Six U.S. Senators are calling for an overhaul of the federal government’s $35 billion plan for doctors and hospitals to switch from paper to electronic medical records, citing concerns from patient privacy to possible Medicare billing fraud.

The report issued Tuesday by the half-dozen Republicans concedes that many lawmakers and medical experts believe the digital systems can reduce health care costs and improve the quality of care by reducing duplicative testing and cutting down on medical errors.

But the report asserts that the Obama administration’s push to use billions of dollars in stimulus money helping doctors and hospitals buy digital systems needs to be “recalibrated.”

“Now, nearly four years after the enactment…and after hundreds of pages of regulations implementing the program,” the document says, “we see evidence that the program is at risk of not achieving its goals and that $35 billion in taxpayer money is being spent ineffectively in the process.”

Among the report’s conclusions:

• Despite expectations of cost savings, the digital systems may be increasing unnecessary medical tests and billings to Medicare.
• The government has not demanded that the various digital systems be able to share medical information, a critical element to their success.
• Few controls exist to prevent fraud and abuse. Many doctors and hospitals are receiving money by simply attesting that they are meeting required standards.
• Procedures to protect the privacy of patient records are “lax and may jeopardize sensitive patient data.”
• It remains unclear whether doctors and hospitals that have accepted stimulus funding will be able to maintain the systems without government money.

Some of the concerns cited were detailed by the Center for Public Integrity’s “Cracking the Codes”  series last year. The year-long investigation found that thousands of medical professionals have steadily billed higher rates for treating seniors on Medicare over the last decade — adding $11 billion or more to their fees.

The Center’s probe uncovered a broad range of costly billing errors and abuses that have plagued Medicare for years—from confusion over how to pick proper payment codes to outright overcharges. The findings indicated that Medicare billing problems are worsening as doctors and hospitals switch to electronic health records.

Addressing the coding abuses the senators wrote: “However, early reports raise concerns that health IT may have actually accelerated the ordering of unnecessary care as well as increased billing for the same procedures.”

The administration’s Office of National Coordinator, which oversees the program, referred a request for comment on the report to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A CMS official did not respond to written questions.

It’s unclear what steps administration officials are taking to combat fraud and abuse from errant billing, a process known as “upcoding.”

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder last September notified five medical groups of their intention to ramp up investigative oversight of upcoding, including possible criminal prosecutions, but it is not clear if any follow-up actions are underway.

In addition, the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services on May 3 is holding a summit in Baltimore to discuss electronic records systems,   “the increase in code levels billed for some Medicare services, and appropriate coding in an increasingly electronic environment.”

The Congressional report,  titled “REBOOT: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT” was released on Tuesday by Senators John Thune (R-S.D.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.).

During the three years since Rep. Eric Massa resigned his congressional seat after male staffers accusedhim of sexual harassment, the Upstate New York Democrat has paid his wife — and campaign treasurer — a monthly salary from his dormant re-election account. 

Apparently, no longer.

Beverly Massa received no money from the Massa for Congress campaign committee between Jan. 1 and March 31, according to its latest Federal Election Commission disclosure report, filed Monday evening.

It's an abrupt change: Since Eric Massa quit Congress in March 2010, Beverly Massa consistently earned up to $2,404 per month to keep the books for a candidate committee with no active candidate, disclosure documents indicate.

Beverly Massa's monthly salary dropped to $1,694 per month in December 2010, then $1,292 in October 2011, before creeping back up to $1,294 in January 2012. In July 2012, it fell again to $692 per month.

For most cases, Beverly Massa's salary payments were earmarked for work performed during Eric Massa's 2010 primary, although a January 2012 payment of $1,294 went toward a "2012 primary" in which Eric Massa never ran.

In all, the Massa for Congress committee has paid Beverly Massa nearly $79,000 since its namesake candidate ceased to be a candidate, including a lump payment of $27,000 on April 1, 2010, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal disclosures.

Such payments are highly unusual for a defunct congressional committee, which usually require minimal accounting attention. Many simply terminate themselves upon clearing any outstanding debt, donating surplus funds to other political committees or charitable organizations.

Phone messages left for both Beverly and Eric Massa were not immediately returned. 

The Massa for Congress committee still had $61,520 remaining in its account as of March 31.

During the year's first quarter, Massa for Congress spent just $809, all on payroll taxes and service fees to payroll management company Paychex.

On April 2, 2010, an explosion at the Tesoro Corp. oil refinery in Anacortes, Wash., killed five workers instantly and severely burned two others, who succumbed to their wounds.

Eighteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing a massive oil spill.

In both cases, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board– an independent agency modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board – launched investigations. Like the NTSB, the Chemical Safety Board is supposed to follow such probes with recommendations aimed at preventing similar tragedies.

Yet three years after Tesoro and Deepwater Horizon, both inquiries remain open – exemplars of a chemical board under attack for what critics call its sluggish investigative pace and short attention span. A former board member calls the agency “grossly mismanaged.”

The number of board accident reports, case studies and safety bulletins has fallen precipitously since 2006, an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found. Thirteen board investigations – one more than five years old – are incomplete.

As members of Congress raise questions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general is auditing the board’s investigative process.

“It is unacceptable that after three long years, the CSB has failed to complete its investigation of the tragic Tesoro refinery accident,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a written statement to the Center. “The families of the seven victims and the Anacortes community deserve better, and the CSB must be held accountable for this ridiculous delay.”

At Tesoro, a tube-like device called a heat exchanger came apart, triggering an inferno that melted aluminum 100 feet away. Shauna Gumbel, whose son, Matt, died 22 days after being burned in the blast, said the victims’ families were told to expect news from the CSB on the tragedy’s second anniversary. The date came and went. “Then we were told, ‘Six more months,’ ” she said.

In a recent conference call with the families, board officials pledged to finish the Tesoro report by the end of 2013 – more than 3 ½ years after the accident, Gumbel said.

“I think they’re making excuses,” she said. “Why aren’t they assigning more people so they can get the investigation done in a timely manner and the families can move forward?”

Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso and managing director Daniel Horowitz say the board, which has a $10.55 million annual budget, is stretched thin and must decide which of the 200 or so “high-consequence” accidents that take place in the United States each year merit its attention.

“We’ve made innumerable proposals over the years … pointing out the significant discrepancy between the number of serious accidents and the ones that we can handle from a practical standpoint,” Horowitz said in an interview with the Center. “We’ve asked for a Houston office. We’ve asked for additional investigators for many years.”

Congress, he said, has been unwilling to come up with more money.

Moure-Eraso, chairman since June 2010, said the Tesoro investigation was sidetracked by an explosion at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., last August that created a towering black cloud and prompted about 15,000 people in surrounding neighborhoods to seek medical evaluation. No one was killed but 19 workers were exposed to noxious hydrocarbon vapors.

“We have to make decisions,” Moure-Eraso said. “Here we were, running along, working on Tesoro, and then this accident happened at Chevron. We decided that it was important to deploy [to Richmond] because the issues that were raised were issues that affect the whole refinery industry.”

Current and former board members and staffers, however, contend the agency’s investigations are poorly managed – an allegation the EPA’s inspector general is exploring.

“They were jumping from one investigation to another, and when a new accident occurred they would pull people off an existing investigation to go investigate that one,” said former CSB board member William Wark, whose five-year term ended in September 2011. Wark, who accompanied investigators dispatched to the Tesoro accident, said it’s “embarrassing” that the investigation has not been finished.

“The basic, bottom line is the agency is grossly mismanaged,” he said.

The board has 20 investigators – four more than it had in 2008. Adjusted for inflation, its budget has been essentially flat over the past five years. Yet earlier investigations were often completed more quickly.

The deadliest accident the board has investigated was the March 2005 explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas. Fifteen workers were killed and 180 injured. The board’s final report was issued just under two years after the accident.

A February 2008 blast at the Imperial Sugar plant near Savannah, Ga., killed 14 and injured 36. The final report was issued in 19 months.

Gerald Poje, a Bill Clinton appointee who served on the board from 1998 to 2004, finds it “painful” that more recent investigations have stagnated. He worries that an “erosion of the reputation of the institution” could cause Congress to question its value.

“I always considered the board to be in a race against time,” Poje said. “When an event occurs, people want to know instantaneously why it happened, how it happened and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Unfortunately, over time, people begin to forget and feel less obligated to pay attention to recommendations.”

Falling productivity

The Chemical Safety Board had a rocky start.

Created by Congress in amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990, the board wasn’t up and running until 1998. It was a relative weakling among government agencies, starved of funding and mistrusted by industry.

“Upon reflection as a former board member, it appears that neither administration nor Congressional support for the CSB has ever been very strong,” Andrea Kidd Taylor, now a lecturer at Morgan State University in Baltimore, wrote in the journal New Solutions in 2006. “[F]unding for this small agency has been limited … So the agency’s growth and the number of investigations it can conduct and complete in a year are minimal.”

Still, Taylor wrote, “Given the CSB’s current budget [then about $9 million], the average number of four root-cause investigations completed per year is exceptional.”

Authorized for five members, the board currently has three, with a fourth awaiting confirmation. Its staff numbers 39. The NTSB, by comparison, had more than 400 people and a budget of $102 million in fiscal year 2012.

The chemical board appeared to hit its stride under Carolyn Merritt, a George W. Bush appointee who served as chair from 2002 to 2007 and died of cancer in 2008.

In 2006 the board released nine products – three full reports, three case studies and three safety bulletins. In 2007 it put out eight, including a widely praised, 341-page report on the BP-Texas City explosion.

Production has trended down ever since. Last year, the board released two case studies. So far this year, it has issued one full report and one case study. On Monday, it released an interim report on the August 2012 Chevron accident.

“It depends, ultimately, what Congress expects the agency to do,” the board’s Horowitz said. “If they expect us to look at all 200 of these high-consequence accidents, then that’s a larger problem. With the resources that we have – which, like every other agency, are finite – we do tremendous good.

“Would we like to do more? Would we like to do it faster? Sure.”

Horowitz and Moure-Eraso say they are eager to complete the Tesoro investigation, which has consumed about 7,100 hours of staff time and $700,000 over the past three years. But, they say, Deepwater Horizon, an inquiry requested by two members of Congress that has cost nearly $4 million to date, required a diversion of staff.

“We’ve spent $4 million that we really didn’t have, and we’ve committed, at times, over half our investigative staff,” Horowitz said. Investigators, he said, have prepared a 400-page draft report that’s “the most comprehensive we’ve ever done.”

The Tesoro inquiry progressed in fits and starts. Within a few months of the accident in April 2010, investigators had drafted urgent recommendations for the company as well as a refining industry trade group and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Those recommendations were never issued.

“The board at that time didn’t feel that they went far enough,” Horowitz said. “They were company-specific. We didn’t feel they went to the real heart of the problems, which are broader than Tesoro and reflect aging infrastructure in refineries [and] use of antiquated materials and systems.”

A year earlier, however, the board had issued urgent recommendations stemming from a release of potentially lethal hydrofluoric acid from the Citgo refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. They were no broader than the draft Tesoro recommendations.

“Well, look, it was a different board, and they make their decisions on what recommendations they want to ultimately issue,” Horowitz said.

The board’s investigation of the Citgo accident, which occurred in July 2009, is unfinished. “That’s a case we hope to get back to,” Horowitz said.

Soon after the draft Tesoro recommendations were shelved, several experienced investigators – including Rob Hall, who was leading the Tesoro team – left the board. In the fall of 2011, an almost entirely new team essentially had to start over.

Team members have since been pulled into the Deepwater Horizon and Chevron investigations, among others. The current leader, Dan Tillema, spent months examining the failed blowout preventer implicated in the Gulf oil spill, a process that has cost about $1 million.

When the Tesoro report finally comes out, Horowitz said, it will reflect an exhaustive inquiry.

“We engaged top metallurgists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and we are undertaking complex modeling to understand process conditions inside the heat exchanger,” he said. “The investigative team has been continuing to obtain documents and interviews from Tesoro.”

‘Management problem’

The United Steelworkers union, which represents workers in refineries, chemical plants and other hazardous settings, has been among the board’s more vocal critics.

At a public meeting in January, on an explosion that killed five at a Hawaii fireworks storage facility, Steelworkers official Mike Wright observed that “our workplaces have been the subject of more CSB investigations than any other union or corporation. We are your biggest stakeholder and, perhaps, your biggest fan.”

Investigative delays “severely compromise the board’s mission,” said Wright, the union's director of health, safety and environment.

“Perhaps even worse is the human cost of the delays,” he said. “Families and co-workers feel abandoned by the board, and even abandoned by their government.”

The union didn’t blame the board’s investigators, Wright said. “This is a management problem.”

The EPA’s inspector general is looking into this very subject. In May 2012, the IG notified Moure-Eraso that it planned an audit “to determine whether CSB’s investigative process can be more efficient to enable more investigative work.”

Three months later the IG released the results of another audit, finding that the board did not press regulators, such as OSHA, and industry hard enough to make sure its recommendations were adopted. As of December 2010, the IG said, more than a third of the 588 recommendations issued by the board were still open; almost a quarter of these had been open more than five years. The board says 29 percent of its recommendations are open today.

“We are kind of full-time employment device for the IG,” Moure-Eraso said. “I don’t think that they are competent to basically understand how we work or understand how we conduct investigations.”

The board was dealt a substantial blow in 2011, when four investigators quit. Two of them, Hall and John Vorderbrueggen, had been team leaders; both, now with the NTSB, declined comment.

Asked if he thought the departures reflected dissatisfaction, Moure-Eraso said: “Investigator is a very tough job. You are asking somebody to deploy for weeks at a time wherever the accident happened, to be away from their families, to deal with very unsavory situations. You have to deal with people getting killed, places destroyed. … It’s not for weak hearts.”

Where to deploy?

The board’s choice of investigative targets has been a point of contention.

Why, the Steelworkers ask, did the board follow up on an ink plant explosion in East Rutherford, N.J., that injured seven workers last October but not a hydrofluoric acid release that killed a union member in December at the Valero Energy Corp. refinery in Memphis?

Hydrofluoric acid, a toxic gas that can rapidly travel long distances in a ground-hugging cloud, is used at about 50 U.S. refineries. “We have been harping on how dangerous it is for quite some time,” said Kim Nibarger, a health and safety specialist with the Steelworkers.

The union thought the Valero accident afforded a “golden opportunity” for the board to reinforce the need for “inherently safer technologies,” Nibarger said. “They said they were too busy.”

Horowitz said the board was asked to go to New Jersey by one of the state’s senators, Frank Lautenberg. No one in the Tennessee congressional delegation urged the board to look into Valero.

“We screen [accidents] very carefully,” Horowitz said. “We look at the specific consequences – the number of deaths and injuries and things like that, the number of community evacuations. We look at qualitative factors, one of which is requests from Congress and from our authorizing committees to investigate these issues.”

Poje recalls fielding congressional requests when he was on the board. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to answer back, ‘Thank you so much for your interest. We wish we were resourced to meet this priority for your community but we aren’t.’ ”

Debate continues over whether the board should have investigated the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident, already addressed in at least a half-dozen other federal inquiries, including one by a presidential commission.

Former board members Wark and William Wright, both appointed by George W. Bush, said they argued against it. “It was offshore. It was something that we had absolutely no business being in,” Wark said. “They insisted on doing it anyway. They spent a lot of the agency’s budget on that.”

“I don’t think there’s anything they’re going to say that’s going to improve offshore drilling right now,” said Wright, whose term expired the same day as Wark’s in 2011. “Yet we have managed to invest $4 million in as many years and I am at a loss as to what value will be added by continuing to look at this incident now, particularly when the Interior Department has changed a number of regulations already.”

Horowitz pointed out that the board, then chaired by John Bresland, was asked to investigate the disaster in early June 2010 by Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich. Bresland agreed. Moure-Eraso assumed the chairmanship days later, having been handed a record-high caseload.  Bresland declined to be interviewed.

“We told Congress at that time that we needed additional resources to conduct that work,” Horowitz said, referring to $5.6 million in supplemental funding sought by Moure-Eraso. “Well, those resources were never provided.”

The investigation was slowed by rig owner Transocean’s refusal to comply with board subpoenas for records, lead investigator Cheryl MacKenzie said in a statement to the Center. “It took nearly two years of steady effort to get the issue before a federal court, and only this month did a decision finally come down in the CSB’s favor,” MacKenzie said.

Nonetheless, Horowitz said, the investigation, which should be completed this summer, was worth doing.

“We’re the agency that’s going to look in detail and depth at industry standards,” he said. “The presidential oil spill commission took the 30,000-foot view, wrote a good report, but looked in broad strokes. The regulators looked at technical issues. We are looking at the effectiveness of those standards, and we’ll have a lot of recommendations for improvement that we think will make a safer industry.”

William Wright said the board should have focused instead on finishing long-overdue reports, like Tesoro, and delving into more recent accidents, like Valero.

“That’s kind of why we were put in business in the first place,” he said. “The public’s not being well served by an agency that was created to improve chemical safety if it fails to put out timely reports on significant chemical incidents."

A cool $4.7 million could buy you Dodgers pitcher Zack Greinke's new compound.

Or this cyclotron.

Or — yes — the original Batmobile.

For ex-Rep. Marty Meehan, such a cash stash ($4,661,671, to be exact, according to a new federal campaign disclosure report) sits quietly in a congressional campaign account the Massachusetts Democrat hasn't had much need for since he resigned from Congress in 2007 to become chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

But Meehan may yet use the money for its intended purpose: seeking elected office.

"I have no immediate plans, but I'm only 56 years old," he told the Center for Public Integrity by phone. "I haven't made a firm decision, I haven't decided I could never be a candidate for office again."

Any run for higher office, if one ever occurred, would likely come years from now, Meehan said.

"If you're trying to have a transformative impact on a university, that usually takes about 10 years," he said. "I'm very happy doing what I'm doing."

Meehan recently was the subject of brief butintensespeculation that he'd seek the U.S. Senate seat John Kerry vacated in January to become Secretary of State. He did not run, tellingThe Eagle-Tribune in December: "I’m not thinking of leaving to go back into politics in Washington.”

Immediate federal-level options in Massachusetts beyond U.S. House seats are scant: Kerry's former seat is slated to be filled in a June special election, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., just began her six-year term in January.

Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick's current term expires in 2015 and he's pledged not to seek a third term.

But Massachusetts campaign finance law prohibits transfers of federal campaign cash to state-level candidate committees, meaning Meehan couldn't easily tap his stash. Massachusetts law does state that a state-level candidate may "coordinate arrangements, with a federal committee that refunds contributions pursuant to federal law, for a solicitation of the same contributors by the candidate's committee."

For now, Meehan — long a campaign finance reform advocate — says he won't convert his federal campaign committee into a super PAC or other such big-dollar political vehicle, even if he one day categorically decides against re-entering electoral politics.

If anything, he says he'd donate his leftover campaign funds to charities, or perhaps give some away to Democratic brethren, as he has to a modest degree in recent years.

Meehan is co-author of the Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill of 2002, which served as the House of Representatives companion to the better-known McCain-Feingold Act, also known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision was a setback for reform, leading to the creation of free-spending organizations known as super PACs.

Meehan said such organizations are "bad for the system."

 He says he'd love to see the ratification of a constitutional amendment overturning the Citizens United decision.

"But I look at the composition of the Congress and this seems unlikely — very unlikely," Meehan said. "There would have to be a change in the composition of the [Supreme] Court for something to happen."

The cigarette, a product so politically passé that even the wiliest of Mad Men stopped selling it, is looking for second shot on Capitol Hill.

But like Don Draper, the maligned cancer stick has assumed a sleek new identity — the electronic cigarette — that capitalizes on societal pressure to quit smoking yet faces increased governmental scrutiny.

NJOY, the leading e-cigarette manufacturer, has hired a team of congressional staffers-turned-lobbyists to do its bidding on Capitol Hill, according to records filed with U.S. Senate.

Jeff Shockey and John Scofield — formerly senior staffers on the House Appropriations Committee — lead Alexandria, Va.-based firm Shockey Scofield Solutions LLC that will lobby Congress and the Food and Drug Administration on behalf of NJOY. Scofield also worked as an aide to former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J., while Shockey once worked for former Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.

Mike Ference, who until late 2012 served as policy director to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., is also a partner at the firm and will lobby for NJOY. Ference also formerly worked at lobbying powerhouse Podesta Group and served as an aide to Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

Scofield, NJOY’s lobbyist, declined to comment on his client’s specific legislative or government influence goals. Representatives at NJOY’s Arizona-based headquarters did not respond to requests for comment. And NJOY’s Senate filing notes only that it intends to lobby on “FDA administration of P.L. 111-31,” a tobacco control law, and “the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act,” offering no additional details.

But the leading e-cigarette manufacturer’s decision to hire Beltway insiders — and place former Surgeon General Richard Carmona on its board — suggests NJOY and its upstart contemporaries  intend to aggressively defend their business interests at the federal level.

It’s no wonder: Government regulators are skeptical of e-cigarettes, health lobbyists aren’t convinced they’re safe and established tobacco companies are attempting to gobble up market share.

Smaller-time e-cigarette manufacturers’ lobbying has already heated up in foreign capitals, and domestically, in statehouses such as that in Oklahoma. And NJOY’s entry into the federal-level fray follows some low-level lobbying by other e-cigarette interests, such as CB Distributors, a wholesaler to convenience stores. The now defunct Electronic Cigarette Association, a trade group formerly headed by current U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., lobbied four years ago in support of laws banning the sale of e-cigarettes to minors.  

Modern e-cigarettes — small plastic tubes that seek to deliver the look, feel and nicotine buzz of traditional smokes — have been subject to little federal regulation since they entered the U.S. market from China in 2007.

NJOY, formerly Sottera Inc., successfully sued the FDA in 2009 to be regulated as a tobacco product, a move that freed the e-cigarette industry from stringent regulation and allowed it to double its market share annually, according to a Forbes report.

The FDA originally announced that e-cigarettes would be regulated as a “drug delivery device,” which requires each product to meet the same safety and efficacy standards as nicotine patches, gums and other smoking cessation products before reaching consumers. Health advocates and lobbyists are concerned and have themselves lobbied the federal government on smoke-free workplace laws, the regulation of e-cigarettes  and online tobacco sales.  

The American Heart Association spent more than $136,000 lobbying the federal government on tobacco-related issues, including the regulation of smokeless tobacco products last year,  Senate filings reveal.

“There are no requirements for ingredient disclosure. No regulation at all for safety,” said Bronson Frick, a lobbyist for the self-explanatory Americans for Nonsmokers’ rights. “It’s best to think of e-cigarettes as hundreds of individual products, because they are all manufactured differently.”

This rising popularity and scant government oversight has provoked a backlash from public health advocates like Frick, who worry about the e-cigarette industry’s lack of quality control and marketing tactics.

“We are very troubled that e-cigarette companies have been making ‘quit smoking’ claims without any sort of reaction from the FDA,” according to Erika Sward, a lobbyist for the American Lung Association.  

Though most players in the e-cigarette industry appear to be smaller, fly-by-night operations, well-established tobacco companies have begun to carve out a space in the e-cigarette market, Frick said.

Lorillard, the maker of Newport cigarettes, launched its own electronic bluCig and an accompanying national ad campaign that features actor Stephan Dorff (of 1998 movie “Blade” fame) urging potential e-smokers to “take their freedom back” and “rise from the ashes.”

Cigarette king Reynolds American has also sponsored a new "Transform Tobacco" campaign, which aims to reduce the harm caused by smoking by offering a line of “smokeless” products. 

As part of this strategy, the company hopes to engage government, public health officials and other tobacco manufacturers in developing tobacco and nicotine-based products, “that are scientifically shown to reduce the risks associated with the use of existing tobacco products, particularly cigarettes.”

But Frick argues that tobacco companies “claim to be in line with society, yet they haven’t given up their old tricks either,” listing the tobacco industry’s continued opposition to cigarette taxes and smoke-free workplace laws as examples.

Tobacco interests spent nearly $27 million on federal-level lobbying efforts during 2012, collectively hiring 173 lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That represents an uptick in the tobacco industry’s lobbying expenditures from 2010 ($19.6 million) and 2011 ($22.5 million), the Center’s research notes.

 “The FDA has the ability to regulate e-cigarettes,” Frick said. “With traditional tobacco companies involved, it becomes a question of whether the FDA will back down in the face of industry lobbying or enact some real regulations to ensure public safety.”

The new immigration proposal now before the Senate could help thousands of American citizens whose families have been shattered or forced into exile because of deportation and tough immigration penalties Congress adopted in 1996.

Grueling debate on the sweeping bipartisan proposal is ahead, with opponents, such as Numbers USA, an immigration restriction group, already mustering a campaign to denounce portions of the bill as “amnesty.”  But Americans who have been forced to move out of the country to remain united with ousted spouses – or who face years of separation from spouses and sometimes children — say they are thrilled by language in the proposal that could provide them relief.  

“We still have a long way to go, but this is one giant step forward for my family,” New Jersey native Margot Bruemmer, 40, told the Center for Public Integrity in a phone call from Veracruz, Mexico. She has lived there, in a remote area, since 2005, after she tried to legalize her husband and he was given a mandatory lifetime “bar” from living in the United States that can’t be appealed for 10 years.

The reason: He had crossed the border more than once unlawfully, which is not uncommon among  undocumented workers. The couple has two small children.

Bruemmer belongs to American Families United, a network of Americans who have all been separated from spouses or moved abroad with them – or who fear that they’ll suffer the same fate if they dare to try to legalize spouses under the current immigration system. 

As a recent Center for Public Integrity report revealed, thousands of American families have been separated – or face separation – because of these little-known mandatory immigration penalties. Bruemmer and others in American Families United recently traveled to Capitol Hill to plead with lawmakers  to address their plight as part of immigration reform proposals.  

Crafted by a bipartisan group of eight senators, the voluminous Senate bill calls for giving immigration judges and other officials more discretion to consider the pain and suffering that a loved one’s separation causes U.S. citizens and legal immigrants. The provisions, if eventually adopted, would allow citizens like Bruemmer and legal residents a much greater chance to bring back spouses who have been deported or forced into exile.

Others might feel more secure in coming forward, without fear, to legalize based on family ties.

Randall Emery, president of American Families United, said the legislation is unprecedented in its explicit recognition that judges can consider the plight of Americans and legal residents who suffer when a spouse or parent is forced out of the country.

The proposal says judges who review cases can decline to order an immigrant, with some criminal exceptions, to be “removed, deported or excluded” if it would be “against the public interest or would result in hardship to the alien’s United States citizen or permanent resident” spouse or children.

Although few Americans realize it, undocumented spouses, over the last decade, have been frequently assessed bars to living in the United States after they voluntarily came forward in attempts to legalize based on marriage.  Right now, the idea that their children might suffer harm cannot be taken into consideration as a plea to halt their ouster.  

Judges and consular officials who review applications have little to no discretion to disregard these penalties because Congress made them mandatory in 1996.

While some families can seek so-called hardship waivers to shorten a spouse’s mandatory exile, the waivers’ requirements are demanding.  And anyone who has a deportation history or who even admits to crossing the border more than once is ineligible to apply for a waiver.

Douglas Stump, an Oklahoma lawyer and president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Center that fear of certain exile has blocked a significant number of the millions of illegal immigrants now in the United States from applying for legal status based on a close family tie.

Because her husband was barred, Bruemmer said, she made a tough decision to give up her career as a college professor and move with him.

She is now “desperate” to move back to the United States both for safety’s sake and for the sake of her children’s education. The family has faced kidnapping threats, she said, because of assumptions she must have lots of money because she’s American.  

In reality, Bruemmer  told the Center, the family is barely eking out a living. She was part of the American Families United group that recently visited congressional offices.

In Los Angeles, American Families United member Chris Xitco, said he was also optimistic after reading parts of the immigration proposal.

“It looks good,” Xitco said, his joy tempered by years of fighting to legalize his wife. “But now we have to get it through Congress.”

Xitco’s wife, Delia, lives with their two small children south of Tijuana, Mexico, where she moved after  immigration officials told her they had no choice but to impose an exile of at least 10 years, until 2018, when she can once again apply for legal status. It did not matter that the couple had a baby.

Delia had crossed the border twice in the 1990s, and had been caught once.  

A family in San Diego interviewed by the Center, headed by T.J. and Maythe Barbour of San Diego, is struggling with a 20-year bar that Maythe was given after a police officer stopped her for driving too slowly and turned her into immigration authorities.

T.J is an American citizen. A lawyer had advised the couple not to even attempt legalization for Maythe because she would surely have been barred due to a prior deportation.  She was barred for 20 years because she was deported twice – the second time after she was turned over to immigration by the police officer.

She now lives in Tijuana and only sees her 10-year-old son when T.J. drives him over on weekends and one night a week. The boy has been deeply distressed by his mother’s deportation. 

Emery applauded legislators for listening to the stories of members of American Families United.

 “For the most part,” he said, “this is what we’ve been looking for: More discretion for judges to really look at the facts, and use more common sense to apply the law.” 

Current and former students at two more prestigious colleges have reportedly filed federal complaints alleging mistreatment of campus sexual assault victims — the subject of a major investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.  

The New York Times reported that the complaints were filed against Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Occidental College in California, alleging violations of the Title IX civil rights law, and in Occidental’s case, the Cleary Act, which established strict rules on reporting of campus crime. Over the past couple years, other elite schools, such as Wesleyan, Yale, Amherst and the University of North Carolina, have been plagued by similar allegations.  

In 2009 and 2010, the Center – in collaboration with NPR – did a series of investigative pieces entitled “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice.” The series revealed that students found “responsible” for campus sexual assaults often face little or no punishment from school judicial systems, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down.

A small but increasing number of U.S. senators — the only federal politicians still allowed to submit campaign finance reports on paper — are opting to voluntarily file their disclosures electronically.

Fourteen current senators chose to e-file their first-quarter campaign finance reports, which were due Monday, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records.

For Senate campaigns filing on paper, it can take weeks, if not months, to get detailed information about who is bankrolling senators and Senate hopefuls.

The FEC pays to manually key in the information contained on paper reports before uploading it into its publicly accessible online databases.

Similar information is available online immediately for House candidates, members of the U.S. House of Representative, presidential candidates and political action committees once those groups e-file their reports.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., one of the senators who e-files his campaign finance reports, has again introduced legislation to require his colleagues to follow suit. Last month, he also unsuccessfully attempted to mandate the practice via an amendment to the budget. He says that e-filing would save taxpayers nearly $500,000 a year.

President Barack Obama has supported the idea in his own budget proposals. Congress must decide for itself whether to adopt e-filing for senators as it has for House members.

Lawmakers of varying ideological stripes joined Tester in voluntarily fast-tracking their first-quarter fundraising disclosures.

In addition to Tester, the first-quarter e-filers were:

• Max Baucus, D-Mont.
• Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
• Thad Cochran, R-Miss.
• John Cornyn, R-Texas
• Joe Donnelly, D-Ind.
• Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
• Al Franken, D-Minn.
• Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
• Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
• Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
• Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
• Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
• Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Tester's Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, S. 375, certainly has 31 co-sponsors across party lines.

I have always believed that if we are doing our job right at the Center for Public Integrity, then our investigations should anticipate the news. That was the case on Wednesday. The Center posted an important story early that morning about the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s failure to complete its investigations into chemical accidents in a timely manner. Further, we reported that a former member of the board believed the agency was being “grossly mismanaged.”

Later that same day, an explosion tore through a fertilizer plant north of Waco in Central Texas, killing more than a dozen people and injuring more than 150, authorities say. The horrific accident was similar to other deadly industrial accidents described in our piece — accidents requiring Chemical Safety Board investigations that have dragged on, in some cases for years. Sluggish and incomplete investigations are important because finished reports often contain recommendations that can save lives going forward. Delay has a human cost.

Each year there are some 200 serious industrial accidents like the fertilizer plant explosion that are deemed to be of “high consequence.” Yet the Chemical Safety Board — modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board — is able to investigate only a handful, and then often takes years more to issue a report.

To be fair, the Board says it is stretched thin with a budget of only $10.5 million. And as the number of such serious accidents rise, the Board’s budget has remained flat. Congress has been unwilling to come up with more resources, the Board says.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, it was 28 years ago that the fertilizer plant in Waco was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration  (OSHA). There were “serious” violations reported at that time. The truth is the powerful chemical industry as a whole is quietly in favor of a weak and ineffective regulatory regime.  

Today it is difficult — if not impossible — to track exactly how many chemical accidents occur in the U.S. Chemical plants are required to report accidental releases of many substances to the National Response Center, but this data, maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard for some reason, is, to put it bluntly, a mess.

In 2009, the Chemical Safety Board issued its intent to propose a rule that would require companies to report accidental chemical releases. The proposal received support from many organizations focused on chemical safety which have long advocated for a more complete reporting system that would help identify trends and prevent future accidents. However, industry groups, such as the American Chemistry Council, and major companies, such as Dow Chemical, pushed back, trying to narrow the scope of the rule or block it entirely. And so the rule appears to have stalled.

If plants are reporting releases whenever they occur, then a regulatory body, the press and the public could all more easily tell what plants were prone to trouble and might be in danger of exploding. Such information would be critical to know in advance, because smaller incidents are often precursors to larger disasters, like the one in Waco. Transparency and accountability in this area are fundamental to public safety.

Until Next Week,

Bill 

Like many, the Fertilizer Institute, a trade group, has extended its condolences to the people of West, Texas, where a blast at a fertilizer plant Wednesday evening killed at least a dozen and injured about 200.

The Washington-based institute, however, has lobbied against legislation that would require high-risk chemical facilities – including some of its members – to consider using safer substances and processes to lower the risk of catastrophic accidents and make such facilities less inviting to terrorists.

Senate records show that the institute has spent $7.4 million on lobbying since 2006, some of it in opposition to legislation like a 2009 bill that passed the House but never became law.

A spokeswoman for the institute did not respond to requests for comment Friday from the Center for Public Integrity. The organization says on its website that it supports existing rules enforced by the Department of Homeland Security and opposes any expansion of the rules “to mandate inherently safer technologies.”

In a 2011 letter to the chairman and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, the institute and nine other groups maintained that “America’s agricultural industry has limited resources available to address all security related matters and it is very important that those resources are spent wisely to coincide with the appropriate level of risk for each particular facility…”

The groups said they supported continuation of the Homeland Security Department’s Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program, begun in 2007, and “oppose any federal requirement to use inherently safer technology (IST)… If an IST requirement is put in place for the nation’s agricultural industry it could jeopardize the availability of lower-cost sources of fertilizers or certain agricultural pesticides used by farmers and ranchers.”

(An example of IST: Replacing poisonous chlorine gas at a water treatment plant with ultraviolet light).

CFATS sets broad security standards for chemical facilities and requires them to prepare “vulnerability assessments,” which are reviewed by federal regulators.

Environmentalists, worker advocates and others say the program is riddled with loopholes. It bars the Homeland Security Department, for example, from requiring any “particular security measure,” exempts thousands of facilities and doesn’t allow for unannounced inspections.

A September 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office raised questions about the department’s management of CFATS, pointing to an internal memo in 2011 that claimed the program suffered from “a lack of planning, poor internal controls, and a workforce whose skills were inadequate to fulfill the program’s mission…”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., has introduced legislation again this year to close the CFATS loopholes. Rick Hind, legislative director for Greenpeace, argues that the Environmental Protection Agency already has the power to do so.

The EPA should steer chemical companies “toward disaster prevention rather than risk management by giving facilities a requirement to reduce the consequences of a catastrophe like [the Texas explosion],” Hind said. “They would be free to choose how they reduced those consequences.”

In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the EPA drafted legislation along the lines of what Hind described. The Bush White House shot it down.

Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA’s administrator at the time, joined others last year in urging the agency to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to address shortcomings in CFATS, saying “millions of Americans [are] at risk.”

An EPA spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

It’s unclear whether West Fertilizer Co., the plant that blew up this week, is among the 4,458 facilities nationwide that the Homeland Security Department considers high-risk.

The company stored anhydrous ammonia, a toxic gas that becomes flammable under certain conditions. More than 10.5 billion pounds of the chemical is kept at 7,378 facilities nationwide, according to data compiled by The Right-to-Know Network, a project of the nonprofit Center for Effective Government.

The West plant also stored ammonium nitrate, which can explode spectacularly if combined with fuel and set aflame. The compound was used by domestic terrorists to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and all but wiped out Texas City, Texas, in a port accident in 1947.

Pentagon officials have been warning that budget cuts will provoke a “hollowing out” of warfighting capabilities in coming years, with tens of billions of dollars on the table under so-called “sequestration” cuts.

Somehow, however, there is still enough money to pay for the construction of some new sun rooms for military housing used by senior officers in Stuttgart, Germany, a country the U.S. military has begun to flee. There also is enough – amid persistent military threats by North Korea -- to pay for a new $10 million museum in South Korea lauding the U.S. Army’s years of work there. And there is also sufficient cash to finance millions of dollars worth of netting around an Army golf course at Camp Zama in Japan, helpfully listed as “safety countermeasure” netting.

The Senate Armed Services committee, in a new report, called these “questionable projects” in the military’s overseas military construction spending, which totals $10 billion a year. Three-quarters of that sum is disbursed in three countries with a large U.S. troop presence – Japan, Korea, and Germany. But the spending occurs without much oversight and in some cases has violated military regulations and Pentagon promises to Congress, according to the committee.

The sun rooms and museum shared a common feature, the Senate investigators learned. They were approved under an obscure rule that lets the military benefit from host country work undertaken in lieu of cash payments to the Pentagon for military facilities that are being relinquished. Here’s how it worked in the case of the sun rooms, which were constructed at the request of the Pentagon’s regional Africa Command:

Africom, as it is commonly known, is hosted in relatively cloudy Stuttgart by the Army’s European command because no African country wanted it on their soil. According to the report, the push for new sun rooms came from the Africom chief of staff at the time, who officials have described as Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass; he retired as the assistant Air Force deputy undersecretary for international affairs in Dec. 2011.

Snodgrass worked at the time under the now-retired Africom commander, Army Gen. William Ward, who was demoted last November after a Pentagon probe concluded he had misused military cars and planes for personal reasons.

Snodgrass complained that housing for senior officers was too small and sent blueprints to the folks responsible for logistics there, who approved the new construction, according to the report and a Pentagon official. The German government then did the work, which it valued at $200,000, instead of paying the Pentagon in cash for some of the U.S. military buildings being vacated as a quarter of the U.S. forces in Germany depart.

Senate investigators said the work was justified on false claims that the existing housing did not meet Pentagon standards. They said the former chief of staff had confirmed making the complaints but had denied requesting the additions, saying it lay outside his responsibility.

A lot of money is at stake in that drawdown from Germany, with $1.7 billion worth of U.S. assets no longer needed, according to the Senate committee’s report. But it complained that the Pentagon has been trading away the cash compensation it could get for this sort of dubious “in-kind” work, without telling Congress about it.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in South Korea. The movement of U.S. forces out of a garrison in Seoul to a military base 40 miles south, known as Camp Humphreys, has sparked the Pentagon to undertake the largest construction project in its history, according to the report. As a small part of that, ground is to be broken for the new museum next year, using South Korean work in lieu of cash payments for relinquished U.S. assets. The Senate report suggested South Korean funds could be spent instead on “more mission critical requirements.”

The golf course netting, which the report said cost $2.9 million, was financed by the Japanese government under an agreement meant to help defray the cost of the U.S. military’s contribution to Japanese security. But the Senate investigators questioned the U.S. military’s approval for that work, noting that erecting a fire station needed at another U.S. military base would have been a better choice.

“When the Pentagon and the entire federal government face enormous fiscal challenges, the questionable projects and lack of oversight identified in this review are simply unacceptable,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D‐Mich.), the committee chairman.

“We are aware of the report, and we take it very seriously,” said Air Force Maj. Robert Firman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington.  “The DOD strives to be a good steward of taxpayer resources and we look forward to discussing it with Congress in the near future.”

Last year, the Energy Department disclosed that guard forces at two key nuclear facilities had cheated on tests meant to assess their capability to respond to terrorist threats. One facility, located in Tennessee and known as Y-12, is the principal storage location for highly-enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads, and the other, located in Texas and known as Pantex, is the main storage site where the warheads themselves are assembled and taken apart.

Now it appears that the culture of fudging test results extends to the guard force protecting the department’s top officials in Washington. A new report by the department’s inspector general claims the small unit assigned to keep the Energy Secretary and his top deputies out of harms’ way scored well on tests of their response times and tactical skills because examiners gave them advance notice of exams and drilled them on the answers.

Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman called the 2011 and 2012 performance tests for the unit “compromised” and said that as a result the department does not know its capability for responding to emergencies.

His report calls the unit a “relatively small, core professional staff” with low morale that works with other security agents to protect top DOE officials when they are at headquarters or traveling. One section of the report indicates that the unit has slightly over a dozen members. The probe was evidently initiated after a series of complaints that it had been mismanaged.

A unnamed test evaluator in DOE’s troubled office of health, safety and security – which is responsible for overseeing guard forces at nuclear weapons-related site – falsely reported that the guards had passed sections of the tests they failed or did not take, the report said. “We could not determine the evaluator’s rationale” for supplying that misinformation, Friedman wrote. The evaluator said the agents “were not coached but were provided guidance.” As a result, they did not know evacuation plans, did not fully understand the security alarm system, and did not demonstrate knowledge of “cover and concealment” in DOE offices.

Glenn S. Padonsky, who directs the health and security office, said in an official response to the report that DOE is creating a new performance evaluation system that should be in place by June and that testing would occur twice yearly. “We acknowledge the issue with morale,”Padonsky said. “However, protection operations are not at risk.”

The terrorist bombing in Boston and the subsequent manhunt there provided tragic bookends to a horrific week also marred by a massive industrial explosion in Texas, a tornado outbreak in Oklahoma, flooding in Illinois and attempted ricin attacks in Washington, D.C.

All of that wasn't enough, however, to keep several prominent politicians, political parties and special interest groups from attending to other business: fundraising.

"Giant thorn in Boehner's side" is the title of one fundraising message Thursday from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to supporters, which warns them: "Tomorrow is our ad buy deadline in the South Carolina special election. Elizabeth Colbert Busch (yeah, Stephen’s sister!) has a real chance to become the first Democrat to represent this ruby-red district in 30 years."

But it continues, ominously: "Right now, Elizabeth is in danger of getting drowned out by misleading Republican attacks. We can’t let that happen — especially in a tough district like this. We need $200,000 by midnight tomorrow for our Democratic Rapid Response Fund to fight Republican attacks like these and set the record straight."

It followed a Wednesday morning e-mail in which DCCC Executive Director Kelly Ward writes on Colbert Busch's behalf: "Look, stand with us right now and chip in $3 or more today" before providing a hyperlink to a contribution form.

Sponsors of an upcoming fundraiser for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Thursday emailed potential attendees to "cordially invite" them to a Wednesday event on Capitol Hill hosted in part by lobbyists, such as Sam Geduldig and Dejan Pavlovic, and Charlie Spies, a political strategist who helped run the pro-Mitt Romney Restore Our Future super PAC.

The event, which requires a minimum $250 contribution, will benefit the Rubio Victory Committee, a joint fundraising committee that splits money raised between Rubio's campaign committee and leadership political action committee.

Ken Martin of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, meanwhile, wrote backers Thursday to promote congressional candidate Jim Graves — and beat up on Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. — while asking for cash.

"We know that early money can make all the difference in a close race like this," Martin writes. "So please, don’t wait. Now is the time to get involved. We must seize this chance to defeat Rep. Bachmann."

Today, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee didn't fundraise but informed supporters of the fruits of its fundraising: a $100,000 ad buy that will first "pressure Sen. Max Baucus this Sunday in seven papers across Montana" as part of holding "the four Democratic senators who voted against background checks this week accountable."

President Barack Obama's lobbying nonprofit, Organizing for Action, also expressed agitation over the Senate's gun vote Wednesday in a message to supporters.

"The special interests have been at this longer, and they can do a real good job at scaring people by distorting the facts — they think we'll go away quietly," Executive Director Jon Carson writes. "But there are so many more of us than there are of them. And as long as you don't give up, we're going to keep fighting, and someday soon, we will win."

The email steers clear of fundraising through most of the message, but includes a quick pitch after Carson's signature.

"Let's keep fighting for change," it reads. "Chip in $5 or more to support Organizing for Action today."

As gun control debates raged in Congress early this year, the National Rifle Association increased its federal government lobbying expenditures to record levels, new filings with the U.S. Senate indicates.

The NRA and affiliated National Rifle Association of America Institute for Legislative Action together spent at least $800,000 lobbying the federal government during the year's first quarter — more money than they've together spent during the same time period from any past year, according to federal records available Saturday afternoon.

Such aggressive advocacy preceded a major legislative victory Wednesday for gun advocates, as the U.S. Senate defeated a proposal to expand gun background checks.

And it came as gun control advocates  — from President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the families of children killed last year in Newtown, Conn. — pressuredlawmakers to pass laws restricting firearm purchases and useage.

The NRA groups' first-quarter lobbying expenditures have ben steadily increasing in recent years, but never cracked the $700,000 mark.

During the first three months of 2012, they spent $695,000. That follows $675,000 in 2011 and $615,000 in 2010.

This year, the NRA's lobbying efforts were exclusively directed at the House and Senate, according to federal disclosures, and it lobbied on numerous U.S. House and U.S. Senate bills proposed by federal legislators.

Among them:

• H.R. 751, the Protect America's Schools Act of 2013
• H.R. 274, the Mental Health First Act of 2013
• H.R. 329, the Strengthening Background Checks Act of 2013
• H.R. 575, the the Second Amendment Protection Act of 2013
• S. 54, the Stop Illegal Trafficking in Firearms Act of 2013
• S. 374, the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2013
• S. 146, the School and Campus Safety Enhancements Act of 2013
• S. 174, the Ammunition Background Check Act of 2013
• S. 480, the NICS Reporting Improvement Act of 2013
• H.R. 138 and S. 33, the Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
• H.R. 142 and S. 35, the Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
• H.R. 437 and S. 150, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013

The NRA itself spent $700,000 lobbying the federal government during the year's first quarter, federal records show. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's chief executive, was among 12 in-house NRA officials to lobby during the year's first three months.

Several contract lobbying firms, including Crossroads Strategies, Prime Policy Group, FTI Government Affairs and Shockey Scofield Solutions, combined to spend at least another $100,000 lobbying on behalf of the NRA or National Rifle Association of America Institute for Legislative Action from January through March.

Companies, unions and special interest groups that lobby the federal government have until the end of today to submit mandatory first quarter lobbying disclosure reports to Congress.

The NRA and affiliate spent nearly $3 million on federal-level lobbying in 2012 — more than it has during any previous year, according to data maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics.

But NRA spending during this year's first quarter puts it on pace to exceed that mark.

Corporations, unions and special interest groups fueled President Barack Obama's second inauguration ceremonies with more than $18 million — money the commander in chief generally rejected during his first inaugural.

The total represents more than 40 percent of the nearly $44.6 million the Presidential Inaugural Committee 2013 collected, according to a disclosure document filed Saturday night with the Federal Election Commission.

Many of the companies and unions that donated to the president's 2013 inauguration rank among the most powerfulgovernment lobbying forces in the nation, collectively spending hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to influence federal policy since Obama first took office.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee 2013's seven-figure donors include some of the nation's most notable corporate names, the FEC filing reveals.

Among them are telecommunications giant AT&T ($4.6 million), software maker Microsoft ($2.1 million), aviation and defense firm Boeing ($1 million) and oil company Chevron ($1 million).

Those that gave $250,000 to $750,000 include:

• Biotech company Genentech ($750,000)
• United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices ($500,000)
• Accounting firm Deloitte ($500,000)
• Event and trade show company Hargrove ($500,000)
• FedEx ($500,000)
• Coca-Cola ($430,000)
• Bank of America ($300,000)
• Xerox Corp. ($250,000)
• ExxonMobil ($250,000)
• Financial Innovations ($250,000)
• Hisvision Inc. ($250,000)
• PSP Capital Partners ($250,000)
• International Association Of Fire Fighters ($250,000)
• International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers ($250,000)
• International Brotherhood of Teamsters ($250,000)
• National Education Association ($250,000)

Among the several dozen other such entities making five- or six-figure contributions were the American Federation of Government Employees, American Hospital Association, American Postal Workers Union, Centene Management Corp., Comcast Corp., Credit Union National Association, Edison Electric Institute and the Forest County Potawatomi Community.

Also: Laborers International Union of North America, Northrop Grumman, Pepco, Service Employees International Union, Southern Co., United States Steel Corp., United Therapeutics, Visa and Verizon Communications Inc.

Several dozen individuals also gave $50,000 or more, the inaugural committee's filing indicates.

The 2013 inaugural committee turned away donations from federally registered lobbyists, political action committees, foreign governments, political parties, registered foreign agents or anyone under the age of 16, as it did four years before.

But Obama’s 2009 inaugural committee had banned corporate contributions altogether and limited individual donations to $50,000.

Obama — long a critic of the influence of lobbyists and big money's influence on politics — this year instituted no such prohibition for corporations, special interests or labor unions that together employ hundreds of lobbyists to influence government policy and legislation. Individuals could also give any amount.

Several political advocacy groups or their affiliates indeed made contributions, according to records.

The inaugural committee reported a $10,000 contribution from the Miami headquarters of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm whose Washington, D.C., office provides government lobbying services for dozens of clients and once employed Jack Abramoff, the fallen lobbyist who served more than three years in federal prison.

Lobbying firm Capitol Council, which also represents dozens of clients, gave $12,500.

Virginia-based Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm run by several prominent Democratic and Republican political operatives, contributed $15,000.

The Democratic Governors Association gave $55,000. And Priorities USA, the lower-profile nonprofit sister organization of pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action, also chipped in $10,000.

The inaugural committee also reported refunding more than $1 million in contributions — including $150,000 from the Machinist Nonpartisan Political League Multicandidate Committee and $10,000 from the Asbestos Workers Political Action Committee. This means it took in a net of about $43.2 million.

About 16,000 itemized donations are listed in the inaugural committee's disclosure. Almost $4.6 million worth of the inaugural committee's smal-dollar contributions (those $200 or less) were unitemized.

An inaugural committee representative couldn't immediately be reached for comment late Saturday.

Last January, the committee said in a statement that “the inaugural is a civic event and our guidelines aren’t just consistent with the law — they are consistent with the president’s commitment to transparency and to reducing the influence of PACs and lobbyists in Washington.”

Obama's ceremonial inauguration took place Jan. 21 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol before hundreds of thousands of onlookers.

As is tradition, a parade and series of presidential balls followed the ceremonial swearing-in ceremony. (Obama actually began his second term the day before.)

Obama's new nonprofit lobbying group, Organizing for Action, initially planned to accept corporate donations but ultimately decided against doing so. It does accept unlimited contributions from most individuals and unions, and much of the initial money it's raised has come from a few wealthy donors.

Today marks the 43^rd anniversary of Earth Day, an invention of Gaylord Nelson — then a senator from Wisconsin — that triggered the environmental movement.

Back in 1970, as the Earth Day Network notes, “Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity.”

Today, as officials with the Environmental Protection Agency are quick to point out, things are better. An EPA study predicts, for instance, that 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act will prevent some 230,000 premature deaths by 2020. In a speech last year, then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the Clean Water Act “has kept tens of billions of pounds of sewage, chemicals and trash out of our waterways.”

Big problems remain, however. The EPA has become a lightning rod for forces hostile to regulation. The 37-year-old law under which it regulates toxic chemicals is widely acknowledged to be ineffective, yet attempts at reform have failed. Emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases in 2011 — while down 7 percent from 2005 – reached the equivalent of 6,702 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The Center for Public Integrity’s environment team will continue to highlight these and other issues, as it has in projects such as “Toxic Clout” and “Poisoned Places,” links to which can be found below.

When you’re shopping for health insurance, wouldn’t it be great if you could find out every insurer’s claim denial rate? And how much each one spent on lobbying and advertising — and how much they paid their CEO?

You can now find all of that information and more if you live in Vermont, thanks to a law that was enacted last year at the urging of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.

In compliance with that law, the insurers that do business in Vermont have just disclosed data they’ve been able to keep secret for years. And that information should come in handy when Vermonters begin shopping for coverage at the state’s online health insurance exchange in October.

With just 626,000 residents, Vermont is the second smallest state in terms of population (only Wyoming has fewer people), and it has only three major health insurers — Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, MVP Health Care and Cigna, the company I used to work for.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont is by far the biggest and the only one based in the Green Mountain State. MVP is headquartered in New York, and Cigna, the for-profit company among the three, is based in Connecticut. 

Which of the trio do you think denied the most claims on a percentage basis in 2012?

If you guessed the for-profit company, as I did, you would be right. But even I was shocked to see how Cigna compared with its competitors, especially Blue Cross.

Of all the claims submitted to it last year by health care providers and policyholders, Blue Cross denied 7.6 percent. Cigna denied 21 percent. MVP was in the middle at 15.5 percent.

Since Vermont is a pretty small state,  chances are pretty high that all three companies have the same doctors and hospitals in their provider networks. One would have to wonder why Cigna felt it necessary to deny more than one of every five claims submitted by those doctors and hospitals while Blue Cross denied only one of every 13. 

Most of the claims denied by all three companies were categorized as “administrative,” meaning they were denied because a provider presumably used an incorrect procedure code or made some other clerical error when submitting their claims for payment. It defies reason to think that the doctors and hospitals in Vermont submitted inaccurate claims to Cigna at almost three times the rate they did to Blue Cross.

One of the things you need to know about the private health insurance business is that insurers make a lot of money when they delay paying a claim. I would be willing to bet that many — if not most — of the claims the Vermont insurers denied were eventually paid. When an insurance company delays paying a claim by days, weeks or months, it can take advantage of “float.”

The longer you can delay paying a claim, the more investment income you can make on the premiums you take in from your policyholders. And investment income is especially important to for-profit insurance companies because it contributes significantly to the bottom line.  Shareholders and Wall Street financial analysts like that, even though much of the money on which the investment gains were made should have been paid to health care providers.

The data reported by the insurers is consistent with recent claim denial rates in California. A California Nurses Association analysis of 2010 data submitted by insurers to the California Department of Managed Care showed that Cigna’s claim denial rate was 39.6 percent. Aetna’s denial rate, by contrast, was 5.9 percent. 

The Vermont disclosures showed that Blue Cross and MVP spent far more money lobbying state officials last year — $258,347 and $55,366, respectively, than Cigna, which spent only $9,141. But Cigna spent much more lobbying federal officials: $1.59 million. MVP spent $160,000 lobbying in Washington. Blue Cross of Vermont spent nothing, although the Chicago-based Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents all of the country’s Blues plans, spends a lot on lobbying every year, as does America’s Health Insurance Plans, of which Cigna and MVP are members.

Cigna, a much bigger company than the other two, reported paying its CEO $3,970,833 in total compensation last year, compared to $1,250,000 for the CEO at MVP and $587,184 at Blue Cross. And Cigna was especially generous in paying its nine board members: $3,199,855. Board members at Blue Cross earned a combined $246,632. MVP did not pay its board members anything.

The one area in which Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont spent much more than the others was advertising and PR. The company spent $743,968 for marketing last year in Vermont, compared to $516,358 for MVP and $66,849 for Cigna.

Cigna notified the state earlier this year that it would not seek to sell policies to individuals and small businesses on Vermont’s exchange, leaving that part of the marketplace to Blue Cross and MVP.  But Cigna will still have at least one big client in Vermont — the state of Vermont. Cigna has had a contract for several years with the state to provide coverage to state employees. If I were one of them, I would ask for an explanation of those high claim denial rates.

Michael David Dunn didn’t like the volume of music coming from the SUV parked next to him at a Jacksonville gas station. So he yelled over the bass vibrating from a boxed speaker in the back of a red Dodge Durango and told the men inside to quiet down.

“Kill him,” one of the Durango’s passengers responded, according to Dunn’s account. Dunn, who is white, said one of the young black men in the SUV reached down for a shotgun. Dunn pulled out a 9-millimeter Taurus handgun from his glove box. He fired eight or nine times.

The bullets sliced through the rear passenger door, striking 17-year-old Jordan Davis in the chest and legs. A high school senior with plans to go into the military, Davis died before arriving at the hospital.

While it’s unclear whether Dunn was the aggressor or defending himself with his handgun, shootings like this one on Nov. 23, 2012, now are common in Florida.

Murders by firearms have increased dramatically in the state since 2000, when there were 499 gun murders, according to data from Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Gun murders have since climbed 38 percent — with 691 murders committed with guns in 2011.

Only partial numbers are available for 2012, but from January to June, there were 479 murders in Florida — 358 of them committed with a gun. That’s an 8 percent increase in gun murders compared to the same period in 2011.

Guns are now the weapons of choice in 75 percent of all homicides in Florida. That’s up from 56 percent in 2000.

The rise in gun homicides in Florida comes at a time when the overall murder rate has declined in Florida, and violent crime has dropped statewide.

It also comes at a time when gun control is at the forefront of national debate. Proposals before Congress died last week in a tight Senate vote, but surveys show a majority of Americans favor tougher firearms regulations. Supporters say stricter background checks that were rejected by Congress could lessen the number of gun murders.

In Florida, shootings have received a greater attention ever since George Zimmerman cited the state’s “stand your ground” law in the February 2012 shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Those on both sides of the gun control debate say the killing emboldened gun owners to carry firearms, and that the increase in guns may have led to the rise in gun murders.

Experts Divided

There’s no clear answer as to why gun murders have increased so dramatically. But one fact is hard to ignore: Floridians own more guns than they did a decade ago, when the gun murder rate was significantly lower.

Concealed carry permits and the state’s so-called “stand your ground” law also have emboldened more people to carry firearms, leading to more opportunities for gun murders.

Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at Florida State University and an expert on guns, said the number of people applying for background checks to buy firearms has increased significantly since 2004. Last year, the state processed about 800,000 background checks. And after the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn., Florida saw a run on gun sales. In the first three months of this year, the state processed 294,185 background checks, nearly as many as in all of 2004.

Most of those who apply for gun background checks in Florida — 98.5 percent in 2010 — are approved. That’s in part because of problems with record keeping. Florida lags behind other states in submitting records on mental illnesses to a federal database used in gun background checks, according to a report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. And unlike other states, Florida does not revisit approved background checks if later those gun owners are disqualified from ownership due to findings such as mental illness and felony convictions.

The number of background checks accounts for only a portion of all gun owners. Many more bought firearms from private sellers and at gun shows, and there is no federal background check or reporting requirement on those sales. Florida, which lagged behind the national average in gun ownership a decade ago, is now in line with that national average, which a recent Gallup Poll put it at 47 percent.

“Since President Obama took office, people expected him to get tougher on guns,” Kleck says. “Even though that hasn’t happened yet, a run on gun sales occurred.”

A police shooting in Orlando highlighted Florida’s gun show market. Angry over a car accident, David Alyn Penney is accused of unloading 30-round clips from two assault weapons at a home on Alabama Avenue in St. Cloud on Nov. 21, 2011. When cops arrived, Penney allegedly turned the guns on the officers, shooting one in the foot and injuring a rookie cop with shattered glass.

Nobody died in the exchange, but investigators later learned that Penney bought the assault rifles at a gun show shortly after his 18th birthday. Prosecutors have cut a deal with Penney in which he will plead no contest in exchange for serving eight years in prison; a judge has yet to sign off on the agreement. Prosecutors indicated in court that Penney’s mental health is the reason for the short sentence — a mental health history that might have been discovered if a background check had been required before he bought the assault weapons.

Murder Rates

Gun advocates, however, challenge the anecdotal evidence that comes from cases like Penney’s and believe that an increase in guns doesn’t necessarily lead to an increase in gun-related crimes. Dave Wood, president of the West Palm Beach-based Second Amendment Coalition, said sales at gun shows and shops have “gone gangbusters” in recent years. But according to Wood, those guns don’t land in the hands of murderers.

“It’s unlikely that law-abiding citizens have contributed to this increase” in gun murders, Wood said. “The people who are buying guns after Obama are not the ones committing the murders.”

Ladd Everitt, communications director for the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, disagrees. He said it’s no coincidence that gun murders rose at a time when gun ownership increased in Florida. In addition, Everitt said high-profile “stand your ground” cases have given gun owners greater confidence to settle disputes with firearms.

“The point of the shoot-first law was to embolden people to carry guns out in public,” Everitt said. “This creates more chances for shootings, and Floridians probably feel much more emboldened to take those shots because they know there’s a law that might protect them.”

But according to John R. Lott, the author of several books on gun ownership, including The Bias Against Guns, it’s deceptive to focus on the increase in gun murders in Florida when the murder rate overall has gone down. Since 2000, the murder rate — or the number of homicides per 100,000 people — has decreased from 5.6 to 5.2. That’s the second-lowest murder rate recorded since the state began keeping statistics in 1971.

“The main thing that concerns people is the murder rate overall,” Lott said from his home in Virginia. “People want to see it go down, and if it has, whether guns were involved is unimportant.”

One possible cause for the increase in gun murders could be that the dramatic rise in gun ownership in Florida made them more available during domestic violence incidences, said Sarah Trumble, policy counsel at Third Way, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for gun control. The presence of guns in a home during domestic violence increases the homicide chance for women by 500 percent, according to a 2003 study of domestic violence incidences in 11 cities.

Background checks conducted at gun shops prevent people with restraining orders against them to purchase firearms, but such buyers can still make purchases at gun shows and from private sellers. “It’s one reason that background checks for all guns is important, and it shows the effectiveness of the background check,” Trumble said. Domestic violence is one reason “we need background checks for all gun purchases so desperately,” she said.

‘A Shield for Gun Owners’

After Dunn shot and killed the 17-year-old at a Jacksonville gas station, police did not find the shotgun that the shooter alleged was pointed at him. No one else at the scene of the shooting reported seeing a gun in the Durango. Prosecutors initially charged Dunn with second-degree murder, but a grand jury in December upgraded the charge to first-degree murder, an unusual move. Dunn has remained in jail since without bail.

Dunn’s attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment. But John M. Phillips, a lawyer representing the family of the slain teenager, said the case highlights the dangers of “stand your ground” laws and concealed carry permits.

“With this law, it’s really not defending yourself anymore as much as it is exerting your power,” Phillips said. “A situation that used to be handled by reason is now handled by gunfire.”

The teen’s father, Ron Davis, is now an opponent of the “stand your ground” law and gun ownership. He has held prayer vigils and is planning a trip to Washington, D.C., to lobby for tougher gun laws.

“Not only are there more guns out there, but there are these laws that are like a shield for gun owners,” Davis said. “More people take ‘shoot first’ as a way to solve arguments, and these ‘stand your ground’ laws allow them to do that.”

After the shooting, Dunn and his fiancé drove to a hotel where they were staying for the night. He said he didn’t know anybody had been hurt until he saw a press conference on TV. Dunn was arrested the next day, 170 miles away at his home in Satellite Beach.

His trial hasn’t been scheduled, but if jurors believe he was threatened, Dunn could be acquitted under Florida’s “stand your ground” law. If they believe he was the aggressor, Dunn will have added one more homicide to Florida’s growing number of gun murders.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization supported by foundations and individual contributions. For more information, visit fcir.org.

Eight retiring U.S. senators are collectively sitting on $10.5 million in campaign funds, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of campaign finance records filed last week.

And while federal law prohibits lawmakers from using campaign funds for personal use, they have a variety of options for leftover campaign cash.

The man with the most money still in the bank is Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., whothe Washington Post today reported will retire at the end of his sixth term in January 2015. The chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee still has nearly $5 million in his campaign account.

At the other end of the financial spectrum are Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who each had less than $200,000 in cash on hand through March, records indicate.

To date, six Democrats and two Republicans have announced plans to retire at the end of the 113th Congress.

With the exception of Baucus, most posted tepid fundraising numbers during the first quarter of 2013. Baucus raised nearly $1.6 million during the first three months of the year, records indicate.

The senators may give their surplus money away to other candidates, subject to the normal contribution limits, or transferred to a state or national party committee, which have no limits.

Politicans may also donate money to charity — including their own charities — as former Republican Reps. Ron Paul and Allen West have recentlydone.

Additionally, they may also use funds for "winding down" costs or other official campaign- or office-related expenses. Or the money may just be kept in the bank for future use, so long as the committee continues to file regular reports with the government.

Representatives for the retiring senators were largely mum about the lawmakers' designs for leftover funds.

Nick Simpson, a spokesman for Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., said the senator's campaign account "will be used to pay for any non-official expenses" during his remaining 20 months in office.

Bronwyn Lance Chester, a spokeswoman for Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., told the Center for Public Integrity that Chambliss "hasn't decided yet."

That sentiment was echoed by Levin spokeswoman Tara Andringa.

"Sen. Levin hasn’t decided what to do with any campaign funds that might be left when he finishes this term," Andringa said. "You can look at his 4/15 FEC report to see the recent choices he has made."

During the year's first three months, Levin reported about $14,200 in operating expenditures, including $3,000 for "website consulting" fees and about $580 to the Internal Revenue Service for federal income taxes.

Levin also reported refunding a $10,000 contribution to the political action committee of the International Union of Operating Engineers and doling out $20,000 to fellow Democratic senators who will be facing re-election in 2014, including Sens. Mark Begich, D-Alaska; Kay Hagan, D-N.C.; Mary Landrieu, D-La.; and Mark Pryor, D-Ark.

The Center for Public Integrity won three 1^st Place honors in the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Awards, the Society of Professional Journalists announced Tuesday, with journalists recognized for investigations into a mysterious kidney disease, the shadowy trade in human body parts, and threats to blue collar workers.

The projects were among winners in an SPJ contest drawing nearly 1,700 submissions. This is the second straight year the Center has won three top honors for public service, investigative and non-deadline reporting.

The winning projects:

• Mystery in the Fields, by writer Sasha Chavkin, photojournalist Anna Barry-Jester and editor Ronnie Greene, won  Public Service in Online Journalism. The series explored how a rare kidney disease is afflicting laborers across continents – and how governments, including the U.S., have been slow to raise alarms.
• Skin & Bone, produced by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center, won for Investigative Reporting Online. The series revealed how the business of recycling dead humans into medical implants has flourished.
• Hard Labor, by Jim Morris, Chris Hamby and Ronnie Greene, won the top prize for Non-deadline Reporting Online. The reports exposed the workplace and environmental perils U.S. workers encounter in the face of regulatory breakdowns.