Secret Service, GSA Scandals Attract More Interest Than War

WASHINGTON -- This city loves a scandal -- as long as it's just the right size. Not too small. But also not too big.

While official Washington remains in a tizzy over profligate spending on a General Services Administration junket in Vegas and alleged dalliances between Secret Service agents and Colombian prostitutes, Congress continues to pay little to no attention to the ongoing war in Afghanistan -- a war in which the cost of waste, fraud and abuse is in the billions of dollars, not the hundreds of thousands.

"I understand why the Congress is having a heyday with the GSA conference," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. "Everyone gets that it's outrageous for taxpayers to pay for commemorative coins and magicians.

"But we're talking about relatively little amounts of money compared to the massive amounts of money that are getting almost no attention from the Congress," she said.

"It's a little shocking to see the outrage and the hysteria that goes on and on about [the GSA and Secret Service]," said Stephen Miles, a coordinator with antiwar group Win Without War.

"It would be nice if there were some concern for when the money is wasted in the war zone or inside the Pentagon that has any relation to the level of outrage that we've seen in the last few days."

The GSA conference, which took place in 2010, cost somewhere over $800,000.

By contrast, when the congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting wrapped up its three-year investigation last August, it concluded that about $30 billion to $60 billion had been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, just out of the $206 billion paid to contractors.

Seven months later, Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Jim Webb (Va.) proposed legislation based on some of the commission's recommendations to increase accountability in wartime contracting. But Hill-watchers don't expect it to go anywhere. And the hearing McCaskill held on the bill last week didn't get nearly as much attention as the one House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) held two days earlier on the GSA scandal.

Meanwhile, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.) has announced plans to hold a hearing on the Secret Service sex scandal.

"It's perfectly reasonable for the committees of jurisdiction to be on top of this and the like," said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. "But it's down there at a relatively low level of priority for the country."

Mann decried the congressional habit of paying "too little attention to matters that really involve huge amounts of money and genuine harm to the country, and loads of attention to those matters that seem titillating."

Brian said Congress seems to have a particular blind spot when it comes to Afghanistan and spending there. "I am astounded at how little thought has been put into the conduct and progress of the Afghanistan war by this Congress," she said.

"They have poked their own eyes out," she said. "It's totally self-inflicted."

Part of the problem is a lack of effort on lawmakers' part, Brian argued. "They're not taking the time to do the hard work to understand it," she said.

After all, the question of how much is too much to pay for logistical support in a war zone is much more complicated to explain and understand than hookers and YouTube videos.

But there's also, perhaps, a lack of will. "The times when it has been clearly pointed out that there's been wasted money, [lawmakers] still haven't dealt with that," Brian said.

The U.S. mission in Afghanistan has been particularly inefficient in part due to poor planning and execution, but also because of the country's extreme and endemic corruption. Transparency International recently ranked it the third most corrupt country in the world, behind only Somalia and Myanmar.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to spend about $2 billion a week on Afghanistan, a country where the gross domestic product is about $14 billion a year.

The revelation by Wikileaks in late 2010 that Afghanistan's vice president had been caught carrying $52 million in cash in a Persian Gulf tax haven raised a few eyebrows, but the story quickly faded. And it was hardly an isolated incident. Just this month, a senior Afghan government official told Reuters that wealthy Afghans are carrying about $8 billion out of the country each year.

Some news organizations have done what they could to focus national and congressional attention on the issue. McClatchy Newspapers exhaustively documented the overspending and corruption afflicting U.S. sponsored project in Afghanistan.

Back in December, Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon was demanding that one of its food contractors in Afghanistan return $756.9 million in overpayments. That alone is about a thousand times more money than the GSA junket cost.

The new strategic partnership agreement that the U.S. reached with Afghanistan on Sunday -- with little to no congressional input -- pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014. It will cost at least $2.7 billion to over $4 billion a year, just for training and funding the Afghan security forces.

Matt Southworth, a lobbyist for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said congressional oversight of the war has amounted to little more than having "high ranking officials tell members of Congress that everything is going well … when the reality is quite to the contrary."

Despite the lack of debate, the House last year nearly passed a measure that, while far short of demanding an end to the war, nevertheless would have required the president to present Congress with a timeline for withdrawal. "They're catching up with America," Southworth said.

See our November 2010 slideshow on billions down the drain:

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Comments

[sbrannon]

01:24 PM on 05/01/2012

I agree with you 100% not to mention the job that I could use that I turned down as a "Social Scientist' in Afghanistan of $250.000 a year, based on my moral standards on wasting tax money on the war(s) and waste that is spent on them. Now, I know that it does not really make a difference to anyone or anything if I took or refused that job and it does not influence government policies. The sad reality is that I may have only "hurt myself" because jobs are so hard to find. But...I just could not do it.

[gravescanada]

10:21 AM on 04/25/2012

End the war in Afghanistan...we are already done. Cut Military spending by 50%, problems solved. We do NOT need the massive military industrial complex that is continuing to drain our nations wealth so that a few can profit off of war, and thousands can die for it.

[PublicCitizen21044]

09:55 AM on 04/25/2012

The GSA conference, which took place in 2010, cost somewhere over $800,000.

By contrast, when the congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting wrapped up its three-year investigation last August, it concluded that about $30 billion to $60 billion had been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, just out of the $206 billion paid to contractors.

The Bush Administration has gotten away with murder, theft, fraud and abuse on a major scale and the American People have had to listen to and put up with the GOP feeling invincible ever since.

America is under attack from within by her corrupt political and justice system and the only American's with rights are those who are wealthy and educated enough to buy them. America has been for sale to the highest bidder for a long time now and soon it will be like a sci-fi movie where we will see giant holographic images of corporate names beamed onto the Capitol Dome as a corporate media advertising scheme.

Someone once suggested that those in Congress should wear their corporate logos on their lapels or on jackets so the voters and their sponsors can see in whose interest they are working. That may not be a bad idea.

[ninthraphael]

09:49 AM on 04/25/2012

the real investigation should start with the investigators themselves (issa and the republicans)!

[NOTEKSKILS]

09:14 AM on 04/25/2012

JUST READ WHERE THE US HAS PROMISED AFGHANISTAN, 10 YEARS PAST THE 2014 PULLOUT, ECONOMIC AID. WOULD BE NICE TO USE A LITTLE OF THAT ECONOMIC AID TO PREVENT 80,000 POST OFFICE EMPLOYEES FROM BEING LAID OFF! OR, SELECT YOUR OWN. MEDICARE, MEDICADE, STUDENT LOANS, THE LIST IS ENDLESS!!!!

[Alux]

09:10 AM on 04/25/2012

Mr. Foomkin, if you weren't a JournoList member and were a real reporter instead, you would be writing about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scandal.

You know, the NOAA scandal.

The one where the law enforcement branch of NOAA has collected more than $100 million in fines from fisherman - little guys, not Wall Street campaign contributors - often taking their boats and property, but can only account for about $60 million.

Yeah, that one where government thugs shake down citizens and steal more than $40 million? And NOBODY has been punished in any way at all?

Nah. Too much of a narrative destroyer.

The biggest fraud in history, maybe? The subprime mortgage scandal. And NOBODY goes to jail? That one?

Oh, can't jeopardize Obama's campaign contributors.

What about Jon Corzine? He stole $1.6 billion of little guys' deposit at MF Global. You remember him? Former Goldman Sachs head, senator, governor.

Ooops, he's one of Obama's most important bundlers right now so we can't distract him with any criminal investigation. Got it!

Oh well, let's just forget it.

[sbrannon]

01:33 PM on 05/01/2012

I agree that these issues should be in the media, errr, I mean in the mainstream media which more people are reading than the independent news....however, if "we" journalists wrote on such things, we would never be able to "get paid" for writing them. In the end, it is difficult to be a "real journalist" and eat. It is even more difficult to be a real journalist, hold a full time job and do the journalism thing. This is the real problem. He wrote a good article and he did speak up.

[Jim Pasterczyk]

03:52 AM on 04/25/2012

Why don't we let Senator Rockefeller finish up his inquiry into how the country got talked into invading Iraq? That report I'd buy a copy of.

[blueswithafeeling]

11:09 PM on 04/24/2012

Well tell that to Panetta, then he can relay it to Obama between the 10 and 11 hole at the golf course.

[demisfine]

10:26 PM on 04/24/2012

Part 3
Oil: The Bushes' ties to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil go back 100 years, when Rockefeller made Buckeye Steel Castings wildly successful by convincing railroads that carried their oil to buy heavy equipment from Buckeye. George H. Walker helped refurbish the Soviet oil industry in the 1920s, and Prescott Bush acquired experience in the international oil business as a 22-year director of Dresser Industries. George H.W. Bush, in turn, worked for Dresser and ran his own offshore oil-drilling business, Zapata Offshore. George W. Bush mostly raised money from investors for oil businesses that failed. Currently, the family's oil focus is principally in the Middle East.
Enron is another family connection. The company's Kenneth L. Lay made his first connections with George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s when the latter was working on energy deregulation. When Bush became president in 1989, he gave Lay two prominent international roles: membership on the President's Export Council and the task of planning for a G-7 summit in Houston. Lay parlayed that exposure into new business overseas and clout with Washington agencies. Family favoritism soon followed. When Bush senior lost the 1992 election, Lay picked up with son George W., first in Texas and then as a top contributor to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. Before Enron imploded in late 2001, it had more influence in a new administration than any other corporation in memory.

[sbrannon]

01:36 PM on 05/01/2012

great info...and correct, but what does that have to do with this article of money waste?

[demisfine]

06:12 PM on 05/01/2012

It goes to the point of being falsely outraged over this slight mis spent cash, but the War overruns go unnoticed.

[demisfine]

10:25 PM on 04/24/2012

Part 2
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about how "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." That complex's recent mega-leap to power came under George H.W. Bush and even more under George W. Bush — with the post-9/11 expansion of the military and creation of the Department of Homeland Security. But armaments and arms deals seem to have been in the Bushes' blood for nearly a century.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0208-05.htm

[demisfine]

10:25 PM on 04/24/2012

Part 1
Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil
The Bushes and the military-industrial complex: George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush I. Walker, a St. Louis financier, made his mark in corporate reorganizations and war contracts. By 1919, he was enlisted by railroad heir W. Averell Harriman to be president of Wall Street-based WA Harriman, which invested in oil, shipping, aviation and manganese, partly in Russia and Germany, during the 1920s. Sam Bush, the current president's other great-grandfather, ran an Ohio company, Buckeye Steel Castings, that produced armaments. In 1917, he went to Washington to head the small arms, ammunition and ordnance section of the federal War Industries Board. Both men were present at the emergence of what became the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator and grandfather of the current president, had some German corporate ties at the outbreak of World War II, but the better yardstick of his connections was his directorships of companies involved in U.S. war production. Dresser Industries, for example, produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and made gaseous diffusion pumps for the atomic bomb project. George H.W. Bush later worked for Dresser's oil-services businesses. Then, as CIA director, vice president and president, one of his priorities was the U.S. weapons trade and secret arms deals with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

[CenaW]

10:24 PM on 04/24/2012

The Republican House is far to busy trying to hang Democratic Reps to bother with the obvious and very real Defense Dept. waste. Not only that,
The Ryan and Romney idea is to add to that budget, The Republicans want more money for their defense contractor buddies.

[demisfine]

10:19 PM on 04/24/2012

Bush’s war pumps up gas prices and oil company profits
The U.S. war against Iraq has killed a lot more people than the Pennsylvania Oil Wars. But it serves the same interests. The war crushed Iraq’s state-owned oil industry - which owned 11 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and was independent of the U.S. oil monopolies. The war also pumped up profits at ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and British Petroleum, who got a stronger grip on the world oil supply. The three biggest oil firms are descended from Standard Oil, and the Rockefellers have major interests in all of them. They made a combined profit of nearly $30 billion in the first six months of this year.
Bankers are also getting richer. They rake it in from oil-future speculation and debt payments from oil-producing countries.
High prices bring little benefit to poor oil-exporting countries, like Mexico, Ecuador, Nigeria and Indonesia. These countries must use most of the oil income to pay interest on loans to western banks. The higher the price of oil, the better the bankers’long-term credit ratings.
http://www.workers.org/2005/us/gas-prices-0901/

[Max Sevilla]

10:10 PM on 04/24/2012

Finally,some one in the media talking about the REAL issue of fraud and waste due to a prolonged,unnecessary war,that is costing us a HUGE amount of money coming out of our TAXES.
We need to address more this issue,to redirect our tax money to our benefits.

[Max Sevilla]

10:09 PM on 04/24/2012

Afghanistan is costing taxpayers $2 BILLION a WEEK..... A WEEK!

And we have homeless families in this country with children going to sleep hungry every night

This should anger every American

[sbrannon]

01:46 PM on 05/01/2012

You know what? I think that we are angry. Yet, the mountain seems too tall to climb in fighting the corporations and politicians who don't care and have total control over just about everything. Not only that, but we are in the mist of a rise of a police state, so when someone tries to peacefully protest (the voice they ignore, including the media) everyone gets, clubbed, pepper sprayed or zapped with their new heart attack provoking stun guns. Its called silence the people, generate propaganda, and keep em down, mentality so we can make more money syndrome.

I am really angry but, I don't know what I can really do about it. I have tried several things: writing to inform; petitions; protesting; photographing (wars); and more writing to the congressmen, senators, president(s), corporations etc...normally, I do get published (for free) so I continue to starve, or receive a run of the mill impersonal response letter not really addressing the issues of concern.

I really want to know, what can we do, to really make a difference? I can't run for anything, I am not Romney with enough money to even print the fliers!