As the latest Pentagon budget shows, no matter the revelations, there will be no reckoning when it comes to this country’s endless wars or its military establishment—not at a moment when President Donald Trump is sending yet more U.S. military personnel into the Middle East and has picked a new fight with Iran. No less troubling: how few in either party in Congress are willing to hold the president and the Pentagon accountable for runaway defense spending or the poor performance that has gone with it.
Given the way the Pentagon has sunk taxpayer dollars into those endless wars, in a more reasonable world that institution would be overdue for a comprehensive audit of all its programs and a reevaluation of its expenditures.
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Transparency International released its 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index, and for the second year in a row, the United States slipped in the standings. Congress should strengthen the safeguards against conflicts of interest in all three branches of government and place more restrictions on former government employees seeking to work as lobbyists or government contractors.
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POGO on Impeachment
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There is no shortage of questions about impeachment and confusion about the process seems to have also enveloped Congress itself. But there’s an abundance of experts and historians on hand to help, including a few here at POGO. We’re using this FAQ to capture the many questions around impeachment, and provide the best answers we can find.
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POGO in the News
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The Washington Post - Cybersecurity 202
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Privacy advocates have come to Apple’s defense, warning that government efforts to undermine encryption could hurt national security by making it easier for hackers to compromise encrypted communications. That includes the security of U.S. elections.
“It is vital that our nation’s election systems have the strongest possible shield against malicious hackers, especially given the resources that hostile foreign powers could deploy to undermine confidence in our democracy,” a coalition of groups led by the nonprofit watchdog Project on Government Oversight wrote in a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr.
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Ironically, in an effort to describe what the funds being diverted to the border wall would pay for in military terms, the Congressional letter highlights some of the most dysfunctional elements of the current Pentagon budget. The letter notes that the $13.3 billion in funds diverted or proposed to be diverted to pay for the wall would equal “more than the full unit acquisition cost of a Ford-class aircraft carrier . . . or the $10.6 billion to purchase 98 F-35s in 2020.” But the Ford-class carrier has been an acquisition disaster, rife with cost overruns and performance problems. A more sensible naval strategy would call for fewer, more maneuverable ships that could be surged to crisis points as needed, not a fleet built around massive aircraft carriers that are sitting ducks for increasingly accurate and lethal missiles. And the Project on Government Oversight has done a series of analyses that suggest that the F-35 may never be fully ready for combat. Rushing to spend over $10 billion a year on a plane that may never be able to adequately carry out its assigned missions is a waste of taxpayer dollars, plain and simple.
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International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
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The top accounting regulator in the U.S., the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a nonprofit established by Congress in 2002, has authority to oversee audits of publicly traded U.S. companies. Critics say the oversight board hasn’t been aggressive enough in policing the Big Four. A recent investigation by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, found that in the past 16 years, the board identified 808 defective audits done by the Big Four, but brought only 18 enforcement cases.
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Politico - Morning Cybersecurity
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FIRST IN MC — The Project On Government Oversight criticized Barr’s recent pressure on Apple to help investigators unlock two iPhones that belonged to a gunman in the deadly Pensacola, Fla., naval base attack. The letter released today and signed by 12 advocacy and activist groups contend those efforts would “weaken encryption of personal electronic devices.” Apple said the company did what it could to help despite Barr’s claims that Apple did not give “any substantive assistance.”
The groups argue that if tech companies water down encryption, it could harm privacy and security, as well as pave the way for hackers to penetrate other critically important systems. “The breach of personal devices and private communication systems can serve as stepping stones for malicious hackers attempting to infiltrate other sensitive systems, such as election systems,” the letter reads.
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[POGO's Mandy Smithberger] makes the case that millions in recent military spending has been wasted and that neither political party conducts enough oversight of wasteful spending. She points out the Pentagon has close ties to private military manufacturing and contracting firms, creating a revolving door between companies that profit from war and the government agencies responsible for oversight of those companies.
[...] "What we see happening with these budget increases is they're not going to real priorities, and as a consequence we're also seeing really poor management happen. And people are throwing money at problems instead trying to fix them," Mandy Smithberger said. "What we need is to have real reform and real management."
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The 2017 report recommended that if improvements could not be quickly carried out, “that ICE pull detainees from this facility until the medical care can be brought into alignment.” Instead, GEO Group and ICE rushed to sign new contracts just days before a new law banning private immigration detention centers in the state went into effect, with Adelanto’s agreement expanding the facility by more than 700, NPR reported. GEO Group, which gets a majority of its revenue from mass jailing immigrants, has also sued the state over the law.
NPR further reported that while a version of this Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties report was released by a watchdog group last fall following a public records lawsuit, “the government had more heavily redacted critical findings and recommendations,” raising fears about what other kinds of abuses officials are keeping secret from the public. "It's kind of confounding why they withheld some of this information [from us]," Nick Schwellenbach of Project on Government Oversight told NPR.
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A coalition for secure elections sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr Wednesday, criticizing the AG for recent comments he made calling on companies to create a “backdoor” through encryption.
The letter, published by the Project on Government Oversight, warns such backdoors—even if expressly for use by law enforcement—would weaken the security of encrypted services and devices, “opening the door” for hackers to harm users.
“While encryption does not guarantee safety from all forms of malicious hacking, it is a vital safeguard to minimize risk. The Department of Justice has previously asked companies to create a ‘backdoor’ through encryption that would be accessible to law enforcement—but it is simply not possible to create a ‘backdoor’ that could not also be accessed by malicious hackers,” the letter states.
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Mandy Smithberger, the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the nonprofit government watchdog Project on Government Oversight, said the public expects research output and testimony from faculty associated with universities to be independent, but foreign funding puts academic integrity at risk.
GW’s large international affairs program magnifies the consequences of potential influence from foreign governments because of the public’s trust in the Elliott School of International Affairs’ academic perspective, she said.
“They are considered to be one of the leading universities on international affairs – it raises questions about their independence,” she said. “We have an ongoing public debate about what strings are coming with these kinds of contributions and whether this is another way foreign governments are trying to influence U.S. foreign policy.”
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A bipartisan group of organizations and individuals working to protect election security highlighted the importance of encryption, and, in order to protect the integrity of our elections, called on the DOJ to end its efforts to weaken encryption.
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