The Center for Public Integrity

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.

Though federal records laws make clear that the official records of the president and vice president are public and must, in general, be preserved, the Bush administration has not always done so. The Executive Office of the President must document all “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies” that reflect the president’s duties, says the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the president may dispose of records “that no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value,” only after clearing the decision with the Archivist of the United States. Rather than using government e-mail addresses, which would be archived automatically, 88 Bush administration officials were given Republican National Committee (RNC) e-mail addresses. Of those, the RNC preserved no e-mails for 51 officials and preserved only some of the e-mails of the 37 other officials. By using these external addresses for official business, White House officials circumvented requirements of both the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act and, as a result, oversight committees, litigators, and historians will be denied a chance to get a full and accurate view of the administration’s actions and decision-making processes. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment, but, when this failure came to light, the White House conceded the error: “I will admit it,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said. “We screwed up.”

Follow-up:
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform continues to investigate the missing e-mails. A federal judge has ordered the White House to preserve all hard drives, tape backups, servers, and other media that may contain the missing e-mails, in response to a lawsuit by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute at The George Washington University.

The Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), the agency responsible for ruling in federal employee labor disputes, has been swamped by a backlog of cases arising from low morale and lack of staffing. In 2007, the agency ranked dead last in the Partnership for Public Service’s listing of the “Best Places to Work” among small government agencies. An independent agency led by three full-time members appointed by the president, the FLRA is responsible not only for setting policies on federal labor-management relations, but also resolving disputes among federal agencies and unions who represent 1.9 million federal employees. The agency’s inspector general (IG) has consistently found issues with staffing levels and management practices, including unresponsive to issues raised by the IG. In its most recent report, issued in April 2008, the IG found that a backlog of 175 issues and suggestions dating back to 1998 were not acted on until January 2008.

The FLRA’s case-writing staff is down to half of what it was five years ago. Carol Pope, one of the members of the FLRA's three-person governing board, referred to the agency’s “human capital issue” as a “crisis.” Adding to the troubles, in 2008 the board was forced to stop work when it suddenly found itself down to one member after the chair stepped down — denying it the quorum required to make any decisions. Because of this, a backlog of over 400 cases was reported in October 2008. At the same time, the agency lacks a general counsel and so the FLRA has also been unable to issue any rulings on unfair labor practices. Newly-confirmed Chairman Thomas Beck told the Center that he was aware of the agency’s problems and that he has both short-term and long-term plans for increasing staff numbers and morale.

A Clinton-era initiative to combine civil and military meteorological programs into one massive new satellite system has been complicated by structural failures, delays, and cost overruns that could potentially hinder the nation’s ability to monitor climate. The National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) — an interagency effort of the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — is supposed to launch four new satellites to replace an aging set that provide data to weather forecasters, climatologists, and the military. The $6.5 billion price tag for the system in 1995 kept climbing until DOD was forced to completely restructure the program in June 2006; as part of that restructuring, the number of new satellites envisioned was reduced from six to four. The Department of Commerce Inspector General — which has jurisdiction over NOAA — found that the project suffered from “poor management oversight and ineffective incentives.” After the program was restructured, the price tag jumped to an estimated $12.5 billion, with a three- to five-year launch delay, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned that both the funding picture and the schedule could continue to get worse. The restructuring forced DOD to prioritize space weather monitoring over climate monitoring for the new program, which led to a reduction in the number of satellites and sensors that will monitor the climate. NPOESS has taken steps to mitigate the loss of those climate sensors, but the program still faces a number of hurdles, including problems in quality control and testing delays.

On September 28, 2002, President Bush proclaimed: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons . . . The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are Al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq." Just over a year after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the president and his administration used these two fears — unconventional weapons and terrorism — to win public approval for going to war in Iraq. But the premises proved to be false. The chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq concluded that President Saddam Hussein had no such weapons or the means to produce them, and the U.S. intelligence community determined that there was no meaningful connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. These conclusions came too late, however. On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom began in an attempt to kill the Iraqi president and overthrow his regime. The Center for Public Integrity found that Bush and seven members of his administration made 935 demonstrably false statements in the lead-up to the war, from September 2001 to September 2003, as reported in Iraq: The War Card. The failure of the commander in chief and his administration to gather solid intelligence before sending U.S. troops to war has cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives, billions of tax dollars, and the trust of not only of U.S. allies abroad, but also of a majority of the American people. When asked about the War Card study, a White House spokesman responded: “The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world."

Seven years after the attacks of September 11, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a better idea of who’s coming into the United States, but it cannot say if the visitors are overstaying their welcome. On average, more than 30 million “nonimmigrant” travelers stream in and out of the country each year; DHS estimates that 3.6 million people currently residing in the United States came here on travel visas and overstayed the visas’ limits. Among those numbers, in 2001, were three of the 19 September 11 hijackers. Post-9/11 homeland security measures include US-VISIT, an entry-exit system that is supposed to track travelers in the United States. DHS has invested more than $1.7 billion in the program. Originally, it required immigration officials to collect two fingerprints from visa applicants. Upon a visitor’s entry into the U.S., officials check the prints against databases of “known criminals and suspected terrorists.”

With 3-3 deadlocks common on key issues, often along party lines, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — made up of three Democrats and three Republicans — has sometimes seemed like it was built for paralysis. 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain has called the commission’s design a “fundamental problem.” The FEC is supposed to enforce the nation’s federal campaign finance laws. But even in cases of bipartisan agreement that a campaign or committee has violated those laws, the FEC’s lengthy investigation process means there can be no punishment until after the election is long past. And in 2008, the FEC’s inability to exercise meaningful control of the most expensive presidential election ever ran into an even more serious impediment: lack of a quorum.

With the terms of three commissioners expired and one other seat vacant, President George W. Bush and the U.S. Senate’s Democratic majority engaged in a procedural stand-off over the confirmation of new commissioners from December 2007 until late June 2008. As the campaign steamed along and questions and controversies arose, there was literally no one there to field them — leaving the nation’s elections without a referee.

Follow-up:
After a compromise between the Senate Democrats and the Republican administration led to confirmation of a total of five new commissioners on June 24, 2008, the quorum issue was resolved. Efforts by some in Congress to enact broader reform have not made it out of committee in the House or the Senate.

Since 9/11, Central Intelligence Agency officers have grabbed more than 100 suspected terrorists from foreign countries and, after flying them around the globe to mask their destination, deposited them in countries that often had notorious human rights records. This practice is known as “extraordinary rendition.” Peter Bergen, a New America Foundation fellow who has studied it, reported that more than a quarter of such prisoners have stated explicitly that they were tortured. Sending prisoners to a country where they are likely to be tortured arguably violates the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. A June 2006 report by the Council of Europe concluded that the CIA’s rendition program had flown some 1,245 flights through European airports or air space. The CIA has swept up at least one innocent victim, and, according to Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side, has investigated at least seven other cases where the detainees may have been innocent. The agency also rendered suspected terrorists to its own prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and at secret “black site” prisons around the world. Prisoners taken in this way have no recourse to a judicial process; often no one knows where they are. The program’s aim was to get dangerous terrorists “off the streets,” according to Michael Scheuer, who initiated the program during the Clinton administration. “The Rendition Program has been the single most effective counterterrorism operation ever conducted by the United States Government,” Scheuer told a congressional committee in 2007. “Americans are safer today because of the program.”

In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, U.S. troops failed to secure weapons depots across the country, allowing Iraqis to loot vast amounts of explosives, ammunition, and weapons that were then used to fuel and supply the insurgency. Many sites around Iraq remained unsecured even three and a half years after the invasion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “According to lessons-learned reports and senior-level DOD [Department of Defense] officials,” the GAO reported, “the widespread looting occurred because DOD had insufficient troop levels to secure conventional munitions storage sites due to several . . . planning priorities and assumptions.” Among those assumptions — which turned out to be wrong — was a belief that the Iraqi military would assist in securing these installations. The GAO also found that the Pentagon “did not have a centrally managed program for the disposition of enemy munitions until August 2003, after widespread looting had already occurred.” The sites included many well known to intelligence experts, such as the sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad. The Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation each stressed to Pentagon officials the need to secure these sites, but the military largely failed to address the issue. Stolen explosives traced to the looting have been used to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, the number-one killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, at least 2,145 troops have been killed by IEDs and other types of explosive devices. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but at a 2007 briefing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged the scope of the problem. “We have destroyed several hundred thousand tons of Iraqi munitions,” he told reporters. “I mean, fundamentally, the entire country was one big ammo dump. And there were thousands of these sites...

“Medicare shouldn't be a political issue," said then-Governor George W. Bush at a presidential campaign rally in 2000. "It's time to reform Medicare." But as president, Bush was unable to deliver on that pledge, and Congress seemed disinclined to address the subject of Medicare either — even though projected spending growth is clearly unsustainable, thanks in part to the aging of the population. Spending on Medicare nearly doubled over the course of the Bush administration, hitting $431.5 billion in 2007, and the program’s financing is slated to run into major trouble by 2012.

According to projections by the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare spending is expected to jump from 4 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2007 to 12 percent in 2050. Warned Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Michael Leavitt in February 2008: “Left unchanged, within 35 years Medicare would eat up every bit of the federal budget as we now know it.” In response to spending alarms triggered by a 2003 law, the administration proposed legislation to rein in Medicare spending, but Congress voted in July to shelve the effort. Jeff Nelligan, director of media affairs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the Center that the Bush administration has tried hard to control the rate of Medicare spending, but said attempts to reform even the smallest piece of Medicare have met resistance from Congress.