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Pruitt got into even deeper hot water yesterday when it became clear that the hasty ethics review he requested of his sweetheart condo arrangement with the wife of lobbyist Steven Hart was flawed, at least in part because Pruitt provided ethics officials with incomplete information about the deal.
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Documents obtained and interviews conducted by POGO demonstrate how Pruitt is trying to circumvent the regulatory process to please his anti-government sympathizers, violating public interest laws in the process.
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EPA says standardizing the rules will allow workers to work in different states more easily and make it easier for growers and state agencies to use training materials.
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Police departments are moving forward with plans to incorporate real-time facial recognition in body cameras, creating serious risks to privacy and due process rights.
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Chairman Gowdy's apparent opinion that Congress lacks the ability to conduct serious investigations, rather than the will to do it, is irreconcilable with your leadership position on House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
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The number of individuals holding federal government security clearances continues to drop, according to a new report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
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President Trump was famously a critic of the F-35 jet fighter when he was running for the White House. But he recently hailed it as the cherry on top of the Pentagon’s ice-cream sundae that is the government’s rest-of-2018 spending bill.
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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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POGO's Sean Moulton: "Every dollar that's wasted on travel or security that is unnecessary is money that's not going to protect health and the environment for the American people."
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Among the most consequential agencies having faulty data is the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Peter Tyler, a senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight.
That’s because the DEA is responsible for maintaining the database of physicians—checked by U.S. pharmacies—who can prescribe controlled substances, such as opioids. However, the DEA doesn’t have full access to the most reliable information. This could allow someone to use the name of a dead doctor, Tyler said.
“Unlike many waste, fraud and abuse issues, the solution is not complicated,” Tyler told Fox News. “It’s a solvable problem that Congress should address. The good news is that we have a bipartisan solution.”
While not perfect—as demonstrated by IG audits—the Social Security death database is fixable, and the legislation requires improvements, Tyler said, adding that other agency lists are a subset of the more complete SSA data.
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While federal ethics rules prevent government employees from biased treatment of individuals or businesses, those rules don't extend to the president, said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based government watchdog group.
Amey said this doesn't mean the public shouldn't demand more restraint from Trump. "Presidential power should never be used in such a manner," he said. "The president should get to work lifting up our country rather than picking playground-type fights with those he doesn't agree with."
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United Press International
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Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight said restructuring initiatives like the Futures Command is a tactic to cut into existing programs to fund larger budgets that use money to unnecessarily upgrade equipment.
"I would hope everyone is careful about what they cut and they actually evaluate things not just on their age but on their effectiveness and contribution to the overall mission," Grazier said.
Introducing newer equipment can induce extra complicity, Grazier said. He also mentioned that innovative systems can distract from a military mission because newer prototypes do not always equal efficiency.
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Lydia Dennett, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, said that while "it's difficult to know what we don't know," Perry has clearly avoided the ethical troubles of officials like Pruitt and Zinke.
“Given the secretary's past experience in government, it is clear he is familiar with the expectations of public office," Dennett said.
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“This memo is odd. Rather than clearing up conflicting reports about Pruitt's actual use of the rented property, the EPA's ethics office is justifying its previous ruling, one which they admit did not include all of the facts or an analysis of other potential ethics violations,” Scott Amey, general counsel for the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, told BuzzFeed News.
“The EPA ethics team needs to do a complete do-over based on the actual usage of the property and consider all ethics laws to determine whether Pruitt received a sweetheart deal from someone with business before his agency,” Amey added.
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According to the Project on Government Oversight, the agency now depends on those fees for more than half its funding. The revolving door between the industry and the agency tasked with regulating that industry is also a concern. Gottlieb himself came straight from consultancies and board memberships with various pharmaceutical companies.
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Scott Amey, an attorney with Project on Government Oversight, told ThinkProgress in an interview last year that Miller’s past work for Perry helped him quickly build up a large client base. “If he has a personal relationship with the secretary of energy that’s going to be a selling point for him,” Amey said.
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“The talking point going around about serious impropriety by the FBI in applications for FISA warrants merits come concern,” Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, which tracks IGs’ work, told Government Executive. “But the IG has just started the review, so it seems calls for a second special counsel are premature. This seems exactly the kind of thing the Justice inspector general is there for.”
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