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Right now, testing shows the F-35 is incapable of performing most of the functions required for an acceptable close support aircraft—functions the A-10 is performing daily in current combat.
As initially advertised, and throughout the program’s development, taxpayers have been told this exorbitantly costly system is necessary to combat advanced future threats. However, testing results show that the planes already delivered cannot even effectively address the current threats. That’s a problem.
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The lead staffer dedicated to protecting Intelligence Community employees who internally report misconduct was terminated earlier this month, despite bipartisan protests from Senators and the whistleblower advocacy community.
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While these administrative boards are little-known to those who aren’t actively engaged in government oversight work, that doesn’t diminish the importance of the work they do or the harm that is caused by their absence.
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Trained as a Marine, Mattis has spent his time as defense chief in a foxhole, keeping his head down and rarely holding press conferences. That has kept him from being publicly accountable to the public, but also kept him out of the president’s line of fire.
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Videos: Unrig the System
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Hear POGO's executive director Danielle Brian break down the revolving door:
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Upcoming
Save the date: POGO's Danielle Brian will be hosting the annual Ridenhour Prizes on April 18th, 2018. This year's winners are:
- Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement
- Carmen YulÃn Cruz Soto, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers
- “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower,” directed by Joe Piscatella
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POGO in the News
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“I don’t think CIA will agree to it if the committee doesn’t force the issue, and I don’t think the committee will force the issue unless Warner is willing to tell Burr that it needs to happen,” Project on Government Oversight investigator Katherine Hawkins said in an interview.
POGO joined more than two dozen liberal and civil liberties groups in a Friday plea for the Senate to declassify Haspel material. Amnesty International went further on Monday, urging Trump to withdraw her nomination outright and launch an investigation into her past.
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There are some important caveats to point out. First of all, said Liz Hempowicz of the non-profit Project on Government Oversight (POGO), we don’t know what the final version of the Trump administration NDAs said.
Hempowicz also said POGO has “really significant concerns” about any attempt to muzzle White House officials, especially if the NDAs do not contain explicit language assuring employees that they’re not precluded from reporting suspected wrongdoing. But Hempowicz said she’s seen enforceable non-disclosure agreements in which executive-branch agencies bar whistleblowing employees from revealing the details of their settlement negotiations with the government.
Hempowicz emphasized that the Trump NDA, if it’s similar to the draft described in the Post article, is much broader – and therefore more troubling - than the whistleblower agreements, but warned against quick assumptions that it’s unconstitutional.
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A more detailed version of his schedule obtained by the Project on Government Oversight redacts details about his meetings but does confirm that he flew United Arab Emirates on his way back from Milan.
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"This case raises a lot of concerns and always deserved more attention," said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a good-government watchdog group. "The reports that Brig. Gen. Bobeck received emails from contractors involving Black Hawk helicopters should trigger an ethics review to determine if he was influenced in his government responsibilities and violated the public trust."
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“This is crazy,” said attorney Debra Katz, who has represented numerous government whistleblowers and negotiated nondisclosure agreements. “The idea of having some kind of economic penalty is an outrageous effort to limit and chill speech. Once again, this president believes employees owe him a personal duty of loyalty, when their duty of loyalty is to the institution.”
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President Trump is finding himself embroiled in the repercussions of non-disclosure agreements he has reportedly been party to, some that were allegedly signed by women for their silence and others he has made White House staffers sign as a condition for working in his administration.
Little is known about the actual text of these documents beyond the general principles, but legal experts are questioning whether it is possible to hold government officials to the same non-disclosure agreements that are typically reserved for the private sector. This comes at the same time as salacious figures from President Trump's past are alleging they were pressured into signing similar NDAs, forbidding women like porn actress Stephanie Clifford (A.K.A Stormy Daniels) and former playboy model Karen McDougal from revealing any affair they may have had with Donald Trump.
Elizabeth Hempowicz, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, and Debra Katz, civil rights attorney and founding partner of Katz, Marshall & Banks, consider whether these agreements pass legal muster.
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More than 90 percent of the tracts of land leased on Wednesday had only one bid. Over the past 20 years, more than three-quarters of the leases awarded in the Gulf of Mexico—76.6 percent—were awarded on the basis of single bids, the Project on Government Oversight reported earlier this year. Adjusting for inflation, the average price paid per acre in each Gulf of Mexico auction has declined by 95.7 percent, dropping from $9,068 to $391, the report also found.
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“We believe that it clearly became problematic as soon as it became clear that Nunes was running back to the White House,” Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said in a phone interview. “That became a painful moment in the investigation. That was such an abdication of his role as the chairman of the committee.”
[...] “It was so clearly a disaster,” Brian said.
[...] “[The Mueller probe] doesn’t help us figure out what weaknesses are in our electoral system to keep this from happening,” Brian said. “That’s the Congress’ job.”
“This is not just an academic exercise,” Brian added. “The purpose is to figure out what reforms are necessary to ensure that this kind of meddling doesn’t happen in the future.”
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But even with the VA IG's scathing report, Wilkes said he sees improvements and he is not the only one. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a group that had worked with VA whistleblowers in the past, has also seen the positive changes.
“We have seen a tonal shift there with the way inspector general Missal is talking about whistleblowers, and his communication with Congress seems to be better. We are very happy and hopeful about that," said POGO investigator Lydia Dennett.
Dennett said the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection, created by Congress in 2017 to make it easier to fire those at fault for problems within the agency, has also helped, though she expected it to have a bigger impact.
“What we’ve seen since the creation of this office is that it’s mostly been low level employees that have been fired and that hasn’t contributed to the kind of systemic change that we really want to see," Dennett said.
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Sarah Turberville, director of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, agrees. “The president’s proposal to seek harsher sentences, including capital punishment, is ineffective — and is a diversion from tackling what is a significant public health crisis,” she tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Threats of increased prison sentences, or even the death sentence, aren’t a solution to the problem, she says.
Federal prosecutors already have a number of tools at their disposal to pursue drug traffickers, Turberville says. “And Singapore is only a model to those unconcerned with constitutional limits on government power, like due process,” she points out. Instead, the administration should provide “meaningful policies” to help people and communities recover from opioid abuse, she says, adding that “harsher sentencing would be a dramatic step in the wrong direction.”
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According to a Military Times investigation, aviation mishaps across the U.S. military have increased since the onset of sequestration. To understand why, Military Times Pentagon bureau chief Tara Copp talked with Dan Grazier from the Project on Government Oversight.
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Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations at the government watchdog group Project On Government Oversight, said it is "not necessarily an abuse of authority or a waste of taxpayer dollars if there's a credible threat."
"But it can be questionable if an agency chief just wants a big entourage and the trappings of power,” he told Politico. “Security personnel are not errand boys or girls and agency leaders are not royalty," he continued.
"When it's a private vacation, there must be even more scrutiny given to these security arrangements than usual."
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Of the 148 tracts sold Wednesday, all but 10, or 98 percent, only had one bid. Usually, only 76 percent of tracts have just one bidder, according to data compiled by the Project on Government Oversight.
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“If Haspel gets confirmed, especially if she gets confirmed without even any public acknowledgement of what her role was, that obviously send a bad signal,” Katherine Hawkins, an expert on CIA torture at the Project on Government Oversight, told ThinkProgress.
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Nick Schwellenbach, the Director of Investigations at the Project On Government Oversight, said he worries about Hook and Lacey’s oversight of the Dissent Channel, based on their recently revealed involvement in the effort to sideline a staffer based on her political views.
That involvement was detailed in emails recently obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight committee. The emails suggest that Hook and Lacey were involved in undermining a career State Department employee who had been the target of attacks by right-wing media outlets over her perceived opposition to Trump, and who ultimately was pushed out of the policy planning office.
“Now we know that they actively took measures to sideline career employees they didn’t think were sufficiently loyal. Did Hook or other appointees misuse Dissent Channel information they were privy to?” Schwellenbach told TPM. “In the emails obtained by the House Oversight minority, Hook demonstrates that he is freewheeling and isn’t acting in good faith with correspondence from career staff shared with him in confidence. It isn’t a stretch to wonder if he acted inappropriately with communications made over the Dissent Channel.”
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“I think we’re seeing a pattern across a number of agencies,” Nick Schwellenbach, the Director of Investigations at the Project On Government Oversight, told TPM. “Top political leadership is working to root out people they view as insufficiently loyal to Trump’s agenda. It’s extremely troubling, because federal government employees’ loyalty should be to the Constitution, not to the political masters of the moment.”
[...] Whistleblower advocates like Schwellenbach say they fear that will mean more laws like the one passed in 2017 to overhaul the scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs, which reports have found led to a mass purge of rank-and-file employees for minor infractions.
“The VA is a petri dish,” Schwellenbach said. “The law there is really being used in ways not intended by Congress. It is disproportionately going after lower-level people instead of holding senior officials accountable for wrongdoing in the department.”
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“There are many ethics concerns when government officials go to work in the industry that they conducted business with or regulated,” Scott Amey, general counsel for the Washington, D.C.-based project on government oversight, said in an email.
“Someone could use their office for personal or private gain at the expense of taxpayers or give preferential treatment to a future employer. Someone needs to conduct a review of Ms. Scott’s government activities, especially any involving CVS, and get details about her employment search to ensure that she didn’t violate any ethics rules.”
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