The Center for Public Integrity

Critics believe a lack of government regulation helped fuel questionable accounting practices — practices that allowed the huge energy trading firm Enron to report profits of hundreds of millions of dollars ($979 million in 2000, alone) before collapsing in 2001, in what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. The erosion of accounting practices was believed to have begun in the 1980s, as firms tried to balance strict standards with a desire to please clients and expand consulting business, but the scandals burst into public view under President George W. Bush. Certainly by the time Bush was elected, there was ample reason to question the overall validity of corporate financial statements, given that restatements of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings had skyrocketed from just three in 1981 to 270 in 2001. (The SEC says some of the blame lies with the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the private nonprofit organization it designated to set rules for corporate financial disclosure. In 2000, for example, it adopted a rule allowing companies, including Enron, to keep certain holdings off their balance sheets.)

In October 2008, a draft intelligence assessment found that, despite the seven-year presence of U.S. troops, Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” as the Taliban renews its influence over the country it once controlled. The draft National Intelligence Estimate, a formal document that reflects the consensus judgments of all 16 American intelligence agencies, faults the Afghan central government for the deteriorating situation, including rampant government corruption, as well as the country’s booming and destabilizing heroin trade. The New York Times reported that the assessment’s “conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.” Critics have long said that the war in Iraq has distracted from the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and that a lack of troops has hampered attempts to fully secure the country. Furthermore, the Taliban has established the border area in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas as a base for incursions into Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has weak control over these areas and violence in Afghanistan has increased markedly, starting in 2005. A U.S. effort to encourage the Pakistani government to control Taliban and Al Qaeda militants has failed to end the safe haven.

To compile this list of the most important federal failures of the past eight years, a team of 13 reporters sifted through hundreds of inspectors general reports, Government Accountability Office assessments, congressional oversight investigations, and news stories. The team interviewed dozens of experts, congressional staffers, and leaders of government watchdog organizations and sent e-mails to more than 4,800 federal government employees to solicit nominations for inclusion in this project. Some 250 failures were nominated, from which editors selected more than 125 — those that elicited some level of bipartisan criticism, but also had a discernible impact on ordinary people.

The Team

Editorial Team:
Bill Buzenberg, executive director
David E. Kaplan, editorial director
Gordon Witkin, managing editor
Josh Israel, project coordinator
Tom Stites, consulting editor
Michael Zuckerman, consulting editor

Reporting Team:
Katherine Aaron, Sara Bularzik, Te-Ping Chen, Caitlin Ginley, Andrew Green, M. Asif Ismail, Josh Israel, Sarah Laskow, Marianne Lavelle, Matt Lewis, Aaron Mehta, Nick Schwellenbach, Kate Willson

Fact-checking:
Laura Cheek, Joe Eaton, Caitlin Ginley, Aaron Mehta, Peter Smith

Copy-editing:
Sara Bularzik, Andrew Green, Ariel Olson Surowidjojo

Web Design:
Stephen Rountree, www.rountreegraphics.com
Top Dead Center Design, www.tdcdesign.com

Technical Team:
David Donald
Andrew Green
Tuan Lee
Jeremy Lewis
Ariel Olson Surowidjojo

Media Team:
Steve Carpinelli
The Hatcher Group, www.thehatchergroup.com

Reports

9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004.

Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Washington, D.C., 2005.

Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD (the "Duelfer Report"), 2004.

• Vol.1
• Vol.2
• Vol.3

Deputy Inspector General for Intelligence. Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2007.

Levin, Carl. Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-Al Qaeda Relationship. Washington, D.C.: Senate Armed Services Committee (minority staff), 2004.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Washington, D.C.: 108th Congress, 2004.

Over the past two and a half years, researchers at the Fund for Independence in Journalism have sought to document every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding (1) Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and (2) Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Although both had been frequently cited as rationales for the U.S. war in Iraq, by 2005 it was known that these assertions had not, in fact, been true.

The centerpiece of this project is an exhaustive, searchable, and robustly indexed database of all public statements on the two topics by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. These statements were painstakingly collected from the websites of the White House, State Department, and Defense Department as well as from transcripts of interviews and briefings, texts of speeches and testimony, prepared statements, and the like.

Also included are statements in the same two categories that appeared in major newspapers and on television programs, were part of public statements by other officials, or were contained in government studies or reports, books, and the like from September 11, 2001, to December 31, 2007. Secondary material from reports and books was included in the two-year database only in cases where specific dates were available. Other noteworthy material was included for context and completeness.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.