Some Oversight Suggestions

Here's a Baker's Dozen of them, courtesy of the Project on Government Oversight, who say these are all areas where the Bush administration are failing and/or not even trying while Congress pretty much lets them.

1) Addressing Federal Contractor Misconduct - "Federal contracting will continue to be plagued with waste, fraud, and corruption until bad actors have been genuinely held accountable. Congressional hearings on the government’s suspension and debarment policies have been contemplated but are long overdue."

2) Hidden Costs of Privatizing Government - "scandals involving government contractors ripping off the government have permeated the public news media. In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that contractors are now handling functions that had previously been considered the exclusive domain of the government, raising questions about whether the government can adequately control its spending and fulfill its mission...The Congress should closely explore and examine how and why the government is being privatized, and whether this privatization is harmful to government’s ability to serve and be held accountable to its citizens.

3) Executive Branch Revolving Door and Conflicts-of-Interest - "In recent years, the news media have profiled a shocking array of scandals involving government officials who made decisions benefiting private interests and left government to work for the very companies they were overseeing. For example, the public learned that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff sought to offer a lucrative lobbying position to Interior Department official Steven Griles after Griles made decisions that benefited Abramoff’s clients. A 2004 POGO study found 300 cases in which officials left government to go work for the 20 largest contractors, with as many as one-third of those officials having been in key positions to influence spending decisions that benefited the contractors."

4) Whistleblower Retaliation - "Congress has held extremely few hearings in recent years on cases of retaliation against whistleblowers who expose waste, fraud, corruption, and illegal activity. However, Members of Congress and the Administration have been quick to demand investigations into leaks of information to the news media."

5) The Black Hole that is Pentagon Spending - "A recent Government Accountability Office report noted that the long-standing failure of the Department of Defense to institute sound financial management had “left the department vulnerable to billions of dollars of fraud, waste, and abuse annually, at a time of increasing fiscal constraint"...In 2004, the Department set the goal of undergoing a full audit by 2007. That deadline has not been met, and in fact, has been moved to the year 2016."

6) Excessive Secrecy - "Congress cannot truly exercise oversight of the Executive Branch if large portions of the federal budget are hidden from view – even from the Congress. The increasing call to control pet projects (also known as earmarks) in government spending demands more scrutiny of all areas of the budget. It is time to re-examine how the classified annex of the defense budget is structured and determine whether or not these expenditures actually help us secure the nation. This process will also require reopening the process that led to classifying the budget for intelligence agencies and determining whether or not this is still an advisable course of action."

7) Defense Spending Priorities: Supporting the Troops or the Defense Contractors? - "Aggressive aerospace and defense industry lobbyists have conditioned the Congress into fighting even the most modest weapons cuts proposed by the Pentagon. For example, members of Congress have repeatedly defended the disastrous C-130J program, forcing over $4 billion to be spent on a plane the Pentagon did not want and that does not work. In another example, the 109th Congress literally cut spending on equipment Marines were using in Iraq – including night vision goggles and upgrades to light-armored vehicles – and transferred those funds to breathe life support into the troubled V-22 Osprey, which cannot even be used in high-risk environments. It is time for the Congress to reevaluate whether its defense spending priorities are genuinely supporting the troops or simply supporting the defense contractors at home."

8) Government Watchdog and Accountability Organizations - "Government watchdogs help the Congress to hold the Executive Branch accountable by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, and by shedding light on issues in need of attention. Anecdotal evidence suggests that government auditing and investigative branches have been denied resources and staffing needed to properly oversee the dramatically expanding federal government. They may also need increased authorities or independence to fulfill their mission. For example, more oversight by the Congress is needed to assess whether major swaths of billions of dollars in government contracts are being adequately policed."

9) Dragging the Government out of the Cold War - "The Department of Energy continues to spend billions of dollars to maintain nuclear bomb making materials and weapons segments spread across the country...The Department of Defense continues to maintain our deployed nuclear weapons on hair-trigger Cold War alert status. Largely as a jobs program for the thousands of contractor employees working for the nuclear weapons complex, the government now plans to spend $150 billion to modernize the complex and build new, more usable nuclear weapons. Aren’t there more pressing needs that our national labs should be addressing?"

10) Oil and Gas Drilling on Federal and Native American Lands - "A variety of industry and government whistleblowers, states, and tribes have come forward to express concerns about whether fees are being collected for oil and gas drilling on federal and Native American lands. Recent investigations by the Congress and the Department of Interior’s (DOI) Inspector General have revealed substantial and deep-rooted problems. Without adequate oversight and legislative intervention, the oil and gas industry will walk away with tens of billions of dollars in revenues, shortchanging the U.S. government and Native Americans."

11) Who is Securing the Homeland? Because DHS Is Not - "The Department of Homeland Security has been open for business for five years but it still has all the problems of a new start-up. The results of the problems are not in dispute: billions of dollars wasted on untested and ineffective technologies and an inability to protect—and in some cases even identify—parts of our most vulnerable infrastructure including aviation, rail and chemical facilities. In other cases, DHS doesn’t even play a role, and the other government agencies haven’t picked up the slack."

12) Conflicts of Interest in Scientific Research - "Some researchers in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) central facility in Bethesda were discovered a few years ago to be serving simultaneously as paid consultants to drug and biotech companies while they were working for the federal government. The serious conflicts of interest these situations caused were resolved by simply abolishing all consulting at NIH. However, the possibility of allowing consulting again is likely to emerge during the coming year. Moreover, many researchers at the nation’s medical schools and universities who receive NIH grants and contracts continue to consult for these companies."

13) Fixing the Broken Federal Contracting System - "Since 1981, POGO has exposed numerous problems that are the result of so-called procurement or acquisition “reforms,” including cozy negotiations, inadequate competition, lack of accountability, little transparency, and risky contracting vehicles that are prone to waste, fraud, and abuse. Given that federal contract spending eclipsed $380 billion in fiscal year 2005 and contracting issues are very high on Congress’s agenda, POGO hopes there will be a wave of contracting improvements that should add sound spending practices, public access, and oversight controls that have been sorely missed for over a decade."

You have to feel something's very wrong reading that list - so much of the wasted money seems to be running out of Defense and Homeland Security in rivers. Yet Bush has announced he will ask Congress for more than 700 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the regular defence budget. That's an increase of 10% on the regular defense budget (plus lots more for his misadventures) while he's going to look for just a 1% increase in non-defense spending. Which means non-defense spending is really taking a cut, considering that inflation is about 2.5%.

And even so, I wasn't at all astounded - just outraged - to read that Bushie Boy had told Democrats he is calling for "a bipartisan effort to rein in entitlement programs, such as the Medicare health program for older Americans".

``Controlling spending also requires us to address the unsustainable growth of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,'' Bush said. ``Spending for these programs is growing faster than inflation, faster than our economy, and faster than our ability to pay for it.

Uh, George? What you've just described is the military budget! It is exactly as you describe - "growing faster than inflation, faster than our economy, and faster than our ability to pay for it" - in big part because of incompetence, corruption, cronyism and outrisht profiteering and with very little success to show for the money. How about asking the guys with guns to clean their fiscal act up instead, George? Is there something about having a uniform to wear that means you can't balance a fricking checkbook?

Or is killing Johnny-foreigner more important in Dubya's mind than saving lives at home?

THAT's where the oversight should start.

Update The New York Times today (Sunday) has a revealing look at just how big the problem of government privatization and lack of contracting oversight has become.

In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

And here we get at the truth of "fiscal conservatism". Their supposed wish for "small government" is actually a need for little oversight. It has always been so and not just in the U.S. - Margaret Thatcher was another conservative who used this lie of a call for small government to rob the public purse and put the nation's money into the pockets of her conservative freinds and cronies in big business.