress information pertaining to, among other areas, the Vice President’s National Energy Policy Development Group. The cost to taxpayers of securing government secrets reached a record $9.91 billion in 2007, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office. Bush’s ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan decried his former boss and the administration’s inner circle for being “the most secretive administration” in the history of Washington. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Bush administration officials have in the past argued that the 9/11 attacks and ensuing war on terrorism demanded greater information security and secrecy.

Follow-up:
During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama vowed to “turn the page on a growing empire of classified information and restore the balance we’ve lost between the necessarily secret and the necessity of openness in a democratic society.”

Despite the passage of new laws designed to protect them, whistleblowers have found themselves largely unprotected during the Bush administration. Six years ago, the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, also known as the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance act, was passed in response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Provisions in the law made it illegal for publicly-traded companies to retaliate against “any other office, employee, contractor, subcontractor, or agent” of a company for acting as a whistleblower. Despite these strong provisions, the Department of Labor has ruled in favor of whistleblowers who claimed to be retaliated against only 17 times out of 1,273 complaints that were filed between 2002 and September 2008. Of those, 841 cases were dismissed, many on the technicality that the whistleblowers work for subsidiaries of the companies, not the main companies themselves. The Labor Department has argued that the statute does not cover employees of those subsidiaries. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, who together drafted the protections, counter that there is no basis for this reading of the law. It is not just corporate whistleblowers who are not receiving the protection they expect; federal whistleblowers also find themselves without cover. In June 2008 a coalition of 112 independent groups urged the Senate and House to pass a new bill increasing whistleblower protection for federal employees. This call came after only two of 53 whistleblowers who brought cases to the Merit System Protection Board during the first three months of 2008 were victorious.

The Bush administration has consistently drawn ire from the scientific community for its propensity to ignore, manipulate, and suppress science. From its earliest days, the administration demonstrated a lack of interest or, say critics, even disdain for science by allowing key scientific posts to go unfilled for over a year — including Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, National Institutes of Health director, and surgeon general. The FDA job took 20 months to fill, while the eventual surgeon general, Richard Carmona, ultimately accused the administration of political interference. In addition, a presidential science adviser was not chosen for nine months, and then was demoted in status from “assistant to the president” to “adviser.”

In the confusion that reigned on September 11, 2001, the U.S. military was never positioned to shoot down any of the hijacked planes and even sent fighters after one of the flights long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center. “The civilian and military defenders of the nation's airspace — FAA [the Federal Aviation Administration] and NORAD [the North American Aerospace Defense Command] — were unprepared for the attacks launched against them,” the 9/11 Commission concluded. “Given that lack of preparedness, they attempted and failed to improvise an effective homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge.” Despite statements by Bush administration officials that it was unimaginable that terrorists would use hijacked places as missiles to crash into planes, NORAD actually ran drills in preparation for that scenario – which proved ineffective. Confronted by an actual attack, Air Force officials “did not know where to go or what targets they were to intercept.” according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “And once the shootdown order was given, it was not communicated to the pilots,” The 9/11 Commission had to dig to uncover the extent of the U.S. air defense system’s failure, including issuing subpoenas to both the FAA and NORAD to learn the truth, which was at odds with agency officials’ statements. Some Commission members reportedly urged a criminal investigation; instead, the matter was turned over to the inspectors general of the Transportation and Defense departments to determine whether to make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. The inspectors general found no evidence that officials were knowingly misleading.

The United States planned poorly for the post-invasion administration of Iraq, contributing to the rise of a broad insurgency and the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The blame can be cast widely. An official Army history of the Iraq conflict found that "the Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better . . . planning and preparations. . . ." A RAND Corporation study concluded that the State Department’s “main postwar planning effort . . . raised many of the right questions. . . . Yet the Department of Defense largely ignored this project." Rand also found that much of the confusion between the State and Defense departments stemmed from poor direction from the National Security Council, which failed to mediate disputes between the departments. Others blame the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, which issued two orders that disbanded the Iraqi military and gutted the Iraqi government by banning members of the Ba'ath Party. Critics say those decisions, which took many U.S. civilian and military leaders by surprise, contributed to the rise in violence. Before Bremer replaced him as director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner drafted a postwar plan for Iraq, which he introduced with, “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.”

As far back as the 1980s, studies warned that the collection of levees, walls, and floodgates that surrounded New Orleans might not withstand a storm as strong as Hurricane Katrina. Despite this, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers neglected to update a system that, in retrospect, appears to have been destined to fail. And so when Katrina hit in 2005, storm surges broke down the walls and flooded the city, causing a level of death and destruction that shocked the nation. “This is the first time that the Corps of Engineers has had to stand up and say, ‘We had a catastrophic failure in one of our projects,’” conceded then-corps chief Lieutenant General Carl Strock. As John McQuaid reported in City Adrift, the Center’s investigation into Hurricane Katrina, federal and state panels traced, respectively, 70 percent and 88 percent of the flooding to errors in design of the hurricane protection system. A federal panel, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET), called the barriers “a system in name only.” Corps scientists knew in the 1980s that the New Orleans levees could not repel category 4 and 5 hurricanes. Robert Bea, who helped lead an investigation of the levee system by University of California at Berkeley engineers, told McQuaid that the Corps’s resistance to change slowed the adoption of new technology. After the storm, the Corps restored flood protection in New Orleans to its pre-Katrina levels, relying in some places on temporary fixes.

A series of audits by the Department of Justice (DOJ) has documented stunningly lax security for laptop computers owned by federal law enforcement agencies. A 2007 report by DOJ’s Inspector General pegged the number of laptops lost, missing, or stolen from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at 160 over 44 months. In many cases, the FBI “could not determine whether the lost or stolen laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information.” A 2008 DOJ audit of the Drug Enforcement Administration found 231 laptops went missing over 66 months. Another audit that year of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) found 418 laptops gone over 59 months. The reports are strewn with examples of missing or stolen computers that went completely or partly undocumented, making it difficult to determine if the laptops held secure information. And in many instances, the missing laptops had not had encryption technology installed that would keep someone from accessing sensitive information — on criminal targets or government informants. According to a 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, about 70 percent of laptops and handheld devices across the major government agencies lack recommended encryption software. Ultimately, these missing, unencrypted laptops increase the risk that national security might be compromised or that Americans might have their identities stolen.

Follow-up:
The GAO reported in June that agencies are working on installing appropriate encryption software, though “none had documented comprehensive plans.” As a result, said the report, “federal information may remain at increased risk of unauthorized disclosure, loss, and modification.”

The National Security Agency (NSA), the government agency responsible for collecting electronic data on threats to the United States, encountered major problems in managing its information systems and providing timely intelligence. A joint congressional inquiry found that the NSA apparently held relevant intercepts prior to the 9/11 attacks that were not processed until after the terrorists had already struck. In another case, the NSA failed to pass on Al Qaeda-related information gathered in 1998 to other intelligence agencies until 2002, due both to the agency’s missteps and its “deficiencies” in keeping up with modern communications. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NSA launched several secret initiatives to avoid such problems. One of these, called Trailblazer, became so plagued by problems that NSA expert Matthew Aid branded it potentially “the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community.”

In a tag-team move that shortchanged the public’s knowledge of environmental hazards, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) loosened reporting requirements on the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Congress created the TRI database in 1986 to allow the public to track toxic chemical emissions. The 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, and a subsequent West Virginia chemical plant leak inspired a system in which facilities discharging or disposing of at least 500 pounds of toxic chemicals per year were required to report totals to a public database. The system seemed to work for two decades. But despite American Chemistry Council data showing a near three-quarters reduction in toxic emissions since the program was enacted, in 2005 the EPA proposed raising the reporting threshold tenfold, while allowing facilities to report only every other year. The EPA said it was aiming to reduce the burden on industry to gather and report data on roughly 650 chemicals. The proposal met opposition from a dozen state attorneys general and health groups such as the American Lung Association and the Breast Cancer Fund. Even the American Petroleum Institute expressed doubts that the agency’s approach would achieve its goal of reducing the burden on industry. In addition to a critical letter from its own Science Advisory Board, the EPA received an overwhelming public response, with comments from 122,420 individuals and groups — all but 34 of whom expressed disapproval. Despite these objections, the EPA formally changed the rule in December 2006. The rule did stop short of the proposed 5,000-pound threshold, instead quadrupling the old reporting requirement from 500 to 2,000 pounds of annual toxic emissions. The Government Accountability Office found that more than 3,500 facilities would no longer have to report detailed information about their toxic chemical releases as a result.

The Clinton administration departed with an unprecedented $127 billion budget surplus, but two prolonged wars and a plummeting economy under President Bush have left the country reeling with a record-setting $455 billion deficit for fiscal year 2008. At a hefty $12 billion per month during 2008, the war in Iraq is one factor that accounts for the runaway red ink. The overall jump in annual defense spending, which ballooned from $295 billion in 2000 to $547 billion in 2007, was another factor. Meanwhile, the rising cost of health care, the economic downturn, and the Bush administration’s 2001 tax cuts have compounded the problem. (Without the tax cuts, for example, the nation would have had a budget surplus as late as 2005.) During Bush’s first year in office, the deficit stood at $32 billion; by 2002, the deficit had skyrocketed by nearly 1,000 percent to $317 billion.

In historic terms, the deficit remains a comparatively modest 3.2 percent of gross domestic product — as opposed to the deficits of the mid-1980s, which hit a record 6 percent of GDP after President Reagan’s tax cuts. But that’s scant comfort for citizens who have watched record surpluses turn into historic deficits, with more bad news likely on the horizon. In September, Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle blamed the deficit on “the slow economy and the bipartisan decision to enact a stimulus package.” The solution, said Nussle: growing the economy “by keeping spending in check.”

Follow-up:
In October 2008, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit for FY 2009 could reach up to $700 billion. But that was before the full impact of the slumping economy and the financial bailout became clear; now some experts say the deficit may rise to a staggering $1 trillion in 2009. That sort of deficit could reach a record-breaking 7 percent of GDP. And it could well constrain the scope of President-Elect Barack Obama’s ambitious agenda.