The Center for Public Integrity

More than five years after its creation, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still suffers from a host of growing pains — growing pains that have attracted scrutiny from a variety of watchdog groups. Cobbled together in 2003 from 22 disparate agencies, the sprawling department oversees a budget that is creeping toward $50 billion. From the inception of DHS, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) categorized its implementation and transformation as a “high risk” item. “It represented an enormous undertaking that would require time to achieve in an effective and efficient manner,” then-Comptroller General David M. Walker told Congress in February 2008, adding that a successful transformation can take five to seven years. DHS has not exactly earned straight A’s, either. Despite repeated promptings from the GAO, the department had not created a comprehensive transformation strategy by its fifth birthday and has struggled to prioritize the most pressing risks to the country’s safety, both when allocating grants to state and local partners and when planning internal strategies. In its first two years, the department came under fire for its bureaucratic torpor, and as one of his first acts after taking office in 2005, Secretary Michael Chertoff commissioned a study that led to a departmental reorganization later that year. Although the department’s operations have improved in recent years, “DHS has made more progress in its mission areas than in its management areas,” Walker noted in his February testimony. In 2008, reports from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the GAO, and the DHS inspector general shared concerns about several areas, including: contractor oversight, information technology, financial management, transportation security, and emergency preparedness. The GAO recently included “protecting the homeland” as one of 13 “urgent issues” requiring the attention of President-Elect Obama and the 111th Congress.

When the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued its original “Most Wanted” list of proposed safety improvements in September 1990, combating the role of human fatigue in transportation mishaps was included. Since then, not a lot has happened. So when the NTSB released its most recent “Most Wanted” list in 2008, human fatigue was still there. ”Human fatigue has been a persistent factor in far too many transportation accidents,” said NTSB Acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker in September 2008. “And, if anything, the problem is growing, not shrinking.” The main target of NTSB scrutiny, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), continues to provide what the 2007 “Most Wanted” list called an “unacceptable response” to the problem. In 1995, the FAA proposed a rule to update the flight and duty regulations for airline pilots, but no action has been taken. Likewise, the FAA recognized as a result of its own 2000 study that a quarter of airline maintenance personnel were fatigued or exhausted at work, but nothing has happened on that front either. The NTSB cites accidents such as Corporate Airlines Flight 5966, which killed 13 people near Kirksville, Missouri, in 2004, in arguing that measures to reduce fatigue are “long overdue.” For decades the NTSB has also pushed other components of the Department of Transportation (DOT) to act on fatigue. For instance, the NTSB urged the DOT to consider mandating the use of on-board recorders in the trucking industry to enforce compliance with hours-of-service rules and reduce fatigue-related accidents — such as a 2005 I-94 Wisconsin crash that killed five and injured 35 others. The DOT responded through its Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which proposed a rule be imposed only on carriers with a pattern of violation. NTSB believes the proposed rule, still pending, does not go far enough, but FMCSA said that the estimated costs imposed by a broader mandate would exceed its benefits.

A backlog in cases and increasing delays in processing investigations have plagued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as a result of funding challenges and organizational issues during the Bush administration. The EEOC is charged with assisting people who claim they’ve suffered discrimination; the agency enforces the Equal Pay Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and relevant sections of the Civil Rights Act and the Rehabilitation Act. Cari M. Dominguez, confirmed as chair in 2001, received solid reviews from the Congressional Black Caucus, but many accounts noted a chronic paucity of funds.

The Bush administration instituted a hiring freeze in 2001 and kept budget requests for EEOC modest, even while the number of complaints increased. Dominguez attempted to streamline the agency, but one of her initiatives — having most inquiries handled by a privately-staffed call center — proved especially controversial. Gabrielle Martin, president of the National Council of EEOC Locals 216, charged that calls were being handled by untrained professionals and were of “very poor quality.” A restructuring of offices in the field also drew complaints that some offices were given broader jurisdiction but less power. Many of the agency’s problems were rooted in budget constrains: The $329 million requested for the agency in fiscal year 2009 is 9 percent higher than what was provided in 2001. Critics charged that wasn’t enough to support the agency’s workload. EEOC had 2,158 employees at the end of 2007, down 22 percent from 2002. The number of investigators dropped from 857 in 2000 to 565 in 2007. The average time for an investigation to be completed went from 160 days in 2003 to 206 days in 2008. The backlog of cases increased 38 percent between 2005 and 2007.

With the growth of global capital, rising numbers of U.S. corporations are offshoring their revenue to hide from the taxman, and for the past eight years, the Bush administration has taken scant action to stem that tide. While corporations use many tactics, the basic principle involves shuffling their U.S. profits or activities through any number of overseas subsidiaries or shell companies — some which consist of little more than a mail slot in a low-tax foreign locale. From 1999 to 2003 alone, for example, the profits reported by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies soared by 68 percent, an increase not accompanied by any gain in real economic activity in popular tax havens. Yet the ability of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide oversight of these practices has failed to keep pace with their growth. While in the mid-1990s, the IRS had a $4.43 billion enforcement budget, by 2006, that budget had risen by less than five percent, even as the size of the economy grew nearly eight times that amount. The IRS has also reduced audits of offshore taxpayers, which take an average two-and-a-half years to complete (the deadline for completion of an audit is three years). Today, according to Congress, the use of offshore tax abuses costs the U.S. government over $100 billion in lost revenue a year. That’s nearly three times the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security. Even the nation’s top Iraq war contractor, Kellogg Brown & Root (a former Halliburton subsidiary), was able to avoid paying hundreds of millions in Medicare and Social Security taxes for years — all while receiving $16 billion in plum contracts.

The White House sanctioned the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, such as simulated drowning, based on legal reasoning it later rescinded; even many within the administration felt the techniques amounted to torture. At the outset of President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) produced legal guidance that enabled the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use the techniques on terrorism suspects. On August 1, 2002, the OLC provided a now-infamous “torture memo” to Alberto Gonzales, who was then counsel to the president. “We conclude that for an act to constitute torture . . . it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure,” reads the memo, which was written at the request of the CIA. Physical pain must be equal to the pain of “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” The OLC later extended similar advice to the Department of Defense. According to reports by news media and human rights organizations, U.S. interrogators used techniques that included: depriving detainees of clothing, food, light, warmth, and sleep; slapping them on the face and torso; and waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

Veterans enrolled in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care programs have long complained of receiving inadequate treatment at poorly funded facilities. According to a 2003 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, veterans were forced to travel long distances to receive care — about 25 percent of the vets lived more than a 60-minute drive from a VA hospital. They also had to endure long waits for appointments, especially in regions like Florida, home to a large number of aging veterans. Nursing homes for veterans were notoriously understaffed, making it difficult to keep up with the increasing population of older vets who need care. But the strains imposed by new veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan exposed a whole new litany of problems for the VA and the military. Citizens and lawmakers were outraged after The Washington Post exposed dismal conditions for veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007. Several high-ranking Defense Department officials were fired or stepped down under pressure, and stories soon emerged about other medical facilities where veterans were placed in rooms teeming with fruit flies, slept on broken hospital beds or faced unprofessional staff. A subsequent investigation of 1,400 hospitals and other facilities for vets found more than 1,000 incidents of substandard conditions. The VA has also struggled to deal with the many young veterans complaining of mental health problems, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Treatment for PTSD was found to be inadequate in 2005, when only half of VA medical centers had a PTSD clinical team. Congressional testimony indicated that VA examiners felt pressure to conduct exams of veterans in as little as 20 minutes. The larger problem is that the VA’s patient workload has nearly doubled in the past 10 years; there are now 7.8 million enrollees in the VA health system.

The disastrous hurricane season of 2005 caught the Small Business Administration (SBA) napping. The SBA’s disaster loan program is the primary way homeowners and small-business owners receive federal funding to recover after a catastrophe. The SBA, however, never considered how it would react to an event the size of Hurricane Katrina, which was followed within the next 60 days by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma. Collectively the storms wreaked an estimated $118 billion in property damage, only a small portion of which was eligible for SBA action, across the Gulf Coast region. Within four months, SBA had a backlog of more than 204,000 applications for assistance.

Each application represented a hurricane victim waiting for the capital to rebuild. “I was amazed at how the delays, affecting the livelihood of my small business, did not seem to be important,” one owner told the House Small Business Committee in March 2006. “Time is critical in these situations. . . . [W]e still have nothing!” In April 2006, the SBA’s administrator, Hector Barreto, announced his resignation. When the SBA’s inspector assessed the situation in May 2006, the SBA was taking about 74 days on average to process an application, far longer than the 21 days the agency had set as its goal. Ultimately, the agency dispersed more than $6 billion in loans.

Follow-up:
In response to a request for comment, an agency spokeswoman noted that, under the SBA’s new administrator, Steven Preston, the application backlog diminished. The agency says it has positioned itself for future disasters by adding an Executive Office of Disaster Strategic Planning and Operations, drawing up a “comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan, and setting up an online system for loan applications.”

More than a decade after the creation of its Office of Children’s Health Protection, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has marginalized the agency’s only center for assessing risks to children, according to government auditors. Children are particularly vulnerable to environmental hazards: Asthma and autism are on the rise, while four children’s diseases of environmental origin cost the nation an estimated $55 billion per year. The Office of Children’s Health Protection was founded in 1997 by the Clinton Administration, which also that year issued an executive order creating the Presidential Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children. Neither group has fared well.

A September 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation found that the EPA had failed to effectively engage or value the input of the office’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC). And President Bush allowed the task force to expire in 2005, leaving the EPA with no “high-level infrastructure or mandate” for children’s environmental health and safety, according to the GAO. Largely ignored by EPA officials, the committee on its own wrote more than 70 letters with hundreds of recommendations over the past decade. The GAO looked at three air quality standard proposals on particulate matter, ozone, and lead, and found that EPA officials either “did not acknowledge, was noncommittal, rejected, or offered only to consider [CHPAC recommendations] along with comments from the general public.” The EPA argues that much of the committee’s value comes from its verbal input during presentations and discussions. An EPA spokesman said the agency does indeed appreciate and rely on the committee’s advice and will “continue cross-agency collaborations to address the recommendations.”

America’s air traffic control system has essentially not changed much since the 1960s — and that’s more than a little alarming. Numerous attempts to upgrade the system have failed, so the nation still relies on decades-old technology at a time when American aviation is suffering from some of the worst delays in its history. And the situation will only get worse, say experts: Airlines have turned to smaller airplanes and are putting them in the sky more often — with the load expected to either double or triple by 2025. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) first moved toward a modernization program in 1981, but attempts to make major technological leaps forward have fallen short, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has listed modernization of air traffic control as a “high risk” project since 1995; One attempt at modernization went so poorly that it has been taught to students as “a case study for failure,” according to an FAA press officer. Experts have said that multiple obstacles hindered previous efforts — such as an FAA culture resistant to change, a shortage of technical expertise, and cumbersome federal budget rules. The Bush administration and Congress agreed on a new concept in 2003 known as NextGen, a computerized system relying on global satellite positioning that significantly boosts capacity by enabling planes to safely fly closer together on more direct paths. NextGen, which is expected to cost between $15 billion and $22 billion by 2025, could face a host of challenges. Despite the potential for saving up to $10 billion annually on fuel, air carriers have raised objections and expressed wariness at relying upon unproven technology. Air traffic controllers, who historically have had a rocky relationship with the FAA, would face fundamental changes in their job duties under NextGen.

The fine particle pollution that blasts into the air from diesel vehicles and power plants is a health threat well-understood by scientists — causing an estimated 20,000 deaths a year and hospitalizing many more in the United States. But faced with this issue, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the first time in three decades ignored the advice of its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) on air quality standards. Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson said his 2006 ruling on National Ambient Air Quality Standards for fine particulate matter was “based on the best available science,” as required by the Clean Air Act. But it wasn’t clear what science he was referring to. The CASAC’s disagreements with the parent agency were echoed by the American Medical Association, American Thoracic Society, American Lung Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and American Public Health Association. EPA did issue a rule requiring that daily exposure levels to fine particulate matter be cut nearly in half by single or multi-county “areas,” to fit just within the revised window recommended by CASAC. But when the committee also recommended toughening the annual air standard for fine particulate matter, EPA disregarded the request.