The Center for Public Integrity

The Bush administration demoted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from a cabinet-level agency to a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by appointees who proved unprepared for the destructive 2005 hurricane season. After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, emergency management took on a new importance in the federal government, and James Lee Witt, the director of FEMA during the Clinton administration, was widely credited with reinvigorating the troubled agency. Witt had previous experience in disaster management; Michael D. Brown, President George W. Bush’s pick for the job in 2003, did not, nor did other key members of FEMA’s top management after 2000. Under Brown, the federal agency’s connections with its state and local partners faded, undermining coordination on preparedness and response projects. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, the response from DHS and FEMA was, by many accounts, slow and disorganized. Victims stranded in their houses drowned as the flood waters rose, and evacuees languished in the Louisiana Superdome. FEMA later drew sharp criticism from both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congress for its muddled chain of command. “A single individual directly responsible and accountable to the president must be designated to act as the central focal point to lead and coordinate the overall federal response in the event of a major catastrophe,” the GAO wrote in 2006. “Neither the DHS secretary nor any of his designees, such as the Principal Federal Official [Brown] filled this leadership role during Hurricane Katrina . . .” By September 2006, Brown had stepped down, but FEMA’s leadership continued to struggle to respond to victims’ needs for food, housing, and aid for reconstruction.

Every year as much as $60 billion in taxpayer money is stolen from Medicare, which pays for the health care of seniors and the disabled. This massive rip-off is done through various schemes, but largely by fraudulently billing for services or medical equipment they do not provide. “The legitimate Medicare recipient is hurt, the legitimate business that’s dispensing this and serving patients is hurt, every taxpayer is hurt, and we need to come down on this with both feet," U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Michael Leavitt told the press in December 2007. But no serious crackdown has taken place, despite calls by legislators from both parties. “Medicare fraud is running rampant across Florida and across the country,” Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, told The Miami Herald in February 2008 “We need to send a message to those bilking billions from the system that we won't stand for it and the penalties are going to be severe.” A Democrat, Representative Pete Stark of California, said bluntly of HHS’s weakness in detecting fraud: “This agency is incompetent,” he told The New York Times in August. A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at HHS put the blame on Congress: “Over the past four years, the administration has requested $579 million for the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Fund. Congress has not provided any of these resources.” He also noted that, despite the Centers’ insufficient resources, the agency has saved billions of dollars through their existing fraud review processes and pilot programs.

Follow-up:
HHS Secretary Leavitt has suggested increasing the amount of money spent on reviewing claims and identifying fraud, but despite sustained bipartisan criticism, the problem persists.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), under the Bush Administration, made an array of inappropriate, politically based decisions, some apparently illegal, which included choosing candidates for career appointments on political grounds. Some of these decisions reached back to the tenure of John Ashcroft, who served as attorney general from 2001 to early 2005, but many of them occurred — and burst into public view — while Alberto Gonzales served as attorney general, from 2005 to the fall of 2007. Under law, certain DOJ positions are reserved for political appointees, but legal internships, assistant U.S. Attorney positions, and immigration judgeships are supposed to be filled without regard to political affiliation. Before 2003, those interested in becoming immigration judges generally applied in response to public job postings, but then, according to a report by the DOJ inspector general, the White House and the Office of the Attorney General began expressing interest in these positions. Monica Goodling, DOJ White House liaison and senior counsel to the Attorney General, judged candidates for these and other jobs on criteria that included membership in a conservative legal society, statements on their “political philosophy,” and opinions on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage. In addition, Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ chief of staff, pushed for the unprecedented dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys under circumstances that appeared to be overtly political. He also suggested that the Bush administration use its power to appoint interim U.S. attorneys for indefinite periods to circumvent the Senate-confirmation process; one of those Sampson recommended for such an appointment was a former department official who had hired candidates for positions in the Civil Rights Division based on their credentials as Republicans and conservatives.

The 2008 presidential race produced its share of philosophical and political disputes, but one broad area of agreement underlined the campaigns of both nominees: The federal government is not functioning as it should. A McCain ad began, “Washington's broken. John McCain knows it,” while one of Barack Obama’s spots warned, “The truth is that while you’ve been living up to your responsibilities, Washington has not.” 

In fact, the executive branch is proving unable to meet many of its most basic obligations to the American public. And the public appears to be increasingly uneasy. National polls show that less than 30 percent of Americans approve of President George W. Bush’s job performance, among the worst numbers since pollsters began tracking presidential approval in the 1940s. A mid-November Gallup Poll showed that 87 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the way things are going in America today. 

Just how bad is this government dysfunction? In an effort to answer that question, the Center for Public Integrity embarked on an examination of the worst systematic failures of the federal government over the past eight years.

In this, a comprehensive assessment of these failures, we found more than 125 examples of government breakdown in areas as diverse as education, energy, the environment, justice and security, the military and veterans affairs, health care, transportation, financial management, consumer and worker safety, and more — failures which adversely affected ordinary people and made the nation a less open or less secure place to live. While some are, by now, depressingly familiar, many are less well-known but equally distressing. And though the list is diverse, it also reflects some recurring — and troubling — themes.

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.