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The Department of Justice will soon begin posting seven years’ worth of Foreign Agents Registration Act advisory opinions for the first time, as the National Law Review reported last week.
For years, POGO has recommended the Department make these documents available as an informational resource to improve compliance with the law, and submitted testimony to Congress just last week urging it to make doing so a legal requirement. The Justice Department’s decision to proactively make these opinions available is a huge win for foreign-influence transparency.
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POGO has examined many developments and issues regarding how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other agencies responded to the 2017 disasters. Here's a summary of what we learned and recommended to the White House and Congress.
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A bipartisan group introduced legislation aimed at the billions of dollars in improper payments made each year by federal agencies. The act would strengthen current laws that require them to estimate, detect, prevent, and recover payments made in error or in the wrong amount.
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POGO Board Member and former Member of Congress Mickey Edwards addressed a graduating class of law students, and emphasized the difference between law and justice. He encouraged the graduates to evaluate the difference between just and unjust laws with compassion.
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The Defense Department didn’t come up with its mechanism to try to restrain costs: Congress did. A generation ago, there was a slew of such congressionally-mandated changes that fitfully improved Pentagon operations.
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POGO in the News
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In addition to hemming in union power, the executive orders could be abused to reduce accountability or punish whistleblowers, said Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
“Weakening civil service protection laws would make the government less effective and put us all at risk, “ he said. “It would impede Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch: Congress’s best sources of information are the employees inside agencies, and without robust protections and due process, more sources will remain silent.”
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“Policies like these latest executive orders from the President can be abused to reduce senior official accountability or punish whistleblowers,” Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations at the Project On Government Oversight, said in a statement.
“More discipline can be beneficial, and of course there are cases where misbehaving employees don’t face the appropriate consequences. But weakening civil service protection laws would make the government less effective, and put us all at risk,” said Schwellenbach, whose group describes its mission as shining a light on the government’s activities.
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It’s clear that Gowdy has zero interest in doing his job or carrying out the committee’s purported mission. As pointed out recently by the Project for Government Oversight (POGO), the chairman has publicly stated that he believes “Congress has proven itself incapable of conducting serious investigations…”
To state the obvious: Yes, It’s near impossible to conduct a serious investigation if the Oversight chairman is not even willing to use his authority to compel witnesses to answer questions.
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The Justice Department thwarted their request for months. Typically, they refuse to honor requests for information related to an open criminal investigation. In this case they did so even when threatened by Congress with contempt. But Nunes and Gowdy's request was finally honored, reportedly after President Trump intervened.
"This is totally unusual," said Morton Rosenberg, a fellow at the Constitution Project. Rosenberg spent more than three decades at the Congressional Research Service as a law specialist in Congress' oversight and investigative authorities.
"In all the cases I cataloged, this is the first instance where there has been cooperation between a chairman of an oversight committee and a president," he said.
That cooperation could be a game-changer in the next months as other members of Congress subpoena information from DOJ about the origin and scope of the special counsel investigation.
br/>Before Rosenstein agreed to provide Nunes, Gowdy and the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leaders with the classified information, the intelligence committee chairman told SBG's Michelle Macaluso the deputy attorney general was "in contempt of Congress."
"I believe the president has directed them to give us the information we've been asking for," Nunes said. "We have a right to the information just as the Department of Justice and FBI do."
Nunes is essentially correct, Rosenberg said. "Congress can get any information it wants, even if it's highly sensitive intelligence information or dealing with Department of Justice open cases," he explained. The issue is not whether Congress has a right to the information, he added, but whether it has weighed its need for transparency against the needs of a federal prosecutor in an open investigation.
There are three ways Congress can enforce a subpoena. They can hold an individual in contempt of Congress, which can lead to criminal prosecution. They can have a contempt hearing, which results in a trial by Congress and potentially criminal charges if the subpoena is still not honored. Or they can pursue a civil enforcement suit, which is typically a very lengthy process.
Over the past decade, Congress' enforcement of its subpoena power has been "totally stymied," Rosenberg said, because the president has stepped in to protect officials from criminal prosecution by claiming executive privilege to the information requested. It has made contempt charges a "theoretical threat."
[...] Among other things, the congressmen requested "the unredacted August 2017 memo written by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein that articulated the scope of the Special Counsel's jurisdiction."
That particular document, Rosenberg said, "has the key to revelations about what Mueller is doing ... That's exactly what the president and his attorneys want to know."
That makes it increasingly unlikely for President Trump to invoke executive privilege to protect that information.
"Rosenstein will, I think, protect the information," Rosenberg said. "He'll take the chance of being fired," he continued, rather than honor a congressional subpoena to turn over documents that would jeopardize the special counsel investigation.
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"For companies like Exxon and Chevron to benefit from associating with this valuable transparency effort without themselves living up to its basic standards was degrading the entire effort," Project on Government Oversight executive director Danielle Brian said.
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Letter to the Editor in the Sioux City Journal
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According to a May 24 story in The Journal headlined "Top-dollar stealth fighter may not go the distance," the Navy's newest fighter jet is "raising troubling questions about whether the multibillion-dollar program is already outpaced by threats." The story quotes Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight as saying a House Armed Services Committee report "highlights just how poorly conceived the Joint Strike Fighter program has been from the very beginning."
The article mentions costs of $406.1 billion to develop and build and $1.1 trillion to operate new F-35 models of aircraft for the military.
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