The Center for Public Integrity

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.

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.