The Center for Public Integrity

The United States meets less than 3 percent of its electricity needs with wind, solar, and other forms of alternative energy. In contrast, Denmark meets 20 percent of its electricity needs with wind, while Spain has reached 9 percent and Germany and Portugal, 7 percent. The Philippines have tapped into geothermal for 28 percent of their power. Yet those countries do not have the resources of the United States, with the blustery expanse of the Great Plains, the clear desert skies of the Southwest, and enough heat stored in underground rock that scientists believe it could produce 2,000 times America’s annual power consumption. Alternative energy advocates broadly agree that the federal government never has provided the robust, steady support that renewable energy needs to compete with cheap coal electricity. Subsidies born of the oil shocks of the 1970s were scaled back in the 1980s.

Since 1992, Congress has offered tax credits but only for a year or two at a time; industry has geared up, then fallen into a lull, undermining large-scale renewable energy projects. And the tax breaks did not benefit homeowners or farmers who wanted to install smaller wind power systems. “The French, the Germans, the Spanish, and a few others have made the decision, first of all, that they want renewable energy, and they want to pay for it,” said longtime renewable industry consultant Paul Gipe. “We haven’t made that decision yet.” In countries that do have a successful renewable energy policy, Gipe and others argue, consumers pay the price for alternatives through higher utility rates that also encourage conservation. Washington, instead, has taken the politically easier course of supporting renewable through tax breaks, leaving the programs constantly at risk over federal budgetary concerns.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies had pieces of information before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that, had they been shared, might have led to the unraveling of Al Qaeda's plot. For example, in July 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, wrote a memo to bureau executives in Washington warning of the "possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Ladin” to train terrorists in U.S. flight schools. No one in the FBI’s Osama bin Laden or Radical Fundamentalist unit saw the field agent’s memo until after 9/11. Had they seen the memo in a timely manner, the 9/11 Commission said, it could have “sensitized the FBI so that it might have taken the Moussaoui matter more seriously.” A month after the Phoenix memo was written, the FBI’s Minneapolis office was kept from notifying the Federal Aviation Administration of an agent’s assessment that Zacarias Moussaoui planned to hijack an airplane. Moussaoui was training to fly commercial aircraft; the FBI suspected him of jihadist beliefs; and in August 2001 the CIA described him as a possible “suicide hijacker,” but the CIA made no connection between him and intelligence reports that warned of possible Al Qaeda hijackings. The 9/11 Commission used these examples to argue for improving communications among agencies. “The culture of agencies feeling they own the information they gathered at taxpayers’ expense must be replaced by a culture in which the agencies instead feel they have a duty to the information — to repay the taxpayers investment by making that information available,” wrote the commission in its report.

After flight delays soared to record-breaking heights in the summer of 2007, inconveniencing millions of travelers and costing the U.S. economy as much as $41 billion, the Department of Transportation (DOT)’s Office of Inspector General called for “urgently needed” improvements from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). But long-term answers to chronic air travel delays remain elusive. The rate of late arriving and canceled flights climbed each year between 2002 and 2007, coming to a head in the summer of 2007 when there was a 28 percent jump in flight cancellations and a 25 percent rise in long delays on the tarmac, compared to a similar period in 2006. Over the course of 2007, 163 million passengers were delayed a total of 320 million hours. Nearly 25 percent of all U.S. flights were delayed in 2007, costing airlines $8.1 billion in direct operating costs. Airspace congestion and over-scheduling were among the culprits, according to the inspector general. For instance, in selected 15-minute increments at Chicago O’Hare and Minneapolis-St. Paul, scheduled departures totaled two to three times what those airports could reasonably accommodate. The FAA has instituted caps on takeoff and landing slots at some of the nation’s busiest airports, but that alone has not solved the problem. While the long-term solution lies largely in modernizing the air traffic control system, the inspector general said a number of short-term solutions are crucial — such as a plan to negotiate with the Department of Defense (DOD) for use of restricted airspace and a system for better understanding and monitoring current airline scheduling practices.

A cascading series of problems — quality control, litigation, and cost overruns among them — has delayed the opening of a viable repository for high-level nuclear waste until at least 2020, but it’s still not clear the project will ever be successfully completed. The inability to find such a permanent site has left growing amounts of spent fuel and other high-level radioactive waste at 121 sites nationwide. The roots of the issue date back to 1982, when passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act created the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) within the Department of Energy (DOE). That office was charged with overseeing construction of a national repository for radioactive waste by the year 1998. When President Bush took office in 2001, the most viable, if controversial site, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, was still years away from operational status. But matters have only grown worse. By failing to use the fees long-imposed on nuclear plants to finance a facility, the government has faced dozens of breach-of-contract lawsuits from industry; many of those cases are still pending, but the government has already paid out millions of dollars in court awards or settlements. Congress approved the Yucca site in 2002, but the DOE repeatedly failed to meet its goal to complete the next step of submitting a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The DOE has faced vigorous opposition from the state of Nevada as well as some members of Congress who control the program’s purse strings, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that chronic quality assurance problems have also plagued the effort. In 2005, the disclosure of e-mails from geologists indicated that environmental documents may have been falsified, forcing the DOE to spend millions re-analyzing the science behind the project. Further slowing progress, the U.S.

In spite of allegations of cronyism, easing terms on subprime mortgages, and federal investigations into possible partisan awarding of contracts, Alphonso Jackson — a longtime friend of President Bush and former president of a billion-dollar Texas electric utility — remained at the helm of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) until April 2008. Jackson joined the administration in 2001 as deputy secretary of HUD. In 2004, the Senate unanimously confirmed Jackson as secretary. Earlier that week, Jackson had blocked implementation of consumer protection standards that forced mortgage lenders to disclose kickbacks and stopped their last-minute changes to interest rates and closing costs. Two years later, the HUD Office of Inspector General launched the first of an array of investigations of Jackson; it found that Jackson had encouraged his staff to consider political affiliation when awarding contracts.

By spring 2008, the inspector general was investigating Jackson again, while the FBI and Congress had opened their own investigations into multiple allegations of cronyism and retaliation. Jackson allegedly pressured the New Orleans office of HUD to hire a friend for a no-bid contract; the contractor also performed renovations on Jackson’s vacation home. The Philadelphia office of HUD filed a lawsuit accusing Jackson of hindering funding in retaliation for refusing to hand over a $2 million vacant lot at a deep discount to a developer friend. Jackson stepped down in March. Bush said he still had confidence in Jackson, calling him “a strong leader and a good man.” A call to Jackson’s home requesting comment was not returned.

Follow-up:
A Washington Post investigation found HUD management had dismissed repeated expressions of concern about Jackson’s dealings by veteran contracting specialists within the agency. The lawsuit filed by the Philadelphia office was settled in October 2008.

Terrorist watch lists, launched by government agencies following the 9/11 attacks to help track terrorism suspects, have been plagued by miscommunication, inaccuracy, and inefficiency. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which maintains a master list through its Terrorist Screening Center, has not always removed records from the watch list when it should have, a Department of Justice investigation found in 2008. FBI field offices have often submitted incomplete or inaccurate information to headquarters, or bypassed headquarters entirely and submitted nominations directly to the screening center, which has resulted in incomplete, less-than-thorough records.

Several agencies, such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration, were supposed to share terror-related information with the FBI, but that didn’t always happen, which meant some potential terrorists never made the list. Other agencies forwarded names to the list that FBI officials thought were only nominations, so some of those names were neither maintained nor removed when necessary. And bureaucratic delays often meant suspect names weren’t added to the list for up to four months. By April 2007, the list contained more than 724,000 entries, including many common names; partly as a result, legitimate passengers have been tagged as potential terrorists, including a five-year-old Californian named James Robinson, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela. Carl Kropf, spokesman for the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, said the most visible problems arise from airline passengers who share the same or similar names with individuals included on the terrorist watch list. He said that trouble should be remedied in 2009 when the government takes over the screening process from the airlines.

Reading First was established under the No Child Left Behind Act as a six-year, $1 billion initiative to help students achieve reading proficiency by the end of third grade, but the Department of Education’s own inspector general has criticized it for favoritism and ineffectiveness. Under the plan, appointed board members would give grants to states, which in turn would award sub-grants to school districts to establish reading programs for kindergarten through third-grade students. But allegations that program directors and board members pressured states to adopt particular reading programs prompted the first of six investigations by the Inspector General. The IG’s conclusion: Department officials were playing favorites, giving grants for certain programs over others.

The Department of Education contended that it screened board members for conflicts of interest. But the inspector general in 2006 deemed the process ineffective, noting that the department failed to look at applicants’ resumes, which clearly indicated potential conflicts. The following year Senator Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, issued a report concluding that four regional program directors maintained ties with educational publishers while they were under contract with the department for Reading First. The directors were paid to promote certain publishers while simultaneously advising schools to adopt the company’s products. Regardless of the scandal, the program failed to meet its objectives. An April 2008 study revealed the general ineffectiveness of Reading First and found that students in schools receiving funds for the program had no better reading skills than children in schools that did not.

On the Bush administration’s watch, China — and other nations — have succeeded in penetrating countless sensitive and “secure” U.S. facilities, ranging from Congress to military sites, intelligence programs to critical industrial centers, using largely untraceable cyber attacks. Beijing denies the allegations, but U.S. officials have revealed classified information identifying the sources of the attacks within China. Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration demonstrated little regard for funding the nascent cybersecurity initiatives, and other counter-terrorism efforts, undertaken in the waning 18 months of the Clinton administration. Those efforts were designed to stem vulnerabilities in America’s critical information infrastructure: data services involving transportation, energy, government, finance communications, public safety, health and the military. The list of nightmare scenarios included phone systems crashing and financial records disappearing. “Our information infrastructure . . . increasingly is being targeted for exploitation and potentially for disruption or destruction by a growing array of state and non-state adversaries,” Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell reported to Congress in February 2008. Among the adversaries, McConnell said, were Russia and China. China alone has downloaded from the Pentagon 10 to 20 terabytes of information from “sensitive” computer networks, according to Major General William Lord of the Air Force's Office of Warfighting Integration. In 2007, there were more than 80,000 attacks against Department of Defense computer systems, which “reduced the U.S. military’s operational capabilities,” according to congressional testimony in March 2007 by U.S. Strategic Command Chief General James E. Cartwright.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has often been unresponsive or slow to react to the needs of soldiers and Marines on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the United States when they return. “A lesson I learned fairly early on was that important elements of the Department of Defense weren’t at war,” and thus failed to support those who were in a wartime posture, said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Instead, he explained, they were “preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low-gear. The needs of those in combat too often were not addressed urgently or creatively.” According to The New York Times, “In Iraq, Army officers say the Air Force has often been out of touch, fulfilling only half of their requests for the sophisticated surveillance aircraft that ground commanders say are needed to find roadside bombs and track down insurgents.” The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Gates has criticized the Pentagon’s slow initial procurement of MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), saying, “I believe that one factor that delayed the fielding was the pervasive assumption . . . that regimes could be toppled, major combat completed, the insurgency crushed, and most U.S. troops withdrawn fairly soon.” Gates sees a lack of accountability at the root of the problems, citing as an example Walter Reed Army Medical Center: “Over a year ago, The Washington Post broke the story about inadequate out-patient care at Walter Reed. I was disappointed by the initially-dismissive response of some in the Army’s leadership, who went into damage-control mode against the press and, in one case, blamed a couple of sergeants. Wrong move. I concluded responsibility lay much higher and acted accordingly.”

During an administration in which all three branches of government debated greenhouse gas regulation, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) was busy suppressing references to a landmark 2000 national assessment on climate change and delaying the congressionally-mandated update of that document. In 2005, Rick Piltz, a senior associate at CCSP, blew the whistle and resigned over politicization that he felt “undermine[d] the credibility and integrity of the program” — a 13-agency research effort overseen by the White House. Piltz testified in an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that reported White House officials heavily edited scientific documents and controlled which climate scientists could speak to the media. Philip A. Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, spearheaded the editing for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) — including 181 edits made to CCSP’s 2003 strategic plan. CEQ deleted nine references to the national assessment — a document that sought to identify key climatic vulnerabilities in the United States. The oversight investigation highlighted other reports by CCSP and the Environmental Protection Agency in which material on climate change was significantly edited or deleted altogether. Cooney resigned after the revelations of his edits (and then went to work for Exxon-Mobil), but the administration called it normal procedure for political appointees to edit work by government scientists. Officials said it was done to echo a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report, but the oversight committee characterized the practice as cherry-picking science. Meanwhile, CCSP failed to meet a required November 2004 deadline to update the national assessment, electing instead to wait and issue 21 separate reports over a multi-year period. Those delays prompted criticism from the Government Accountability Office and the National Research Council.