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POGO is disappointed and troubled by Thursday's rushed vote by the House of Representatives to pass legislation reauthorizing the government’s warrantless-surveillance program and codifying its most controversial practices with no real reforms to protect the privacy of Americans.
“By Congress allowing the backdoor search loophole to exist, Americans may find their Fourth Amendment rights violated, and the contents of their communications funneled to investigations that have nothing to do with foreign intelligence or national security,” said Jake Laperruque, senior counsel for The Constitution Project at POGO.
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Federal expenditures on hurricane relief contracts have now surpassed the $3 billion spent for Hurricane Sandy and are steadily approaching the $20 billion total for Hurricane Katrina. As the total grows, so too will the misuse of those funds.
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Forty-four civil society organizations called on Congress to limit surveillance of private citizens.
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A Pentagon office that spent $675 million on economic development projects in Afghanistan was rife with waste and achieved “mixed results,” according to an audit report released this week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
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For the third time the IRS hired contractors to collect unpaid federal taxes, and for the third time the effort is falling short: contractors are costing more than they are collecting while making a bad situation even worse for low-income taxpayers.
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POGO in the News
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“Backdoor search and about collection take something that's supposed to be a foreign intelligence authority focused on counterterrorism and turns it into a warrantless, domestic law enforcement surveillance authority,” Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project On Government Oversight told me on the phone.
[...] “If the House approves the bill, then I think the FBI will really see this as a green light to take these controversial practices and ramp them up to an unprecedented degree,” Laperruque said.
[...]Laperruque said he’s optimistic there’s enough resistance to these bills to force Congress to do a temporary reauthorization of Section 702 without any changes while they have a real debate about how to reform US surveillance practices. “On the one hand, you have a bill that would take these surveillance practices and codify them into law,” Laperruque said. “On the other hand you have an amendment that would ban about collection and require a warrant for backdoor searches. The House is really faced with a pretty black and white contrast between these two measures.”
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“ICE has consistently proven that it does not have the appropriate oversight in place to ensure either of the safety of the American public or the well-being of immigrant detainees,” Mia Steinle, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, said via email. "In just the past few months, the Office of Inspector General has uncovered countless instances of sloppy record-keeping, inadequate oversight and poor management of the immigrant detention system,” Steinle said.
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If the Senate approves a similar proposal to the House bill, one rights advocate said such practices could escalate.
“The government will see that and say, okay, we basically have got free rein here. To whatever degree they are using this for routine investigations now, it will increase dramatically,” said Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog group.
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Take the F-35 combat plane, a Rube Goldberg contraption once designed to carry out multiple missions and now capable of doing none of them well.
In fact, as the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, it’s an aircraft that may never be fully ready for combat. To add insult to injury, billions more will be spent to fix defects in planes that were rushed through production before they had been fully tested. The cost of this “too big to fail” program is currently projected at $1.5 trillion over the lifetimes of the 2,400-plus aircraft currently planned for. This means it is likely to become the most expensive weapons program in the history of Pentagon procurement.
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The yo-yo of federal regulation is on the downswing or the upswing depending on your point of view. The Trump administration has repeatedly touted the pace of its rollback of regulations and has promised even more in 2018. Sean Moulton, the open government program manager at the Project on Government Oversight, has been watching this phenomenon closely and he joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss what it means for the agencies that do the regulating.
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But do not expect the Pentagon to pass the audit even if it is completed as Norquist promised, said Dan Grazier, a fellow at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog group.
“The important issue is going through the process of actually auditing the Pentagon,” Grazier said. “I don’t think anybody really expects a clean audit the first time around but it’s important to establish kind of a baseline and to figure out where to progress from there.”
The maiden audit also comes just as the Trump administration and defense hawks in Congress are pushing to hike funding for defense. Grazier said getting the military finances in order would be key to knowing how to wisely spend the money.
“We have service leaders going up to Capitol Hill all the time saying that they need more resources,” he said. “But we don’t really know that because we don’t know how all of the resources, the abundant resources frankly, that they are receiving are being spent.”
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The Washington Examiner's Daily on Defense
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About 1,200 auditors will be dispatched in the effort to account for an estimated $2.4 trillion in assets. Norquist promised an audit report on Nov. 15 and every year after. “Only time will tell if they actually go through with it,” said Dan Grazier, a fellow at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog group.
Law has required federal agencies to submit to audits annually for more than two decades but the Pentagon alone has not, meaning it cannot fully account for how it spends money and resources. “We have service leaders going up to Capitol Hill all the time saying that they need more resources,” Grazier said. “But we don’t really know that because we don’t know how all of the resources, the abundant resources frankly, that they are receiving are being spent.”
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Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight said the CFPB cost overruns are problems for both GSA and for Grunley.
“The government has an obligation to define the project’s scope and standards and properly estimate costs,” he told The DCNF. “And the contractor has an obligation to bid appropriately and get the job done. It’s unfortunate that in many cases, both sides fail and we see projects that are over budget and behind schedule.”
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