POGO Podcasts
By Project On Government Oversight
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Podcast Description
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is an independent nonprofit that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more effective, accountable, open, and ethical federal government. Founded in 1981, POGO (which was then known as Project on Military Procurement) originally worked to expose outrageously overpriced military spending on items such as a $7,600 coffee maker and a $436 hammer. In 1990, after many successes reforming military spending, including a Pentagon spending freeze at the height of the Cold War, POGO decided to expand its mandate and investigate waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the federal government. Throughout its history, POGO's work has been applauded by Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, federal workers and whistleblowers, other nonprofits, and the media.
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1 |
Get to Know an Agency: A Refresher Course on the Office of Special Counsel and Whistleblowers | On this week's podcast, Adam Miles, from the Office of Special Council, gives an overview of how OSC works with federal whistleblowers. Miles was a speaker at the July meeting of POGO's Congressional Oversight Training Series. The series is put on by POGO to train congressional staffers about the art of congressional oversight. | 8/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
Conflict Zone: Increasing Transparency of NIH-Funded Researchers' Financial Conflicts of Interest | In May 2010, leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a rule that would require NIH-funded researchers to publicly disclose their financial arrangements with drug and medical device companies. This proposal would bring a much needed dose of transparency to federally funded medical research. Now, one thing stands in its way: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). POGO is concerned that OMB will weaken or block this proposal, and in July, we sent a letter urging OMB to leave the rule intact. For this podcast, POGO Staff Scientist Ned Feder and POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian discuss why this proposal is so important. After we recorded this podcast, Nature News reported that the proposal has been dropped. Things aren't completely final just yet--but if the NIH's disclosure proposal does wind up on the cutting room floor, it would be a significant blow to transparency and taxpayer interests. | 8/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
Graveyard Shift: Why We Need to Change the Way We Store Spent Nuclear Fuel | Despite containing some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, the structures housing the majority of U.S. spent nuclear fuel--our nuclear graveyards so to speak--are designed to withstand little more than a bad thunderstorm. In this podcast, POGO staffers talk with Bob Alvarez, a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), about why this is a problem, and whether or not a disaster like the one at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could happen in the U.S. Alvarez is the author of a new report on storage of spent nuclear fuel that was released by IPS with support from POGO. | 7/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
Too Big to Debar? The Government's Reluctance to Crack Down on Contractors that Bribe Foreign Officials | A recent law review article poses a question that POGO and others have been asking: Have the top federal contractors become "too big to debar"? The article, written by South Texas College of Law professor Drury Stevenson and third-year student Nicholas Wagoner, looks at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and how it is being enforced against federal contractors caught bribing foreign government officials. For this podcast, POGO staffers Bryan Rahija and Neil Gordon speak with Wagoner and Professor Stevenson to find out how this lack of strong enforcement hurts taxpayers' interests. | 7/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
Is Kazakhstan Funding Members of Congress? | Allegations that the government of Kazakhstan may have set up a slush fund to influence members of Congress are serious enough to warrant a federal investigation POGO earlier this month in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The influence-peddling claim originated in a lawsuit filed in federal court by a relative of Rahkat Aliyev, the ex-son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Attorneys for the relative entered a letter into the court file purportedly written to Nazarbayev by the Kazakh ambassador to the U.S., in which the ambassador describes efforts to influence members of a congressional caucus created by the Embassy by financing them through a special foreign currency account. The defendants in the case have strongly contested the letter as a forgery, including filing statements by Kazakh government officials and an analysis by a forensic document examiner. However, there is circumstantial evidence that gives considerable credence to some of the letter’s underlying claims. POGO’s investigation has found campaign contributions from employees of firms hired by the Kazakhstan Embassy. Additionally, documents filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) and news reports show that the government of Kazakhstan has used lobbying firms to establish two separate congressional caucuses--The Friends of Kazakhstan and the Central Asia Caucus--dedicated to supporting its interests. | 6/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
They Say They Want a Revolution: More Than 200 Former SEC Employees Passed through Revolving Door to Work for the Industry They | POGO staffers discuss the issue of the revolving door and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Our new report identifies over 200 former SEC employees who left the Commission to go work for the industry they once oversaw, raising questions about the integrity of the agency's ability to be an effective watchdog. | 5/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
Crash Course? | On April 1, a five-foot piece of the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines 737 Classic airplane ripped off in mid-flight, forcing the plane to an emergency landing in Arizona. Despite the date of the incident, this was no joke. In late April, the nation’s crash detectives, the National Transportation Safety Board, said they found evidence of manufacturing defects. Experts told the New York Times that the board’s findings suggest the 737’s "aluminum skin had not been properly bound together, leading to premature damage from fatigue." This week's podcast is a phone conversation between POGO staffers and a former Boeing employee and her attorney, who claim that Boeing bent the rules and allowed very similar manufacturing defects on a newer version of the 737, the 737 Next Generation. In 2005, they filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Boeing defrauded the military by supplying defective planes. They claim that Boeing has also put the flying public at risk. | 5/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
Family Matters: The Ties between a DARPA Contractor and the Agency's Director | In March 2011, AllGov reported that DARPA, the Pentagon's premier research arm, had awarded a contract to a company founded by the agency's director. Wired's Spencer Ackerman joined POGO staffers to discuss how it all went down. | 4/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
Tales of a Broken System: Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes Tells His Story | POGO first learned about Lieutenant Colonel Michael Holmes in an explosive article written by journalist Michael Hastings for Rolling Stone magazine. Lt. Colonel Holmes is the leader of an "information operations" team in the military. When Holmes was ordered to use his skills on Members of Congress, he checked with a JAG attorney on whether that order was legal. The JAG attorney said the order was illegal, and Holmes pushed back against the order and that order was rescinded. Afterwards he was subjected to what he calls a retaliatory investigation, and when he took his case to the Department of Defense Inspector General, his voice seemed to fall on deaf ears. In this podcast, POGO's Nick Schwellenbach and Bryan Rahija interview Holmes about his story. | 3/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
How Bad Performance Can Be Good for Business When it Comes to Government Contracting | POGO's Scott Amey testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) on Monday, February 28, 2011. Find his testimony here: http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/alerts/contract-oversight/co-fcmd-20110228.html Since his testimony, Scott and other investigators at POGO have written about the hearing on POGO's blog. See: http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2011/03/contractor-past-poor-formance-information.html http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2011/03/does-the-federal-government-have-performance-anxiety.html http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2011/03/im-beginning-to-get-the-picture-that-bad-performance-can-be-good-business.html | 3/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
Now It's "Personal": The Case of Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc. | Does a corporation enjoy the benefits of "personal privacy" when it comes to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)? That's the key question that was argued today before the Supreme Court in the case of AT&T v. FCC. Back in November, POGO and allies in the good government community challenged a Court of Appeals decision and argued in an amicus brief that the "personal privacy" exemption to FOIA did not apply to corporate entities. In this podcast POGO staffers go over the arguments and implications of the case. You can read the amicus brief submitted by POGO and good government allies here: http://pogoarchives.org/m/gs/foia/fcc-v-att-pogo-amicus-brief.pdf | 1/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
POGO Discusses the Latest WikiLeaks Disclosures | This week, Nick Schwellenbach, Keith Rutter, Danielle Brian and Bryan Rahija discuss the latest WikiLeaks disclosures. | 12/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
War Zone Watchdogs Part 2: No Cigar for SIGAR? | POGO recently reiterated its call for the removal of Arnold Fields as the head of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Fields recently defended his work before critics in Congress, and here POGO staffers discuss how the hearing went. | 11/29/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
War Zone Watchdogs Part 1: A Letter Regarding the State Department Inspector General | POGO staffers discuss our recent letter to the President raising questions about whether the State Department's Inspector General is independent enough to be effective. (Letter: http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/letters/government-oversight/go-ig-20101118.html) | 11/29/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
Private Security Contracting in Afghanistan | The State Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week released a damning performance evaluation of ArmorGroup North America (AGNA), the contractor responsible for guarding the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Among the revelations from the OIG report: * AGNA employed, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security failed to scrutinize, “Nepalese guards without verifiable experience, training, or background investigations in violation of its contract.” * “AGNA cannot account for 101 U.S. Government-furnished weapons that have been missing since 2007. AGNA used U.S. Government-furnished weapons for training rather than required contractor-furnished weapons.” * “AGNA regularly allows individuals who are not vetted by Embassy Kabul’s regional security office unescorted access to Camp Sullivan, a U.S. Government-owned camp containing sensitive materials.” The report confirms and expands on the findings of our investigation last year, which pulled back the curtain on a "Lord of the Flies environment" that had taken hold of the Embassy security guard force. Lewd and obscene photos of AGNA security guards helped our investigation garner considerable attention—but the key revelation, as detailed in our letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was that the State Department was failing to conduct oversight of a contractor performing an incredibly important service. This OIG report is just one more piece of evidence demonstrating that the State Department continues to struggle in its oversight of private security contractors--and raises questions about what role private security contractors should play in the U.S. efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. | 11/4/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
A Father's Attempt to Warn the Military about U.S. Servicemen Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport | POGO sat down to speak with Chris and Emma Winfield, the parents of Army Specialist Adam Winfield, one of five soldiers charged with the murders of three Afghans in January, February and May. Spec. Winfield reportedly contacted his parents after the first incident, saying that he was being harassed and that his squad leader had gotten away with murder. Chris Winfield says he tried to warn the Army after communicating with his son, but says several Army offices, including the Army Inspector General and the Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID), did not respond to their voice mails. As reported by ABC News, the Army says that it conducted an internal investigation in response to the Winfields' story, and determined that the Winfields did not call the Army Inspector General. Regarding the interaction between Winfield and CID, the Army told ABC: "The evidence shows that he called several numbers on a Sunday. He spoke to one individual for approximately 12 minutes. He did call the Army Criminal Investigations Division, but he did not leave a message and did not follow a prompt to call the 24-hour MP desk." Chris Grey, a CID spokesperson, also told POGO that the CID office at Fort Lewis “could find no record of a message left by Mr. Winfield,” although the office admits Chris Winfield has produced phone records showing a one-minute phone call with the CID office. Nonetheless, because POGO has long taken an interest in issues related to blowing the whistle and the inspector general system, we thought this story merited exploration. | 10/18/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
Downblending and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex in Plain English | Ingrid and Peter sit down to discuss the findings in POGO's latest report. In a nutshell, we have identified an opportunity to create jobs, save taxpayer dollars, improve security, and generate as much as $23 billion for the Treasury. | 9/17/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
Special Announcement Within | Ask us anything! What do you want to know about POGO or the world of government oversight? | 9/10/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
On the Hunt for Savings at the Pentagon | On Monday August 9 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposed several initiatives to trim Pentagon bloat and make Department of Defense operations more efficient. But do these proposals mark steps towards genuine reform at the Pentagon? And what do the folks on Capitol Hill think? To find out, POGO sat down with Winslow Wheeler, director of the Center for Defense Information. | 8/13/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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20 |
Hill Update: Turning Investigations into Good Government Reforms | Angela Canterbury, POGO's Director of Public Policy, walks us through some of the key pieces of legislation that POGO has been working on (the CLEAR Act, the financial regulatory reform bill...), and talks about what's next (GAO oversight of the intelligence community, whistleblower protections...?) once legislators return from recess. | 8/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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21 |
Countdown to Zero...Oversight of the Nuclear Complex | POGOnauts, including POGO Senior Investigator Peter Stockton, review a new film about the nuclear weapons complex, Countdown to Zero, and discuss the recent trend towards less and less oversight of our nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. | 7/27/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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22 |
Plan B: Opengov Advocates Audit Revisions to Agency Open Government Plans | This week POGO is joined by OpenTheGovernment.org's Amy Bennett for a discussion of the recent audit of revisions to agency Open Government Plans. Agencies were required to submit these Plans as part of the Open Government Directive, the Obama Administration commitment to increase transparency in the federal government. POGO and other good government groups audited the agencies' Plans when they were first published, and committed to re-evaluating Plans that were re-submitted by June 25. You can find the results of the audit here: https://sites.google.com/site/opengovtplans/home/about-this-project/audit-results-updated | 7/21/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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23 |
Examining Reforms to the Minerals Management Service (MMS), Interior's Oil and Gas Regulator | This week, POGO staffers dive into the history of the beleaguered government agency responsible for oversight of the offshore oil industry, and examine the reforms under consideration to improve the agency. Find more background information on POGO's blog: http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/oil-spill-mms/ | 7/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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24 |
Fun with Inherently Governmental Functions | It may be one of the bulkiest terms in Washington, but POGO's got the skinny on inherently governmental functions. In this week's podcast, POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian describes her recent testimony before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, in which she addressed whether private security contractors in combat zones are performing services that should be reserved strictly for government personnel. You may read Danielle's testimony here: http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/testimony/contract-oversight/co-gp-20100618.html | 6/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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25 |
Congressional Oversight of the Intelligence Community: an Overview and Update | Why does the National Security Agency maintain a room for Government Accountability Office investigators--and why is it empty? The Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood joins POGO to discuss congressional oversight of the intelligence community. The House just passed an amendment that would better enable the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate and audit intelligence agencies--Aftergood breaks down why this amendment is important, and why we still have a long way to go to strengthen oversight of this sector of the government. Read more about Steve Aftergood's work on his blog, Secrecy News: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ | 6/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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26 |
POGO's Favorite FinReg Reform Amendments | What are POGO's favorite amendments to the financial regulatory reform bill? Find out this week, as we learn about measures that would increase transparency and limit the revolving door problem between government and the financial sector. | 5/14/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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27 |
Spilling the Beans: How the Deepwater Horizon Rig Explosion Brought the Shortcomings of One Government Regulatory Agency Back i | The tragic Gulf oil spill has highlighted significant failures and deficiencies at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS)--the agency responsible for oversight of offshore drilling. POGO has been monitoring the MMS for years, and this week we sat down to discuss some of the problems facing the agency. | 5/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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28 |
Evaluating Open Government Plans of Three National Security Agencies | As required by the Open Government Directive, agencies have released their blueprints for transparency: the Open Government Plans. But how much openness and accountability will we see as a result of these plans? | 5/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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29 |
The Latest in Contractor Accountability | What's new in the updated version of POGO's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database? What's the public's reaction to the database? How do contractors react to the database? | 4/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
Unraveling the Pseudo-Classification System | In the aftermath of 9/11, many agencies began labeling documents with markings such as "Sensitive But Unclassified." Scott describes how the proliferation of different labels and markings for this kind of information has become problematic. | 4/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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31 |
The SEC's Little-Known Whistleblower Bounty Program | The agency's bounty program has resulted in awards to only five recipients in over twenty years of existence. | 4/16/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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32 |
FOIA, The NY Fed, and Breakdancing: a Sunshine Week Roundup | POGO staffers discuss all that transpired as part of Sunshine Week, the annual initiative to raise awareness of open-government issues. | 3/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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33 |
Is The Revolving Door Still Spinning? | Sometimes people working in the private sector come into public service, and sometimes people leave public service to enter the private sector. What questions does these sort of personnel shifts raise? | 3/19/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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34 |
Is the Defense Department's Auditing Agency Resisting the Reform it Desperately Needs? | The DCAA conducts around 30,000 audits each year, covering $501 billion in proposed contracts. But POGO worries that auditors lack the independence to fully hold contractors accountable and fight fraud waste and abuse. | 3/10/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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35 |
Examining FINRA and Other Self-Regulatory Organizations in the Financial Sector | Michael Smallberg raises questions about the effectiveness of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. | 3/4/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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36 |
Tumbling Dice: POGO's Latest Recommendations to Congress in No Particular Order | Last week POGO submitted a list of a dozen nonpartisan good government fixes to each congressional office. For this podcast, instead of an orderly rundown, POGO staffers decided to mix things up and roll dice to determine which recommendation to discuss next. | 2/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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37 |
What We Need in a Nominee for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission | Ingrid Drake explains why the Senate should oppose the nomination of William Magwood to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- and what we should be looking for in a nominee. | 2/17/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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38 |
Another Case of the SEC Ignoring Whistleblowers | Michael Smallberg and Adam Zagorin discuss their recent investigation on how a former SEC lawyer -- who is now running for Congress -- dimed out a whistleblower. | 2/17/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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39 |
Recommendations for Good Government Reform | Just in time for the State of the Union address, Mandy Smithberger and Ingrid Drake discuss POGO's latest recommendations to the President. | 2/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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40 |
The Week in Open Government | Agencies face new challenges implementing the Open Government Directive, and the White House has a new approach with presidential signing statements. | 1/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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41 |
A Break from Oversight | If your kid accidentally blew apart a building, would you give them less supervision? This hands-off approach is exactly what the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is doing by giving the contractors who manage the nation’s eight nuclear weapons sites (Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Nevada Test Site, Sandia National Laboratory, Savannah River Site, Pantex, Y-12, and the Kansas City Plant) a six-month break from many regularly scheduled oversight reviews. | 1/8/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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42 |
Derivatives, Financial Self-Regulating Organizations, and Preventing the Next Madoff Disaster | In December, POGO sent a letter to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro regarding loopholes in proposed rule to increase transparency for troubled assets. Another letter urged the SEC Chairman to take action on recommendations made by the agency's Inspector General. | 12/21/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
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43 |
POGO Urges Pentagon To Create Strong Regulations Against Conflicts of Interest in Engineering Programs | Mandy Smithberger discusses a recent POGO letter to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. | 12/16/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 43 Episodes |
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