Upheaval as 2020 census looms

According to more than two dozen whistleblowers who’ve spoken to Congress, the office of the Commerce Department’s internal watchdog is plagued by mismanagement, misconduct, and low productivity, caused in part by plummeting morale. Upheaval as 2020 Census Looms: Senate Chairmen Scrutinize Commerce Department Watchdog According to more than two dozen whistleblowers who’ve spoken to Congress, the office of the Commerce Department’s internal watchdog is plagued by mismanagement, misconduct, and low productivity, caused in part by plummeting morale. In response, three powerful Senate committee chairmen are demanding that the watchdog’s Obama-appointed leader, Inspector General Peggy Gustafson, allow Congress to question eight of her top aides and two executive assistants about the whistleblowers’ complaints, according to a pair of previously unreported letters signed by the senators and obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). Read More Double Standards at DOJ While our Constitution guarantees equal protection of the law, as a nation, we have done a pretty terrible job of living up to that promise. Read more Recommendations for Reclaiming Congress’s War Powers It will not be easy for Congress to stop unauthorized uses of force and reassert its constitutional authority. But a growing number of members of Congress from across the political spectrum recognize the necessity for action. Read more A Century of Airpower Propaganda Was Just 'Blown Up' by an Air Force Think Tank It turns out that when we need to send a message of deterrence, nothing works better than the humble main battle tank. Read more Sexual harassment by judges operating with impunity shows courts need their own #MeToo The branch of government charged with enforcing federal discrimination and harassment laws does not police its own. Read more POGO Opposes the Nomination of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve It’s crucial the Fed remain independent when crafting and implementing America’s monetary policy. Without its autonomy, the Fed would be focused on achieving short-term economic gains to benefit political candidates’ upcoming reelections and not on the future wellbeing of our nation’s economy. The Senate must reject Shelton’s nomination. Read the letter NEW: The Bunker Introducing: The Bunker After nearly 20 years of winless wars following 9/11, and a Pentagon budget that is well above the Cold War average, U.S. national security spending has never been a more target-rich environment. That is why the Project On Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information has launched The Bunker, a precision-guided e-newsletter targeting your inbox most every week. Sign up now! Sign up for The Bunker POGO in the News Associated Press Homeland Security waives contracting laws for border wall Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, said waiving a law for contractors to provide the government with certified cost data — such as how much they pay for labor or parts — could lead to grossly inflated prices. “It’s equivalent to buying a car without seeing a sticker price,” Amey said. “This could be a recipe for shoddy work and paying a much higher price than they should.” The Washington Post Pentagon shaves $6.5 billion by selling obsolete equipment, overhauling bureaucracy Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain who now studies defense spending at the Project On Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said the savings announced this week should be replicated elsewhere. “It’s kind of a drop in the bucket, but it’s a starting place, so I applaud that,” Grazier said. House Speaker's Office Pelosi Names Shanna Devine First Director of Whistleblower Ombudsman Office of the U.S. House of Representatives “I am elated at the news that Shanna Devine will lead the newly created House Office of the Whistleblower Ombudsman,” said Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). “The office was created to address a lack of consistent understanding across House offices on how to best work with whistleblowers, who can serve as a tremendous resource to Congress. I've worked with Shanna for over a decade and know her to be a tireless advocate for whistleblower and worker rights. Her deep understanding of the importance of whistleblower-congressional communications will surely lead the office to be a resounding success felt for years to come. On behalf of POGO, I look forward to seeing this office succeed under her leadership and vision and commend leadership on this excellent choice.” National Law Review Trump Budget Proposes Folding the PCAOB into the SEC by 2022 Then, last September, a nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight report criticized the PCAOB by pointing out that since 2002, it had only brought 18 enforcement actions against the Big Four accounting firms, despite having found 808 instances of defective audits and only imposed $6.5 million in fines, despite its authority to levy as much as $15 million per violation.

Popular Mechanics Inside the Pentagon's Secret UFO Program   The idea of using an aerospace research project as a cover for a secret UFO program may seem unscrupulous. “But this all rings very familiar,” Neil Gordon, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, tells Popular Mechanics. Gordon, whose area of expertise is in federal contractor misconduct, contractor accountability, and government privatization, says running the “commercial in confidence” program through AATIP is consistent with how the DoD deals with programs it wants to keep secret. “Whether it’s right or not is another story,” Gordon says, “but everything sounds very common for how black budget programs run.”       Government Executive Democratic Candidates Defend Their Records on Transparency During Nevada Primary Debate   Regardless if Trump or a Democrat wins in 2020, “I think it’s a fair question, in terms of whether or not this administration is going to move that needle [on transparency], on what's considered normal and what's considered expected,” said Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst at the watchdog Project on Government Oversight. “I do worry that after this administration our expectation levels may be lower.”       Federal News Network How well are agencies actually complying with the DATA Act?   Federal inspectors general are finishing up the testing of their agencies’ compliance with the Data Act. It’s one of three audits required under the 2014 law. But the Council of Inspectors General changed the audit methodology between the current exercise and the one they did two years ago. Some say that could lead to skewed results though. One of them is Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to explain why. Read Sean’s article here. Listen to the broadcast       Government Executive Whistleblower Advocates Praise Pick to Lead New House Ombudsman Office   Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog Project on Government Oversight, also said she was thrilled with the selection. “I've worked with Shanna for over a decade and know her to be a tireless advocate for whistleblower and worker rights,” Brian said. “Her deep understanding of the importance of whistleblower-congressional communications will surely lead the office to be a resounding success felt for years to come. On behalf of POGO, I look forward to seeing this office succeed under her leadership and vision and commend leadership on this excellent choice.”       The Regulatory Review Week in review   The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it will waive federal procurement law to speed up construction of the border wall between the United States and Mexico. Procurement law governs the processes through which the federal government contracts with private businesses to provide goods and services, but under federal immigration law the government may waive those procurement requirements if necessary to prevent unauthorized entry into the United States. Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, reportedly said the government’s use of a waiver “could be a recipe for shoddy work and paying a much higher price than they should.”       Muck Rock This week’s FOIA roundup: Record wins, Detroit’s big, bad neighbor, and taxpayer dollars to Trump   The Project on Government Oversight published a reminder this week that federal FOIA exemption b(5) is still being over-applied, threatening the right of American people to know what their government is doing.       Epoch Times Bipartisan Coalition Unites Behind First Federal Financial Management Reform Since 1990   An ideologically broad-based coalition of advocacy groups concerned with federal spending abuses has also endorsed the reform package, including the Data Coalition, Citizens Against Government Waste, Project on Government Oversight, the R Street Institute, Truth in Accounting (TIA), and Taxpayers for Common Sense.       CFO Dive Proposal to fold audit watchdog into SEC sparks pushback   "We have a watchdog who is not watching," John Coffee, director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School, told the Project on Government Oversight, which conducted the review last year. "We have a watchdog who looks increasingly like a lapdog."       WGBH MIT Extends Russian Tech Partnership, Despite Scrutiny From Feds   The D.C.-based Project on Government Oversight has been looking at Vekselberg and the MIT-Skolkovo Foundation relationship for some time. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette is a policy analyst with the non-governmental organization best known by its acronym POGO. “I don't view there being anything wrong with having relationships with entities that exist outside of the country,” Hedtler-Gaudette said in an interview. “There are all kinds of legitimate reasons why. But in this case, this is a foundation that has links to the Russian government. MIT should have known for a long time that there were some problems here, which included allowing the head of the foundation to be on the MIT Corporation board.” [..] In September of last year, the federal government began probing MIT’s financial relationship with the Skolkovo Foundation. A letter from the Department of Education addressed to MIT President Rafael Reif raised questions about whether MIT has properly reported gifts and contracts with Skolkovo and other foreign entities or enterprises. Hedtler-Gaudette of POGO says millions of dollars exchanged may not have been properly accounted for. “When we’re talking about the dollar amount we’re talking about, it appears as though the Department of Education thinks that MIT may not have been in compliance and that’s why they opened up this investigation particularly around the Russian foundation,” Hedtler-Gaudette said.       Epoch Times ‘Zombie’ Federal Programs That Congress Hasn’t Authorized in Years Cost Taxpayers $332 Billion   As a result, continued spending on a program too easily becomes a default position for Congress, according to Elizabeth Hempowicz, Project on Government Oversight’s Director of Public Policy (POGO). “The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has not been authorized right now for years, but money continues to be appropriated to keep the agency running,” Hempowicz told The Epoch Times. The MSPB’s job is protecting merit-based hiring in the civil service. “So, there’s this idea that authorizing statutes are optional now because in many ways Congress has slowed down to this trickle of legislation and most of them are spending bills. As long as they are appropriating, they can pat themselves on the back for doing their jobs,” she said.       Business Insider Prime Watchdog groups are warning that up to 50% of the audits performed by the Big Four accounting firms are fatally flawed and are calling on Congress to step in to prevent another financial meltdown   "When the auditors aren't doing their jobs or aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, we've seen the harm that can come," said Tim Stretton, a policy analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, or POGO, an independent, nonpartisan watchdog group. "We don't want another economic crisis on our hands."       Going Concern Let’s See What Some Folks Are Saying About the Proposal to Fold the PCAOB Into the SEC   In the Feb. 18 Cloud Accounting Podcast that he co-hosts with David Leary, Blake Oliver called the proposal to eliminate the PCAOB “the best thing Trump has ever done,” citing statistics from a recent report from Project on Government Oversight. Since 2003, the PCAOB has identified 808 instances in which Big 4 firms performed audits that were “so defective that the audit firms should not have vouched for a company’s financial statements, internal controls, or both,” according to POGO. Yet, despite those 808 alleged failures, the PCAOB has brought only 18 enforcement cases against the Big 4 or employees of those firms. Those cases involved a total of 21 audits.

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