Oversight Archives

While perhaps not critical to the protection of life and property, the economic stimulus-tracking website Recovery.gov is exempt from the government shutdown. The site, which will be updated later this month, is funded through 2009 Recovery Act appropriations -- not the annual agency appropriations that Congress is debating today. A media release from the site's overseer, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Oversight Board, states:

In the event of a government shutdown, the Recovery Board will continue its regular operations because the agency is funded from an appropriation that continues to remain available until September 30, 2011. The government shutdown will not affect the ongoing recipient reporting for the first quarter of 2011, which is scheduled to continue until April 14. Data from those recipient reports will be posted on Recovery.gov on April 30.

The White House is releasing the software code for a website it uses to track the performance of big computing projects, as a way to fix program glitches and share the tool with other government bodies, according to the federal chief information officer.

The so-called IT Dashboard monitors the budget, schedule and functionality of systems under development that cost the federal government about $80 billion annually. But critics and federal auditors say ratings on the site do not always accurately represent the current status of projects.

Still, federal CIO Vivek Kundra says the dashboard has helped reduce IT costs by more than $3 billion and he wants "to tap into the collective talents and ingenuity of the American people, to enhance functionality, improve the code and address existing challenges," according to a post on the White House blog. "Software developers will be able to collaborate, identify errors, develop enhancements and recommend improvements to the dashboard, and find new uses for it that we have not even imagined."

CIOs throughout the nation and the world, such as Maarten Hillenaar of the Netherlands, Kyle Schafer in West Virginia and Jason DeHaan in the City of Chicago, are interested in deploying the accountability software in their respective governments, he writes.

The code underpinning the dashboard is freely available, through a format referred to as open source.

In addition, the Obama administration is publishing instructions on how to conduct "TechStat" sessions, which are in-person meetings Kundra typically holds with agency CIOs to decide what to do with systems at risk of failing.

He writes, "The TechStat toolkit provides a comprehensive guide for organizations to establish their own TechStats to improve line-of-sight between project teams and senior executives, increase the precision of ongoing measurement of IT program health, and boost the quality and timing of interventions to keep projects on track."

Last year, the Obama administration started producing a series of "White House Whiteboard" videos to highlight administration policies and initiatives. The latest edition features none other than federal CIO Vivek Kundra, discussing the ins and outs of the Federal IT Dashboard and the administration's TechStat review sessions:

Boeing, General Dynamics and the Navy fought over billion-dollar claims involving a failed 1991 stealth fighter aircraft contract on Jan. 18. The contractors claimed that the government withheld information from them, and by invoking the state secrets privilege, prevented them from delivering a satisfactory product. The question is, does throwing around the word "state secrets" unnecessarily politicize a dispute that can be resolved by contract law?

The facts of the case: In 1991, the Defense Department pulled the plug on the inauspicious project to build a stealth fighter, the A-12 Avenger, when it ended up too heavy for aircraft carriers to handle. The plane never took off from blueprint into production. The 20-year-long dispute is a bitter blame game following a disastrous $4.8 billion deal that in truth, just amounted to expensive aircraft blueprints.

The government demanded a refund of $1.35 billion after it cancelled the contract and declared General Dynamics and Boeing in default. The contractors sued, countering that they were owed an additional $1.25 billion for work done that had not yet been billed.

Boeing and General Dynamics said it wasn't their fault that they hadn't delivered what the Navy wanted; the real problem was the abuse of the state secrets privilege. The government withheld sensitive information that would have allowed them to deliver satisfactory results, the contractors claimed. The government countered that this was done to protect national security.

The information that came was "too little and too late to effectively allow the contract to proceed as planned," said attorney Carter Phillips. "The weight specifics that we were being asked to provide or to supply were literally impossible to comply with based on what the government already knew," he said.

His argument sounded almost convincing until he dropped this:

The problem is we don't know precisely what information we didn't have and were never entitled to. So it's very difficult to say how strong is our defense under these circumstances.

That admission reveals that this case is going to be a difficult one to argue. The politically-charged rhetoric around "state secrets" masks what is at the heart of the debate: "All we're asking for is the actual amount of money that we expended," said Phillips, "maybe to some extent you could say we're sort of being a little greedy." But a contract is a contract, he added.

Framing the case as a constitutional precedent centered around "state secrets" unnecessarily politicizes more fundamental problems, namely mutual distrust and insufficient planning.

The insistence of General Dynamics and Boeing that the government provide more specifications could hint at a lack of enterprise, Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to suggest. "Sophisticated contractors are perfectly capable of negotiating their own contract," he said. If the government fed too much information to contractors, "we are not just throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of government contracting; we're throwing the whole monkey."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia seemed in favor of tossing the case out of the court, arguing that the dispute could be better resolved by contract law rather than constitutional law. If it is indeed settled behind closed doors, we'll never know who put the monkey wrench in the gears of this contract. But really, in a case involving two the top five government contractors, billions of dollars, and the U.S. Navy, are we surprised?

Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner, who has probed contractor waste at the department since its inception, announced on Thursday that he will step down March 1.

Prior to his July 2005 Senate confirmation as IG, Skinner -- a four-decade veteran of the federal government -- had held the position of deputy IG at DHS since its March 2003 creation.

"After serving more than 42 years in the federal government, under nine presidents, I believe the time has come for me to give my full time attention to my family and personal endeavors," Skinner wrote to President Obama in a Jan. 13 letter of resignation. "Because of [the IG office staff's] commitment, professionalism and hard work, the OIG has been extremely successful in working with the department to promote the efficacy of its programs and operations, and to combat fraud, waste, and abuse within its ranks. Looking back over the past 9 years since the tragic events on September 11, 2001, we, as a nation, are now beginning to witness the positive effects of the creation of the department of Homeland Security."

It's not surprising that a department quickly cobbled together from 22 existing agencies would endure a fair degree of mismanagement. Most recently, in a report released Jan. 3, Skinner found that DHS had not tried to recover about $643 million in overpayments to 160,000 people who claimed they were victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Last summer, he revealed that department officials funding a new financial management system worth potentially $1 billion did not have suitable plans, cost estimates or staffing projection for the undertaking.

Skinner started his career at the Agriculture Department in 1969, and later moved on to managerial positions in the investigative arms of the departments of Justice, Commerce and State, as well as the Arms Controls and Disarmament Agency. He was honored with the President's Meritorious Executive Rank Award for serving FEMA, where he worked as acting IG, deputy IG and assistant IG for audits.

The White House official overseeing the president's transparency initiative stepped down last week to return to her teaching post at New York Law School, Obama administration officials said Monday. A replacement has not been named.

The departure of Beth Noveck, deputy chief technology officer, coincides with the second anniversary of Obama's landmark open government memo. The guidance the president released one day after taking the oath of office called for agencies to institutionalize public participation in policymaking, collaboration with outside organizations and a default setting for disclosing information.

On Monday, Office of Science and Technology Policy spokesman Rick Weiss said this of Noveck:

Beth has been a tireless advocate for opening the federal government to greater collaboration and public participation. She has helped to develop significant advancements in the administration's efforts to utilize technology to break down the barriers between the American public and their government. We are sorry to see her go, and wish her all the best in her next endeavors.

Government transparency advocates have applauded agency efforts to create plans for fulfilling Obama's open government vision but criticized agencies' follow-through. They argue White House leaders aren't doing enough to hold agencies accountable for failing to be transparent. And questions have arisen about Obama's personal commitment to the movement.

But activists seem hopeful that the administration will keep Noveck's post and appoint someone capable of filling her big shoes. Already the blogosphere is abuzz with suggestions for replacements, like these from the social network GovLoop:

-Andrew Hoppin, New York State Senate chief information officer
-Dustin Haisler, CIO for the City of Manor, Texas
-Clay Johnson, former director of the Sunlight Foundation's software development division
-Bill Eggers, director of Deloitte research, public sector
-Lena Trudeau, vice president of the National Academy of Public Administration; founder of the Collaboration Project, an independent consortium working to apply web 2.0 tools to solve the government's problems.

Lawmakers, auditors and national security experts are questioning whether the Transportation Security Administration is too quick to embrace technology for basic security problems and too eager to write checks for unproven products, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Since its creation in 2001, TSA has spent about $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors, according to the news report. Among that total, $30 million was spent on puffers -- devices that puff air on travelers to 'sniff' out explosive residue. The devices were quickly abandoned after being deemed impractical.

When TSA sees a promising technology, the temptation is to "run to deploy it before we fully understand how it integrates with the multiple layers we already have in place," Kip Hawley, head of the TSA from 2005 to 2009, told the Post.

White House officials on Thursday morning released a 25-point implementation plan to execute one of the biggest information technology contracting overhauls since the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act.

The problem the plan aims to tackle: Productivity gains in the private sector have outpaced government performance even though federal agencies spent about $600 billion during the past decade on technology to boost efficiency. The Obama administration's policy roadmap aims to dismantle the old way of installing new technology - which has been to design overly-ambitious systems that fall years behind in development - and create new procedures for quickly and cheaply upgrading machinery.

Here are some of the standouts on the to-do list:

• Reshape or terminate at least one-third of underperforming projects in the government's $80 billion IT portfolio within the next 18 months.
• Shift to a "cloud first" policy, where agencies consider moving to Web-based software and hardware before spending money on new systems. Each agency will identify three must-move services within three months, shift one of those services to the cloud within 12 months and then transition the remaining two within 18 months.
• Within 12 months, establish a tech fellows program modeled after the Presidential Management Fellows program to recruit graduate students with in-demand talents into IT program management.
• By mid-June, launch a website where industry and agency contracting officials can collaborate prior to the issuance of requests for proposals.

More details and commentary later today. . .

The government's stimulus spending watchdog is set to launch a website on Monday that will track $10 billion in non-stimulus funding for education jobs, Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced on Wednesday. The board, which Congress established in 2009 to oversee $787 billion of economic recovery funding, will host FederalTransparency.gov while it continues to maintain the interactive stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov.

The goal of the new site is more ambitious. Devaney has said it potentially could be used to monitor the impact of all federal funding. At this point, the board only is authorized to evaluate progress reports from recipients of stimulus funding and money disbursed under the Education Jobs Fund, which Congress created this summer.

"To avoid confusion, the board decided to establish a separate website to track spending under the new education program, which is not part of the Recovery Act. According to Devaney, the new site also will be used for any spending the board is asked to monitor in the future," board officials said in a press release.

The new site, at first, only will provide basic information, such as the total amount received by each recipient, the number of jobs funded and the status of projects, board officials said on Wednesday: "Over time, FederalTransparency.gov will have some of the same features as Recovery.gov,'' Devaney said. "We are putting up the site now as a placeholder so that the public can see where the money is going and where the jobs are being funded in states and territories.''

Under the education jobs program, the Education Department will distribute funds to states and U.S. territories, which will award the money to localities for hiring and rehiring school personnel. Schools are prohibited from using the funds for anything other than paying for salaries and benefits of education-related positions, such as teachers, librarians, secretaries, speech therapists and cafeteria workers.

On Election Night, California Republican Darrell Issa, the presumptive chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he intends to release more data about government operations and authorize federal inspectors general to do the same.

"I'm going to make sure that the 74 primary inspectors general are able to do their job -- and support them," Issa said, adding that he would "absolutely" advocate for granting IGs subpoena power. Only the Defense IG has that authority today.

Current Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., is expected to relinquish the committee gavel to Issa next year, when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives. And Issa is expected to raise the profile of a watchdog panel that quieted down in the presence of a president from the same side of the aisle.

The anti-bailout, anti-stimulus lawmaker is known for holding the Obama White House to account for claims of being the most transparent administration in history.

Almost daily, he points out apparent secretive acts, such as the alleged use of personal webmail accounts to sidestep federal recordkeeping.

But Issa also chastises the legislative branch and federal agencies for not disclosing enough information to taxpayers.

In March, he co-founded the bipartisan Congressional Transparency Caucus to champion the principles of free, online access to the government's information; publication of the government's information in raw, searchable formats that the masses can scrutinize; providing the public with federal spending data that can be linked to agency performance data; and tracking lawmaker pet projects - so-called earmarks - in the federal budget.

Around midnight, during a call with reporters, Issa said he would make sure that all on the phone line can get the data they need.