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We are deeply troubled by the new threats by President Trump against Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It is in the best interest of our country that Mueller be allowed to complete his investigation without undue interference. Our mission as a nonpartisan government watchdog is to fight waste, fraud, and abuse. An order from the president to fire Mueller without cause would be a clear abuse of power, and therefore requires immediate congressional action.
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The Trump Administration wants to add an untested question about citizenship to the 2020 census, but it could reduce the accuracy of the data that we use to apportion Congressional seats and direct hundreds of billions in federal funds.
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As in the past, current lawmakers are lamenting a looming military readiness crisis. Not surprisingly, the solution to the “problem” remains the same: increasing the Pentagon’s budget. A closer look at how Congress appropriated funds suggests that their true interests lie in buying new toys.
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Recent attention to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) could lead to Congress closing an often-exploited loophole, but it has also led to significant questions about what kinds of activities and relationships make someone a foreign agent.
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Since the war began, U.S. officials have said repeatedly that the only way U.S. troops can come home is if they train enough Afghan troops well enough to defend their country.
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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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POGO in the News
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The New York Times Editorial Board
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Since then, President Barack Obama and now Mr. Trump have used those same authorizations at least 37 times to justify attacks on the Islamic State and other militant groups in 14 countries, including Yemen, the Philippines, Kenya, Eritrea and Niger, according to Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight. This has allowed the Republican-led Congress to avoid public debate — and any responsibility for sending American men and women into battle.
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Peter Tyler of the Project On Government Oversight argues that the duties of inspectors general are more important than ever, and they "do really good work, but the question is, does anybody listen?" He previously worked in the inspector general's office at the Department of Health and Human Services and said agencies should listen to the recommendations and make changes. "That does happen, but not enough," he said.
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“This could be the clearest example we’ve seen of a conflict of interest stemming from the president’s role as head of state in connection with other countries and his business interests,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of The Project on Government Oversight, a Washington ethics and good government organization.
[...] Brian said she and other ethicists worry that “this sets a low bar of standards for future presidents.”
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Some critics of Mr. Pruitt’s coin proposal said it missed the point of the gift item. Scott H. Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said that the coins were intended to honor jobs well done and lift morale. “The coin should reference the E.P.A., and not become tribute to Pruitt or Oklahoma,” he said.
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There’s not complete agreement among ethics experts on whether all of Sessions’ actions involving the 2016 campaigns and Russia constitute violations of his recusal. On the McCabe firing, for example, Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, says some people argue that “he has the authority to fire an employee that made a misstatement to government investigators.” On the other hand, Amey continues, there are those saying “wait a second, this violates his sworn testimony to congress that he would recuse himself from matters involving the Clinton Foundation”—the subject of the investigation McCabe is accused of lying about.
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So-called budgetary burn-offs are endemic to the military. “It’s an open joke within the ranks,” Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps officer who is now an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Project on Government Oversight, told The Daily Beast. “Practically everyone in the military knows that, with budgets, it’s important to use it or lose it.”
[...] “People get rewarded for expanding their departments and their budgets,” Grazier explained. “This practice is learned at low levels at the beginning of careers and is expanded and perfected when people reach the higher levels. It is then that readiness can really be hurt.”
“Spending more money on defense does not necessarily result in more defense,” Grazier added.
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“Essentially, OGE is saying that it is watching and the EPA better conduct comprehensive investigations into the numerous ethics concerns involving Pruitt,” Scott Amey, general counsel of the government watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, told BuzzFeed News in an email. “OGE even goes so far to cite authorities that could lead to an OGE investigation and disciplinary recommendations if the EPA drops the ball.”
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Christian Science Monitor
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All presidents deal to some extent with alleged wrongdoing by senior appointees, but “I have never seen anything like this,” says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.
Why is this happening, especially under an outsider president who swooped into Washington promising to change the way the capital operates?
One answer may center on what, exactly, Trump meant by “drain the swamp.”
“We thought he was saying, ‘Hey, there’s going to be a new sheriff in town,’ and that he would do things differently with the revolving door [between government service and lobbying] and cleaning up ethics laws and regulations,” says Mr. Amey.
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POGO's Lydia Dennett: We here at the Project on Government Oversight certainly think it’s fair and reasonable for foreign governments to want to put their issues before members of Congress as well as the American public. We just feel like that should be disclosed and the Department of Justice should be enforcing this law so that the American people and members of Congress know who is influencing them and where that money's going.
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The inspector general office issued a memo in November showing Zinke has failed to properly document his travel, which stymied the agency’s probe. In addition, Zinke and his wife, Lola, brought a taxpayer-funded security team to a vacation in Turkey and Greece last year, the Project On Government Oversight has found.
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POGO's Neil Gordon: The public needs to understand that some of the world's most well-known companies are government contractors, which means they take their tax dollars and often have some misbehavior in their background that might sometimes cast doubt on whether they should be entrusted with tax money.
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“I find no grounds in the Constitution or the War Powers Resolution that would authorize unilateral presidential use of military force against another nation that has not attacked the United States,” said Louis Fisher, a Constitution Project scholar who formerly worked as senior specialist for separation of powers at the Library of Congress. “That fundamental principle has been regularly violated by presidents from Truman [in Korea] through Obama [in Libya].”
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According to Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, an attack on his investigators could spur lawmakers to attempt to remove Trump from office.
“That would absolutely be, from our perspective, a triggering event for the House to consider impeachment proceedings,” Brian said by phone on Thursday.
[...] According to Brian, Trump attempting to get rid of Mueller could cause a similar exodus, as she believes even Republicans would likely consider such a move to be a “red line.”
“I have confidence that if he were to take that step, you would see not just an uprising from people on the left, but you would see Republicans saying that this has gone too far,” Brian said.
Swalwell and Brian each expressed hope that it would not come to that point, though, telling Mic that it would be best for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to pass legislation protecting not just Mueller, but future special counsels.
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Former Marine Capt. Dan Grazier, who works on military reform issues for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said he agrees with Mattis that signaling weakness to an adversary could be dangerous, and he feels that members of Congress hyperventilate about a military readiness crisis every time something bad happens.
But Grazier said he does not believe that releasing information about plane and helicopter crashes might inadvertently trigger a war.
“I don’t think that anybody who doesn’t already have malign intent against the United States is going to say: ‘Oh, look, they’re having a lot of Class A mishaps; now is a good time to launch an attack,’” he said.
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That mishaps spiked as flight hours fell isn’t surprising, analysts said. The less frequently a pilot flies or a maintainer works on an aircraft, the less current their skills are. That adds risk, said Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain who is now a military fellow with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington.
“The lack of flight hours — that is the big thing I am hearing from my friends still in the service,” Grazier said. “What if they run into one of those situations where there is a minor issue with the aircraft, or where they run into an emergency situation. That is where experience comes into play.”
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“If you’re a litigant in federal court, you certainly don’t want the judge to be getting up to speed on the law while she’s ruling on your case,” Sarah Turberville, director of The Constitution Project at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, told the Times-Picayune."
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The sudden departure of former Veterans Affairs Department Secretary David Shulkin revved up questions about the Vacancies Act. Did he quit or was he fired? How an administration can respond to a political opening depends on that question, and on how you interpret the Vacancies Act. For more on the Act, and why it might need reform, Federal News Radio’s Eric White spoke with Project on Government Oversight policy associate Rebecca Jones for Federal Drive with Tom Temin.
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The EPA is facing a record number of FOIA requests under the Trump administration, which has in part led to an extreme backlog in response rates. Between Jan. 20, 2017, and the end of last year, 11,431 FOIA requests were filed to the EPA — an increase of about 17 percent compared to the same time period in former President Obama’s last year in office, a Project on Government Oversight report found.
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Dan Grazier, a Project On Government Oversight defense watchdog, chided the amount of spending on “a broken system.”
“Congress simply threw more money at a broken system, so the American people can expect to see more of the same,” he said in an email. “They will see more over-priced and under-performing aircraft. They will see more wasted overhead spending. And they will see more money into bloated contracts that will, in part, be turned into future campaign contributions. With this bill, Congress has rewarded bad behavior which will only serve to encourage more bad behavior in the future.”
Grazier noted the plan adds 10 F-35As and three KC-46s aircraft above what the Air Force asked to receive. While the budget has prioritized more spending on aircraft, it put less of a hike into operations and maintenance to restore readiness, he said.
“If you just look at aircraft programs, Congress added $9.5 billion above the $34.5 (billion) figure requested by the Pentagon,” he wrote. “After years of being lectured about the looming ‘readiness crisis,’ you would think that Congress would have prioritized operations and maintenance.”
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Independent observers have praised these new probes. “The fact that Pruitt doesn't seem to understand why his actions even create the appearance of impropriety is troubling,” Laura Peterson, investigator at nonpartisan independent watchdog The Project for Government Oversight, told The World Weekly.
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Daniel Grazier, a defense analyst with the non-partisan watchdog Project On Government Oversight, said it’s probably a good idea to let each service branch have oversight.
“I’ll be interested to see how it works in practice,” he said. “In theory, it’s probably a good idea because a lot of the problems with the F-35 program already are the direct result of it being a joint program.
Grazier said it would have been a better decision to separate the service programs in the late 1990s, prior to the initial development contract in October 2001.
The Pentagon had forgotten the lessons of an earlier 1960s-era program, the F-111, when plans were scrapped for a joint fighter between the Air Force and Navy, he said. The Air Force flew the jet without the Navy buying its own version because of a wide gap in requirements.
“It’s always problematic,” he said. “This has been tried before and it didn’t work out all that well.
“We scrapped all of those lessons and went right back to the F-111 model so we have to learn all of these lessons again the hard way.”
Grazier said the F-35 has the added issue of heavy reliance on defense contractors to stay operational.
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