The Center for Public Integrity

In the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States embraced an unlikely ally: Pakistan’s dictator and longtime Taliban backer, Pervez Musharraf. After Musharraf reversed his support for the Taliban in late 2001, Pakistan went from pariah to close ally in the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” It was a controversial and risky move that initially seemed to work, resulting in arrests of high-level Al Qaeda leaders. But the White House also bet that General Musharraf — who ousted Pakistan’s elected government in a 1999 coup — would crack down on Pakistan’s restive northwest areas, home to many senior Taliban and Al Qaeda members, possibly including Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, despite $10 billion in American largesse since 2001, Musharraf proved an unreliable partner. Rather than using U.S. funds to conduct counterterrorism operations, Pakistan funneled the majority of the aid into heavy arms and aircraft — equipment more appropriate for conventional warfare with rival India than for a battle with terrorists. Pakistan’s northwestern frontier remains a pipeline for insurgent traffic into Afghanistan. According to the Department of Defense (DOD), the existence of militant sanctuaries in Pakistan represents “the greatest challenge to long-term security within Afghanistan.” Moreover, Bush’s long-standing support for Musharraf’s dictatorship did little to burnish the United States’ beacon-of-democracy credentials. In 2007 America’s image in Pakistan sank to a new low, with only 15 percent of Pakistanis holding a favorable view of the United States.

In elementary school, American children learn that the U.S. Constitution dictates a precise and cumbersome process through which a bill becomes law. When a bill is passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the president may either let it become law or veto it. The Executive Office of the President under George W. Bush, however, often tried to create a third option: changing the meaning of the legislation via a “signing statement,” attached while signing the bill into law. Bush is not the first president to employ signing statements, but no chief executive has used them this aggressively; a Boston Globe report in 2006 determined that Bush had issued such statements “to more than one of every ten bills he has signed,” claiming “the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.” According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, 78 percent of Bush’s signing statements raised constitutional objections. A bipartisan task force of the American Bar Association warned that, to protect the constitutional separation of powers, “the president and those who succeed him [should] cease the practice of using presidential signing statements to state his intention to disregard or decline to enforce a law or to interpret it in a manner inconsistent with the will of Congress.” The task force recommended that presidents instead simply veto legislation they deem unconstitutional. “Our legislation doesn't amount to anything if the president can say, ‘My constitutional authority supersedes the statute,’” Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania told Reuters.

A dramatic increase in the contracting of government services has resulted in a litany of problems, ranging from cost overruns and missed deadlines to a lack of oversight, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). From 2001 to 2005, the number of federal contractor jobs surged by 72 percent, increasing from 4.4 million to 7.6 million. Spending on contractors nearly doubled from FY 2001 to FY 2006, jumping from $234.8 billion to $415 billion The GAO has issued a series of reports identifying problems associated with the rise in outsourcing. Among the issues: “separating wants from needs; executing acquisition programs within available funding and established timeframes; using sound contracting arrangements with appropriate incentives and effective oversight; assuring that contractors are used only in appropriate circumstances and play proper roles; and sustaining a capable and accountable acquisition workforce ” GAO auditors found that interagency contracting was a “high-risk area” for outsourcing, as were the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The agency also cited concerns about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which now contracts out one-third of its workforce. Lack of competition is another problem. The Department of the Interior’s inspector general found that more than a quarter of the agency’s $380 billion in contracts were awarded without competition.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own science advisory board has joined a host of critics questioning the agency’s decision not to set a drinking water standard for perchlorate, a rocket fuel ingredient that can hinder brain development. Perchlorate has shown up in more than 150 drinking water systems in 35 states, and the EPA has wrestled with what to do about it for years. Critics charge that the agency has been reluctant to act because the pollutant is released by the politically influential aerospace industry and Department of Defense.

In 2002, EPA scientists found that perchlorate posed a danger to human health at concentrations greater than one part per billion (ppb), but the agency told staff members not to talk about the issue, pending further study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). An NAS panel reported in 2005 that it could not find a conclusive link between perchlorate and health hazards, but the panel acknowledged that there had been no research examining the relationship between perchlorate exposure and highly vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and their babies.

In 2006, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a study finding that perchlorate exposure endangers fetal brain development in one-third of pregnant American women at levels of 7 ppb. But the EPA announced in October 2008 that it would set no safety standard for perchlorate, arguing that a new regulation would not present a “meaningful opportunity” for reducing health risks.

The highly-secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — responsible for U.S. surveillance satellites — saw its high-tech image tarnished in a series of management and technology failures. Most of the failures related to a $25 billion satellite program known as Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), which the agency envisioned as the next generation of U.S. super-surveillance systems. While the NRO’s funding and operations are closely held national security secrets, industry and government officials have let slip that FIA ran up a nearly $10 billion tab on what was supposed to be a $5 billion to $7 billion satellite development project with The Boeing Co.; ultimately, the Department of Defense, NRO’s parent agency, cut its losses and dropped the program altogether in 2005. Other elements of the FIA program ran years behind schedule due to mismanagement, including a classified program intended to develop advanced lenses for space-based surveillance imagery systems. Former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, whose office has jurisdiction over all intelligence program budgets, killed that program soon after taking office in April 2005. “It was killed, dead, buried, stake in the heart,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, a Negroponte deputy. “We have an alternate [system] that will deliver the capability that we’ve needed cheaper, better, faster.” But in October, congressional budget makers, with a still-skeptical gaze toward NRO, scrapped funding — reportedly more than about $1 billion — for two NRO launches scheduled for around 2012 as part of the proposed alternate system: the Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection satellite system.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) new counterterrorism assignments have bled resources from its other missions. Traditionally the FBI has fought domestic bad guys — bank robbers, white-collar criminals, mobsters, and spies — but now its top three priorities are counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber-security. As resources have accrued to these areas, prosecutions have dropped off for white-collar and financial crimes, such as mortgage fraud, and for local criminal activity. Analyses of data from the Department of Justice by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The New York Times have demonstrated the decline in investigations and prosecutions for financial or white-collar crimes, while the number of terrorism-related cases has ballooned. “It's continuously an effort to request new resources while prioritizing the resources that we have,” FBI Director Robert Mueller told the House Committee on the Judiciary in September 2008. Mueller fought the Office of Management and Budget to gain greater funding for his criminal investigators, according to The New York Times; he lost that battle. The bureau is pursuing an increasing number of mortgage fraud cases, but the 2009 budget continues to prioritize funds for counterterrorism at the expense of other FBI functions.

In 1973, when President Richard Nixon said, “Our independence will depend on maintaining and achieving self-sufficiency in energy,” the United States imported 34.8 percent of its oil from foreign countries. In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter said the country will “never again use more foreign oil than we did in 1977,” imports were up to 45 percent of the nation’s oil supply. Dependence on foreign oil did indeed fall during a few economically troubled years when smaller, foreign-built cars gained popularity and American manufacturers reduced the weight of their vehicles. But that began to change when oil prices dropped in the mid-1980s, and by 1990, when President George H.W. Bush talked of the need to reverse “excessive dependence on foreign oil” at the dawn of the first Persian Gulf War, the United States was importing 42.2 percent of its oil. By the time his son ran for office, sport utility vehicles ruled the roads and 52.9 percent of the nation’s petroleum came from overseas. By 2006, when President Bush declared in his State of the Union that the nation was addicted to oil, foreign countries were delivering 59.9 percent of the fix. Geology has dealt the United States a bad hand if it hopes to achieve energy independence while continuing to rely heavily on oil. America’s old fields are tapped out; U.S. oil production has been in an inexorable decline since its peak in 1971. The government has pushed for the oil industry to squeeze out more domestic supply. Federal subsidies approved by Congress in 1995 encouraged a boom in oil drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And the Bush administration’s Department of the Interior streamlined the process for drilling on federal lands, nearly doubling the number of permits approved each year. Nonetheless, U.S. oil production plummeted 22 percent over the past 10 years to about the same level that the nation’s oil fields were producing in 1947.

The government’s ability to protect critical technology in the hands of the private sector has been repeatedly called into question, most prominently by the Government Accountability Office (GAO); in fact, the government’s performance in this area has been designated “high risk” by the GAO since 2007. “The technologies that underpin U.S. military and economic strength continue to be targets for theft, espionage, reverse engineering, and illegal export,” the GAO has warned. Among the problems the agency highlighted: inefficient programs, poor interagency coordination, and decades-old programs ill-equipped to weigh competing U.S. interests in the 21st Century. The various programs cover everything from monitoring arms exports to vetting foreign takeovers of U.S. firms whose work has national security implications. Part of the problem is rooted in the fact that these protection responsibilities are scattered across various agencies in the State, Defense, and Commerce departments. The Department of Defense (DOD)’s Defense Security Service, which oversees contractors across most of the government, was “broken across the board” when Director Kathleen Watson took over in 2006, according to Watson’s testimony before Congress in April 2008. And the situation hasn’t fared much better elsewhere; the GAO reported in 2008 that both the State Department and the Department of Commerce “have not managed their respective export licensing processes to ensure their effective operations.” In 2007, defense contractor ITT pled guilty to illegally sending classified military information to other countries — China among them — and agreed to pay a $100 million penalty. It was “the first conviction of a major defense contractor for a violation of the Arms Export Control Act,” according to a statement by then-U.S. attorney John Brownlee in Roanoke, Virginia.

“Prior to 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not have an adequate ability to know what it knew,” said a statement from the staff of the 9/11 Commission. The commission faulted the FBI and other agencies for failing to “connect the dots” in a way that might have uncovered the 9/11 plot; the “dots” referred to suspicious activities by the hijackers that had been uncovered, in some cases, by the bureau’s field offices. Yet seven years after the attacks, the FBI is still largely unable to electronically share investigative information among its agents that could help it solve crimes and stop terrorist plots. The bureau embarked on a program known as Trilogy that was designed to weave the FBI’s information together — and make it accessible to agents — using new computers, electronic networks, and software. But the software, called the Virtual Case File (VCF), turned out to be a spectacular failure — and a waste of at least $100 million — as a result of missteps by both the bureau and its main contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Among the problems: poorly defined design requirements and a lack of management continuity and oversight. “The urgent need within the FBI to create, organize, share, and analyze investigative leads and case files on an ongoing basis remains unmet,” a report by the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General concluded in February 2005. This failure to provide modern information technology to FBI agents put them at “a severe disadvantage in performing their duties,” the report added. The FBI officially killed VCF in April 2005. "We had information that could have stopped 9/11," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, told The Washington Post. "It was sitting there and was not acted upon. . . . We might be in the 22nd century before we get the 21st-century technology."

The number of backlogged disability claims at the Social Security Administration (SSA) more than doubled over the past decade, with those pending at the hearing level reaching 760,800 as of October 2008, according to an agency spokesman. The spike in applicants from an aging baby boomer generation, staff cuts, and management problems all contributed to a cumbersome operation; individual cases took an average of more than 500 days to process in 2007. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of people pursuing disability claims have been forced to wait as long as three years, with some going into bankruptcy, losing their homes, or even dying while waiting for a result. As far back as 2001, the chairman of the Social Security Advisory Board acknowledged that “unless there’s fundamental change, we will soon see disruptions of service. The Social Security agency lacks the ability to handle existing workloads, and those workloads are bound to increase in the next decade.” The situation continued to deteriorate, despite continuous warnings and recommendations for improvement from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), especially in regard to issues with the SSA’s electronic claims processing system.

A lack of funding compounded the problem; Congress appropriated an average of $150 million less for the agency than the Bush administration requested between fiscal years 2001 and 2007, while giving the agency a heavier workload. In an attempt to reform the system, the agency introduced its so-called Disability Service Improvement in 2006, but the GAO found that poor management, rushed rollout, and short staffing ultimately stunted the initiative, resulting in additional costs. Finally, in May 2007, Michael Astrue, the Social Security commissioner, appealed to Congress for additional funding to refine the disability program’s electronic systems and hire more judges to hear cases.