What do the woman who founded the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, the co-chairmen of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the U.S. Senate’s lone self-described “democratic socialist” have in common?

They all rank among the top beneficiaries of small-dollar political donors, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal records.

It’s firm evidence that neither Democrats nor Republicans in Congress have a monopoly on small-dollar givers, who often serve as barometers for a candidate’s grassroots support.

And the correlation between politicians with fervent beliefs and small-dollar givers lies at the heart of an ongoing debate about the role and significance of modest contributions from the masses in a political age often dominated by sizable contributions from a wealthy few.

Do passionate defenders of ideological views attract small-dollar donors? Do small-dollar givers push politicians to the partisan extremes? And are small-dollar donors ideologically dissimilar from the average voter or their large-dollar counterparts?

During the 2012 election cycle, Tea Party Caucus founder Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., collected both more cash and a larger portion of her congressional campaign war chest from small-dollar contributions than any other incumbent politician at the federal level, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis.

Donations of $200 or less, the threshold at which the Federal Election Commission requires itemization in campaign finance reports, amounted to more than $9.5 million — or 62 percent of the $15 million Bachmann raised for her 2012 re-election efforts.

This morning, Bachmann — who was facing multiplecampaign financeinvestigations and a tough re-election bid — announced that she would not seek a fifth term in Congress.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a left-leaning independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, collected nearly $3.7 million — or 59 percent of his total $6.3 million — from such small-dollar giving. That was enough to rank the self-described socialist as second among incumbents, in terms of percentage of receipts from modest donors.

Attribute this success to the senator’s “career standing up to the most powerful special interests in the country and vigorously representing the needs of the elderly, the children, the sick and low-income Americans,” said Ben Eisenberg, the finance director of Sanders’ campaign.

“People in Vermont and across the country appreciate Bernie’s efforts,” Eisenberg added.

Former Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., another darling of tea party activists, ranked third. Ahead of his narrow defeat by Democrat Patrick Murphy in November, West collected $9.3 million in contributions of $200 or less — nearly half of the $19 million he raised.

Representatives for Bachmann and West did not respond to requests for comment.

Tapping the grassroots

Among non-incumbents who raised at least six figures, Republican congressional challengers John Dennis of California, Anna Little of New Jersey, Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher of Ohio, Karen Harrington of Florida and Chris Fields of Minnesota placed as the top five beneficiaries — percentage-wise — of small-dollar support, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis.

Each reported raising at least half of their funds as coming from contributions of $200 or less.

Money from grassroots supporters doesn’t always translate into electoral success. Incumbency still remains a most powerful force.

Dennis, for instance, raised 84 percent of his campaign cash from low-dollar gifts and received just 15 percent of the vote in his longshot bid to unseat Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

All the while, Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Reps. Carolyn McCarthy of New York, Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Keith Ellison of Minnesota, also ranked highly among incumbents who raised a lofty portion of their campaign war chest from small-dollar contributions.

And Florida Democrat Alan Grayson pulled in $2.5 million from small-dollar gifts — more than any other House candidate — ahead of his victory last November. That sum accounted for roughly 47 percent of the $5.4 million he raised overall in the race.

Grijalva and Ellison are the co-chairmen of the Progressive Caucus.

In a telephone interview, Grijalva told the Center that “grassroots” donors help “shift the balance of power.”

“The lady that sends me 10 bucks out of her Social Security check for six months is at the table when I’m making a decision as much as a captain of industry is sitting at the table trying to affect the decision,” he said. “It equalizes things.”

Peggy May, McCarthy’s campaign treasurer, noted that the New York congresswoman “wants to foster an environment in which everyone can get involved and make a difference, no matter how small.”

McCarthy, whose husband was killed in a 1993 mass shooting on the Long Island Railroad, “is a singular figure in Congress when it comes to fighting to reduce gun violence,” May said. “She fights for this issue even when it's not in the headlines and her supporters recognize that.”

Overall, the median portion of campaign funds raised by an incumbent House member during the 2012 election cycle from small-dollar gifts was about 4 percent, and the median portion raised by an incumbent senator was about 11 percent.

Celebrity breeds small-donor success

Recently, Washington Post policy wonk blogger Ezra Klein argued that “small money is polarizing.”

“Small money will turn on you if you dare cut a deal with the other side,” Klein wrote. “Small money attacks the bipartisanship that, for better and worse, is required for the system to function.”

Michael Malbin, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, and Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, disagree.

When you raise political money, Ornstein told the Center for Public Integrity, you “naturally” attract support first from partisans. But you can change the system to expand the donor base “beyond those who are the most intense.”

Added Malbin: “Small-donor fundraising presumes that you will be known by a large enough number of people to get a decent response.”

Politicians typically achieve small-donor fundraising success because they have “gotten some celebrity either because they are leaders or because of statements they’ve made,” Malbin continued.

Both Malbin and Ornstein contend that small-dollar donors are a counterweight against corruption.

Ornstein says that under the current system, where most politicians chase large-dollar contributions, the potential for corruption is two-fold: Lawmakers can “shakedown” donors, and donors can make “explicit threats” to members of Congress.

Small-dollar donors, Ornstein said, “just don’t provide those kinds of problems.”

Chevron Corp. shareholders today rejected a resolution seeking to prohibit the company from using corporate funds for political activities.

Last year, the oil company was one of the largest corporate super PAC donors, as the Center for Public Integrity has previously reported.

Leslie Samuelrich, senior vice president at the financial advisory firm Green Century Capital Management — the firm was the lead filer of the shareholder resolution — said the measure garnered at least 3 percent of the not-yet-official vote.

But she spun this seemingly miniscule support as good news.

"We're thrilled," Samuelrich told the Center for Public Integrity. "It is the beginning of a turning of the tide."

Just weeks out from Election Day, Chevron donated $2.5 million to the Republican-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC led by former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and associated with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Ahead of Chevron's annual meeting in California, the company's board urged shareholders to reject the measure.

"Chevron’s participation in the political process is an important means of protecting the interests of the Company and its stockholders," the company wrote in its 2013 proxy statement.

"A fixed policy barring the company from participating in the political process would undermine the board’s flexibility to exercise its business judgment in a manner that it reasonably believes is in Chevron’s best interests," the board members argued.

The board also noted that Chevron voluntarily discloses on its website information about its donations to political committees and trade associations, such as the $1 million it contributed in 2012 to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Samuelrich told the Center for Public Integrity that the motion's supporters gained enough traction to refile the resolution again next fall, should they so choose.

"We're looking at all our options," she noted. "We're not satisfied with the progress Chevron has made on this front."

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations were free to use general treasury funds to call for the election or defeat of federal candidates. Corporations may now also donate unlimited amounts of money to super PACs and politically active nonprofit organizations that may, in turn, advocate for or against politicians.

Tobacco giant Reynolds American Inc. last year helped fund several of the nation’s most politically active — and secretive — nonprofit organizations, according to a company document reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

Reynolds American’s contributions include $175,000 to Americans for Tax Reform, a nonprofit led by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and $50,000 to Americans for Prosperity, a free-market advocacy outfit heavily backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

The tobacco company’s donations are just a fraction of the nearly $50 million that those two groups reported spending on political advocacy ads during the 2012 election cycle, almost exclusively on negative advertising. Federal records show that Americans for Prosperity alone sponsored more than $33 million in attack ads that directly targeted President Barack Obama.

But the money, which Reynolds American says it disclosed in a corporate governance document at the behest of an unnamed shareholder, provides rare insight into how some of the most powerful politically active 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits are bankrolled.

Reynolds American is the parent company of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which makes Camel and Winston brand cigarettes.

“The shareholder specifically requested that we disclose information about 501(c)(4)s, and in the interests of greater transparency, we agreed,” Reynolds American spokeswoman Jane Seccombe said.

Large corporations — tobacco companies or otherwise — almost never release information about their giving to such groups, and it’s most unusual for the groups themselves to voluntarily disclose who donates to them.

These groups, which obtain their nonprofit status because they say their “primary purpose” is not political activity, are generally under no legal obligation to detail their funding sources. Super PACs and other recognized political committees, by contrast, must report the names of their contributors who give more than $200 and the amounts they give.

Yet during the 2012 election cycle, various social welfare nonprofit organizations, emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissiondecision in January 2010, spent more than $250 million to promote or attack federal political candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The source of most of that money remains a mystery.

Reynolds American’s other contributions last year to 501(c)(4) groups include $100,000 to the Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an organization run by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce that spent several million dollars in a failed 2012 ballot initiative campaign to uphold a law limiting public workers’ collective bargaining rights. It also gave $12,500 to the National Taxpayers Union, a 501(c)(4) group that backed Republican candidates last year with modest expenditures.

Ohio Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Linda Woggon told the Center for Public Integrity she wasn’t aware that Reynolds American planned to disclose its donation to Partnership for Ohio’s Future.

But Woggon said she did not have a problem with officials there doing so, adding that “the decision is up to the company.”

Americans for Prosperity, which in 2011 reported to the IRS it received more than $25.4 million in contributions and grants, “leaves it up to our supporters” to decide whether to reveal their donations,” spokesman Levi Russell said.

“It’s their right, and we respect it,” he said.

Officials at Americans for Tax Reform, which in 2011 reported to the IRS that it received nearly $4 million in contributions and grants, did not reply to several requests for comment.

Within the tobacco industry, Reynolds American competitor Lorillard, which manufactures Newport brand cigarettes, has no nonprofit donation disclosure policy in place.

Ronald Whitford, the company’s associate general counsel, said Lorillard “could look at possibly enhancing disclosure in the future.”

Altria, the world’s largest tobacco company, does make contributions to politically active nonprofit organizations, spokesman Bill Phelps said — but he would not name any beneficiaries.

Altria’s corporate policy only requires it disclose its contributions to 501(c)(4) nonprofits in narrow circumstances, none of which applied to its 2012 donations, Phelps said.

For example, Altria, which makes Marlboros, the top-selling cigarettes, would publicly disclose a contribution if a nonprofit used at least $50,000 specifically for “political activities” as defined by the Internal Revenue Service — but only if the nonprofit informed Altria of this fact.

The IRS considers political activity to be the “participation in, or intervention in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

Therefore, by its own rules, Altria would not disclose contributions that a 501(c)(4) used to fund so-called “issue advertisements” that are sometimes barely distinguishable from ads that directly advocate for or against a politician.

Politically active nonprofit groups such as Americans for Prosperity and Crossroads GPS, which was co-founded by GOP strategist Karl Rove, together spent millions of dollars on these kinds of communications last year.

Reynolds American’s written corporate policy on nonprofit donation disclosure is similar to that of Altria. But the policy “represents the minimum disclosure threshold,” said Seccombe, the company spokeswoman.

Reynolds American specifically acknowledged its donation to Americans for Tax Reform“because of expected stakeholder interest, not because the contributions were intended to be used or were in fact used for ‘political activity’ as that term is meant for purposes of the Internal Revenue Code,” Seccombe added.

She declined to speculate on which 501(c)(4) organizations Reynolds American will donate to this year. But officials will release information on its 2013 donations early next year, she said.

The company’s actions, although limited and hardly in real time, “set a precedent” and are “to be commended,” said Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which tracks and advocates for political transparency by corporations.

 “We just haven’t seen this with other companies related to their giving to (c)(4)’s,” Freed said. 

Shortly after 11 a.m. local time, a U.S. ballistic missile target loaded with a mock nuclear warhead blasted off from Narrow Cape, a low-lying coastal area of Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A network of radars from Alaska to California tracked the target, watching for the release of metal chaff, Mylar or aluminum balloons or other objects like those that North Korean missiles might use to fool U.S. defenses.

This simulated attack on the United States on Dec. 5, 2008 was the first time massive sea- and ground-based defenses would try to penetrate the decoys or countermeasures that might be used to hide a warhead in the near-vacuum of space . As the Pentagon had wanted, a rocket interceptor launched from a silo at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base destroyed the warhead and the radar network performed well, prompting officials to declare the test a success in a press release the same day.

But the real test of U.S. defenses against the countermeasures that North Korean missiles might eventually carry – the primary objective of that exercise, which was estimated to cost taxpayers between $200 million and $300 million – never happened. The target malfunctioned and failed to release them.

For years, the public’s focus on the nation’s nearly $10 billion-a-year missile defense program has been on whether American interceptors can hit incoming ballistic missiles and protect the country and its allies, a feat often likened to hitting a speeding bullet with a bullet. More than $90 billion has been spent since 2002 to develop the means to target incoming threats and intercept them, but without much demonstrated success.

Less attention has been paid to the targets used in U.S. missile defense testing, which have failed or malfunctioned at an alarming rate since the 2002 inception of the Missile Defense Agency, which oversees all the development, procurement and testing programs. In the last five years, target problems occurred in two of the last three intercept tests of ground-based interceptors – such as those already deployed to Alaska and California – and in two of the last seven  tests of the Army’s mobile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors.

An investigation by the independent Government Accountability Office in 2008 found that 7 percent of the targets launched from 2002-2005 also had problems, a rate that more than doubled to 16 percent from 2006-2007.

Target problems have driven up costs, with GAO estimating the cost of the most recent ground-based interceptor tests at $230 million apiece. In total, the Pentagon is now spending roughly a half-billion dollars a year on targets, and another half-billion a year on testing.

And they have caused significant disruptions to testing schedules, often pushing back critical intercept tests by a year or more. The December 2008 test to see if missile defenses could distinguish between decoys and a warhead has yet to be repeated, undermining claims by both military and elected officials that U.S. missile defenses are capable and effective in protecting the homeland or U.S. troops overseas from a future missile attack by North Korea or Iran.

Those countries will be able to field threatening missiles during the next decade, the National Academy of Sciences told Congress in a report last September, adding that “at some point, countermeasures of various kinds should be expected.” Defense officials should expect any weaknesses to be exploited, observed Tom Collina, an analyst with the Arms Control Association. "In a real missile attack North Korea could be expected to use decoys and countermeasures that US defenses would not be able to handle,” he predicted.

Risky Test Set for Later This Year

The risk of another major development setback looms this fall when the military plans its first test of the missile defense system intended for Europe. In one of the most complex such experiments the Pentagon has ever attempted, two different interceptor systems will be used to try to defeat a near-simultaneous attack by two air-launched extended medium-range ballistic missiles. Originally meant to involve three different interceptor systems in a raid by up to five missile threats, the test was scaled back due to budget sequestration cuts, two congressional sources said. Unofficial estimates put the cost of the original test at more than $500 million.

A team of GAO investigators that has long pressed  for reform in the MDA’s targets program recently issued a warning about the Pentagon’s plan to to use a new class of air-launched target missiles in this complex test without separately flight testing one of them first. “Using these new targets puts this major test at risk of not being able to obtain key information should the targets not perform as expected,” Cristina Chaplain, GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management, told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a May 9 hearing.

The manufacturer of these new targets, Lockheed Martin, disagrees. Noting that on May 13 it had successfully dropped a prototype out the cargo bay of a C-17 transport plane, it says the target missile is ready for the big test later this year. But the version that was dropped lacked an engine, so the test did not satisfy the GAO.

Richard Lehner, the Missile Defense Agency spokesman, said the agency’s scrutiny of key target components and its “proven quality control processes” give officials “the confidence necessary …to plan for and launch targets for the first time as part of a system-level flight test.”  Lehner also reiterated the Pentagon’s official response to the GAO that any decision to perform a flight test of the new targets “must be balanced against cost, schedule, and programmatic impacts.”

Chaplain and her colleagues, including her assistant for missile defense, David Best, and her boss, Paul Francis, have been using their audits and congressional testimony to try to get MDA to resolve the target problems and stop relying on high-risk strategies in which major purchases of targets, interceptors and other hardware are made before all the design and engineering bugs have been worked out.

“Since its inception, MDA has been operating in an environment of tight time frames for delivering capabilities – first with a presidential directive in 2002 and then with a presidential announcement in 2009 on U.S. missile defenses in Europe,” Chaplain told the senators.  Budget constraints “have already necessitated tough trade-off decisions and will require additional steps to reduce acquisition risk,” she added.

Besides the continuing pressure to meet development and deployment deadlines, there have been instances of poor execution by contractors, she and her colleagues say, as well as difficulties building an inventory of targets that do not have aged components, such as rocket motors from surplus Trident or Polaris submarine missiles.

The High Cost of Failure

The stakes are higher as more missile defense elements – sensors, interceptors and targets -- are added to increase the complexity and realism of the tests. “These are exceptionally expensive tests,” Chaplain said in an interview, raising the possibility that well over $200 million will be wasted anytime one of them fails.

The GAO team has found that the missile defense programs most affected by target problems have been the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system and the mobile THAAD system. The first is the sole system tasked with protecting the United States against a North Korean missile attack, with 26 interceptors deployed to Alaska and four to California. The THAAD is a critical piece of land- and sea-based defenses scheduled to be deployed to Europe beginning in 2015.

 The GMD system has not had a successful interceptor test since 2008, partly due to target issues, but some lawmakers are calling for its additional deployment in the eastern United States, anyway. And in March, amid North Korean saber rattling, the Obama administration announced a $1 billion plan to add 14 more of the GMD interceptors in Alaska by 2017.

A third system, the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, has fared better with targets and testing, although a key 2008 intercept test was postponed for three years due to problems with a Lockheed Martin LV-2 intermediate-range target missile and other issues, according to auditors. A March 2009 test had trouble with two refurbished Lance missile targets when both fell short of their expected trajectory, causing the Aegis BMD system not to fire one of its interceptors, GAO and MDA officials reported.

GAO also has documented major setbacks to missile defense programs due to other target issues, including inventory shortages and production delays of newly designed targets. The THAAD program was forced to postpone planned flight tests in fiscal year 2009 due to a lack of available targets, delays that GAO said cost about $201 million. A shortage of targets in 2007 prevented the ground-based system from achieving its primary test objectives that year and kept the Army from testing its radar systems.

Several analysts agreed that MDA’s efforts to save money have backfired when target-related troubles surfaced. Philip Coyle, a former director of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001, called it a management, not a contractor issue. “If MDA told the contractors to test their targets adequately, and paid them for it, the contractors would be happy to do that,” he said.

Missiles are sometimes thrown into a test against an interceptor without having been flown as targets beforehand to see how they will behave, mainly to save money, said George N. Lewis, a physicist and missile defense specialist at Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

But if a test fails due to a poorly performing target, more money must be spent to buy another target missile and plan and execute another test. “My impression is that it’s one of those things where you try to do something cheaply that ends up costing you a lot of money,” Lewis said.

Consider what happened on Jan. 31, 2010 after a 45-foot Lockheed Martin missile target was launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and soared toward the edge of the atmosphere. After its booster engine, an old solid-fuel motor from a Trident submarine missile, finished its burn, ground controllers rotated the missile slightly, said Lewis, who has written a detailed analysis of the test with Theodore A. Postol, professor of Science, Technology and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As the missile turned, the spent rocket stage began “chuffing,” Lewis said, spewing chunks of unburned fuel and insulator material, varying in size from less than an inch to 6-8 inches or larger, each creating unexpected radar signals that confused a sea-based radar defense system. The radar failed to identify the warhead, and so an interceptor fired from a silo at Vandenberg could not hit its target.

After that test, which the Pentagon said cost $150 million, missile defense officials took contractors to task for chronic lapses in quality control. “I’m not going to name names today, but I’m going to tell you we continue to be disappointed in the quality that we are receiving from our prime contractors and their [subcontractors] -- very, very disappointed,” David Altwegg, then-MDA executive director, told reporters after the test.

But GAO’s Chaplain told Congress that MDA never subjected the target that had failed to a “risk reduction flight test.”

“While the target… was successfully flown in that flight test, aspects of its performance were not properly understood and lack of modeling data prior to that test contributed to significant delays in the test program,” she said in an April 2012 report.

Lewis said in an interview that debris fallout was not unusual for a Trident C4 motor that was 25-35 years old. Trident missiles had been launched many times over the years, “but had they flown it as a target, they probably would have found out about” the chuffing, he said.

This target-related test failure came less than two months after a target built by Coleman Aerospace, a unit of L-3 Communications, embarrassed missile defense officials when it had trouble during its release from a C-17 transport plane. The launch of a THAAD interceptor had to be aborted when the target’s motor failed to ignite once the missile cleared the plane’s cargo bay.

“We all sat there and watched the target fall into the water,” MDA’s Altwegg told reporters after the Dec. 11, 2009 test, which cost $41.2 million. He said the target was found to have a “big-time quality problem.”

Its failure led to a delay of the planned test, cancellation of five tests scheduled for fiscal year 2010, and “hundreds of millions of dollars” being spent to develop and acquire new medium-range air-launched targets, GAO said.

The failure also prompted the MDA to suspend Coleman Aerospace for a year due to quality-control issues.

A Decade of Management Problems

The GAO, which investigated the MDA’s target procurement program in detail in 2008, traced such performance problems and the rising costs of targets and testing to difficulties the agency had overseeing a long-term contract awarded to Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems in December 2003. The military had decided to abandon its piecemeal purchase of targets and have Lockheed Martin act as a so-called lead systems integrator, charged with developing and producing short, medium and intermediate-range ballistic target missiles for use against all of its missile defense systems.

The idea was to use common components for all the targets, reduce the time needed to produce them, and cut costs. Existing targets in the military’s inventory had little in common, varying in size, shape and the age of their components -- including some rocket engines from submarine missiles over 40 years old, GAO said.

But GAO faulted missile defense officials for not doing a thorough cost analysis or evaluating all alternatives before embarking on their plan. By the time Paul Francis, then-GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management, wrote leaders of the House and Senate defense committees in September 2008 to report the findings of his investigation, the total cost of the target procurement program had ballooned to $1 billion or more, with $553 million already spent.

None of the new targets had been delivered, forcing the MDA to use older targets much longer than planned, emptying its inventory of certain kinds of targets and putting the increasingly complex tests at risk of failure.

“Early in the development of [the procurement program], MDA underestimated the technical and design challenges involved in the development of a new target family,” Francis told lawmakers. “By May of 2006, MDA recognized that the funding set aside for [target] development was no longer adequate,” he added.

The cost of each target jumped from the $4.5 million to $8.5 million the agency paid in 2002-2006 to an estimated $32 million to $65 million in 2008-2010, Francis said. As a result, the agency’s plan would yield fewer targets at higher costs, he said.

The strategy “has not gone as planned,” wrote Francis, who added that Lockheed Martin chose to reuse surplus missile components for some of its targets. “The availability of targets for flight tests continues to be problematic, and as a result the scope of the flight test program has been reduced to better match available targets,” he said.

Work on all but one of the new classes of target missiles was cancelled in June 2008, partly due to the unexpectedly high costs. The MDA responded by promising to make “threat-representative targets available on schedule and within the funding allotted.”

In early 2009, Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, then the MDA director, publicly acknowledged the gravity of the availability and reliability problems, as well as the rising costs and schedule delays. He promised a new strategy, and began awarding separate contracts for four classes of targets,, GAO’s Chaplain said.

In fiscal year 2011, the MDA received 11 targets, all of which performed as expected, she said. In addition, the agency awarded a competitively bid contract to Orbital Sciences Corp. to produce eight   targets by 2015.

But Chaplain noted that, even under the agency’s new approach, an early attempt to award a competitive contract was cancelled after the agency received bids that were more expensive than it anticipated. The agency also continues to rely heavily on Lockheed Martin to produce some of its targets, she said.

In an interview, Chaplain said that even though the number of companies able to build ballistic missiles is quite small, GAO “would still like to see more competition in the procurements to maximize the potential for savings.”

Coyle, the Pentagon’s former testing chief, sees target failures as part of a larger problem with the testing of the ground-based missile defense system, which he said has gotten worse over time. He pointed to MDA data showing a decline in the rate of testing and the rate of success over the years, with three successful intercept tests out of eight since December 2002, and only one out of three since the Dec. 5, 2008 test that failed to release decoys.

“The performance of systems undergoing engineering development is supposed to get better with time, not worse,” said Coyle, a Pentagon veteran who specialized in overseeing such efforts. “If you count [the 2008 countermeasures test] as a failure, then the record since Dec. 5, 2008 is zero out of three,” he added. “Zero in five years!”

In case you missed this last week, the Center for Public Integrity’s environmental reporting team produced another groundbreaking investigation in our award-winning  “Poisoned Places” series.

Our latest story is about the often toxic, sometimes hidden releases emanating from oil refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities along the chemical corridor of the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast. Those unplanned emissions — known in regulatory parlance as “upsets” — are occurring more often than industry admits or government knows, according to interviews with regulators, activists, plant representatives, workers and residents, and an analysis of tens of thousands of records by the Center for Public Integrity.

Starting in 2011 and in collaboration with NPR, the Center has been looking into the toxic air we breathe, and how insidious forms of toxic air pollution persist in many parts of  the United States. More than two decades ago, Democrats and Republicans together sought to protect Americans from nearly 200 dangerous chemicals in the air by passing a series of amendments to the Clean Air Act. That goal remains unfulfilled. Today, hundreds of communities are still exposed to the pollutants, which can cause cancer, birth defects and other health issues.

Take a look at some of these key findings from our latest report on accidental emissions (which NPR is also reporting on this week):

• The “upsets,” often occur when equipment breaks down or other “unavoidable” mishaps occur. The Center found that these are happening more often than government reports reflect, adversely affecting residents living near industry.
• Over the last five years in Texas alone, the nation’s refinery hub, accidental emissions have yielded almost four million pounds of some of the most toxic air pollutants.
• From 2007-2011, the largest refinery and chemical facilities across Texas spewed almost 180 million pounds of accidental emissions. That represents additional contamination on top of the 14.8 billion pounds of routine air emissions.
• Frequently, state regulators — the primary enforcers of the Clean Air Act — fail to investigate thousands of reports of accidental emissions.  And even if regulators do act, offenders are rarely punished.
• Pollution from accidental emissions is likely even greater than this data suggests. Regulators rely on an honor system which companies easily exploit.  

For decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state regulatory agencies have effectively ignored these accidental emissions. Officials don’t count such “upsets” in facility permits and compliance records because they simply aren’t supposed to happen. That means industrial facilities can get away with releasing more pollution than allowed by the federal Clean Air Act — with few or no repercussions. These incidents skirt normal pollution controls, venting through flares and leaks. Plants can have scores of events per  year, giving off a constant cloud of invisible spoliation. As a former official in Houston with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told the Center, “A big dose of toxins [is] coming out of these facilities and into fence line communities.”

Look for more of our reports on Poisoned Places in the months ahead. And if you want to know the major pollution sources near where you live, then visit our interactive national map, and put in your zip code, to see information on local pollution sources. 

Until Next week,

Bill 

Leading two politically focused nonprofits has generated big money for former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota — with paydays better than when he served in Congress’ upper chamber.

Coleman collected more than $570,000 during a nearly three-year tenure at the helm of the American Action Network and the American Action Forum, for an average of about $190,000 annually, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal filings.

That includes a combined salary of more than $116,000 in 2011, according to the groups' most recent annual reports— though Coleman was only a paid, full-time employee of the organizations for a portion of that year.

According to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service, Coleman worked a combined 40 hours a week for the two conservative nonprofits during 2009 and 2010 — their first two years of existence, when he served as both groups’ chief executive officer.

He dialed back his time and responsibilities during the third year after taking a job at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm and lobbying shop Hogan Lovells, where his clients this year include Airbus Americas Inc. and Hong Kong-based investment firm Primus Holdings Ltd.

In their annual reports filed with the IRS, the two conservative nonprofits state that compensation levels are determined by reviewing compensation “for similar work at peer institutions” and approved by the organizations’ presidents.

Once Coleman stepped down from the chief executive officer posts, he was “no longer compensated by either organization,” Dan Conston, communications director for the two groups, told the Center for Public Integrity.

Coleman continues to serve as the chairman of the board of the American Action Network and sits on the board of the American Action Forum.

When Coleman was first sworn into the U.S. Senate in 2003, senators received an annual salary of $154,700 — a figure that increased to $169,300 during Coleman’s final year in office.

Many other former lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, seek private-sector employment after serving in Congress.

Working in the private sector can be “pretty alluring,” said Viveca Novak, editorial and communications director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

“There is serious money to be made for a former member,” Novak continued, adding that Coleman’s efforts at Hogan Lovells are likely even more lucrative than his nonprofit work.

Coleman, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, lost a highly contested race to Democrat Al Franken in 2008. An extended recount battle after Election Day went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which rejected Coleman’s final appeal of the result on June 30, 2009.

In July, Franken was sworn into the Senate, and Coleman helped launch both the American Action Forum, a policy institute organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code, and the American Action Network, an “action tank” organized under Section 501(c)(4).

Ahead of the 2010 midterms, the American Action Network spent millions of dollars on ads that criticized Democratic candidates, earning the ire of campaign finance watchdogs that alleged the nonprofit spent too significant a portion of its resources influencing elections.

The group, which has denied the allegations, ranked as one of the most politically active nonprofits during both the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Coleman is also the chairman of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that seeks to expand the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. That group made news last year for receiving a $2.5 million contribution from Chevron Corp., shareholders of which this week rejected an effort to stop the company from making political donations.

Even before the film Erin Brockovich depicted the true-life plight of a California town with poisoned water, state scientist John Morgan was calling claims of a cancer cluster there pure fiction.

For the past 18 years, the Loma Linda University professor, who also works as an epidemiologist for the California Department of Public Health, has tenaciously tried to debunk the notion that families in the desert community of Hinkley were suffering from a high rate of cancer after Pacific Gas & Electric Co. dumped tons of a contaminant into an unlined wastewater pond.

Morgan has kept his research up to date and even today presents it at scientific conferences. His message is not subtle. At a conference in Maryland last year, he popped up one slide comparing Brockovich to a delusional Don Quixote and another mocking the Academy Awards for honoring the film “in spite of the absence of evidence of a cancer excess in Hinkley.”

Morgan doesn’t hide his disapproval of a recent ruling by the California Environmental Protection Agency that drinking hexavalent chromium, the rust inhibitor that PG&E dumped in Hinkley, can cause cancer. The agency based its ruling on rodent studies, but as Morgan says, “We’re not big rats.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reached the same conclusion internally as California’s EPA — that drinking chromium causes cancer — but it faces powerful opposition from the chemical industry in making its ruling official. At stake is whether regulators will set stricter limits on how much chromium is allowed in drinking water. Tens of millions of Americans drink small amounts of chromium each day in their tap water.

The ongoing controversy has resurrected interest in Morgan’s work. Some writers and scientists cite it as proof that Brockovich was wrong.

But a review by the Center for Public Integrity found glaring weaknesses in Morgan’s analysis that challenge the validity of his findings. In his first study, he dismisses what others see as a genuine cancer cluster in Hinkley. In his latest analysis, he excludes people who were exposed to the worst contamination.

Morgan has done other questionable work. As an advisor to the American Council on Science and Health, which gets funding from the chemical industry, Morgan is featured on the group’s website, Riskometer.org. He claims that exposure to a number of toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens such as dioxins and hexavalent chromium, has killed no one from cancer in America.

Morgan stands by his research. He says he was dispelling a misconception fostered by the lawsuit and film that the entire community of Hinkley suffered from a high rate of cancer because of the pollution.

Questionable methods

In his Hinkley analysis, Morgan fails to distinguish residents who were exposed to heavy doses of chromium from those who were exposed to little or none at all. With any carcinogen, the more you’re exposed to it, the higher your odds of getting cancer as a result.

Morgan tallies all cancers among roughly 3,500 people in a 137-square-mile census tract. Yet the families who sued PG&E at Brockovich’s urging lived in a neighborhood of 13 homes covering roughly one square mile. Those families were exposed to chromium levels up to hundreds of times higher than anyone else in Hinkley.

Despite obvious limitations, local and state health officials often do this sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation when people complain about too many cancers in a neighborhood. Still, some epidemiologists say such analysis is weak science.

Other problems in Morgan’s work are not so common. In his first analysis from 1988 to 1993, Morgan actually found the cancer rate in Hinkley was 25 percent higher than in the surrounding counties. But he dismisses this cluster as a statistical mirage, a mere fluke.

Other epidemiologists who looked at Morgan’s numbers at the Center’s request disagree. Statistically, there’s at least 95 percent certainty that the cluster is not a fluke, said Richard Clapp, a Boston University professor who used to direct the Massachusetts Cancer Registry. He said that’s the statistical standard most epidemiologists use.

In his 2011 update, Morgan reports fewer cancers than expected in Hinkley. But he starts counting cancers in 1996, coincidentally the year PG&E settled the Brockovich lawsuit.

By then, PG&E had bought and bulldozed every home in the neighborhood where it had dumped chromium. All the people who had sued and were portrayed in the film had moved. One of them, Roberta Walker, said only a couple of families stayed in Hinkley. So, hardly anyone exposed to high levels of chromium are in the Morgan analysis most often cited.

“It seems to me that what’s going on here is this guy has got a bias. He’s trying to use his science to confirm his opinion,” said Stephen Lester, science director for the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a group that helps communities with environmental problems.

Morgan defended his analysis, saying that he wasn’t testing whether chromium was safe to drink. He acknowledges that he has no data on who was exposed and by how much. But he said there was a popular notion that people in Hinkley were suffering from a high rate of cancer, and his analysis proves that was not true.

But what about the cancer cluster that other epidemiologists discovered in his first analysis? Morgan acknowledged that a 95 percent confidence interval is the standard most epidemiologists use. But he said the guidelines for the California Cancer Registry — guidelines he helped craft — call for 99-percent certainty. The cancer cluster in Hinkley didn’t reach that bar.

Morgan himself isn’t consistent in his use of the standard. He says the real problem in Hinkley is a cluster of cervical cancers as a result of women not getting Pap smears. But Morgan relies on a 95-percent confidence interval to deem that cluster statistically significant.

He justifies switching to a lower standard by saying his most recent research was done in his role as a college professor, not a state epidemiologist, so he didn’t have to adhere to state guidelines. In other words, the job Morgan is working determines whether a cancer cluster is real.

He struggled to explain why he started his latest Hinkley analysis in 1996, saying demographics change from one census to the next and for that reason it may be impossible to do a study over more than a decade. Morgan’s latest study stretches over 12 years, but he says he was pushing it by looking at such a long period of time.

Clapp said it is possible to do studies spanning more than a decade, and there are ways to adjust for changing demographics.

Morgan knows the neighborhood portrayed in the film was gone by 1996. He also knows that levels of chromium in most of the water in Hinkley are not much higher than is found naturally in the Mojave Desert. But again, he said it didn’t matter to him whether people in his study were exposed to chromium. He wasn’t looking into chromium exposure, he said; he was addressing the misconception that there was a cancer cluster in Hinkley.

Morgan speculated that people in Hinkley may be exposed to less chromium than others because he doesn’t believe they had been drinking the water since the film came out. In a visit in 2000, he noticed everyone had switched to bottled water. If he’s right, Morgan is left counting cancers in a town where an unknown number of people drank small traces of chromium many years ago.

Surprised by being asked about his analysis, Morgan said, “Now, what I presumed was you're going after Erin Brockovich.”

Limitations of epidemiology

Whether anyone in Hinkley got cancer from drinking chromium is an obvious question to ask. But science may not be able to answer it. Epidemiologists must rely on statistics, which aren’t capable of detecting whether a few extra people in a community got cancer from exposure to a toxic chemical. Either the chemical has to be really deadly, or the number of people in the study has to be very large. Epidemiologists sum it up this way: If they can detect a problem, you know you have a true catastrophe.

Morgan’s analysis illustrates the scientific limitations the EPA grapples with whenever it evaluates a toxic chemical.

The boundaries of the groundwater polluted by PG&E are now drawn around wells in Hinkley with more than naturally occurring levels of hexavalent chromium. The Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board currently defines that as 3.1 parts per billion — equal to about a tablespoon of chromium in an Olympic-size swimming pool.

Only 18 homes had private wells exceeding that level in recent years, according to Lauri Kemper, the board’s assistant executive officer. Based on the state’s estimate of risk, if a group of 6,500 people drank that much chromium every day, you might see one cancer caused by it. One additional cancer in 6,500 won’t show up in Morgan’s study of 3,500 people, even if everybody drank the most polluted water.

As is often the case, there simply aren’t enough people to do a study. Even if there were hundreds of thousands of people drinking low levels of chromium, gathering data on how much chromium is in each person’s well is a daunting and expensive task.

The families portrayed in the movie are a different matter. One well near where Roberta Walker used to live still reads 1,500 parts per billion, despite years of cleanup. That’s nearly 500 times more chromium than anyone in Hinkley is exposed to today. At that dose, a person’s risk of getting cancer increases — theoretically, at least — by one in 13.

The lawyers Brockovich worked for tracked down 650 people who lived in Walker’s neighborhood, dating back to when the dumping began in 1952. Many of those records are sealed as part of a lawsuit.

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment mentioned but dismissed Morgan’s work in its 2011 public health goal, which concluded that drinking low doses of hexavalent chromium daily posed a cancer risk. State epidemiologist Jay Beaumont said in an interview that he reviewed Morgan’s work and found it “not very useful.”

Steven Patierno, an outside scientist who served on the EPA’s peer-review panel, criticized the EPA for leaving Morgan’s work out of its draft evaluation of hexavalent chromium. Patierno, now deputy director of the Duke Cancer Institute, has a long history of defending industry in chromium litigation. He served as a paid expert witness for PG&E in the Brockovich lawsuit.

‘I want to know the truth’

Morgan says he’s not paid by industry. His job as regional epidemiologist for the California Cancer Registry, he says, is to keep people in his Mojave Desert region from getting cancer.

He speaks with quiet passion, explaining that his philosophy is to wage war on cancer by focusing on the big things, like encouraging people to get screened. He argues that the Hinkley lawsuit doesn’t help him in his cause. Instead, he describes it as a crisis hyped up by a law firm to win a big settlement that ends up coming out of consumers’ pockets.

“I've heard different reports of $2 million or $3 million that Erin Brockovich received herself. And yet, she is the humanitarian. Well, I'm more humanitarian than she is. I want to know the truth. My salary is not dependent upon what I find,” Morgan said.

Brockovich said the personal attacks are disappointing. She said when she was investigating claims in Hinkley as a single mother of three working for a Los Angeles law firm, she was getting paid $800 a month. She said she was concerned about the people in Hinkley and had no clue she’d ever get a bonus.

Brockovich said she’s always considered Morgan’s analysis flawed because it didn’t track the people who were actually exposed to chromium.

“He’s projecting junk science onto me when he’s the one doing junk science,” she said.

Morgan did a cancer-cluster study in Redlands, Calif., at the request of scientists consulting for Lockheed Martin. The study was used in court to defend Lockheed Martin against allegations that an old rocket plant had polluted the groundwater with carcinogens. In a study very similar to the Hinkley study, Morgan found no cancer cluster.

Challenged in a 2004 deposition, Morgan testified that he didn’t know the scientists asking for the research were getting paid by Lockheed Martin. One of them, Michael Kelsh, worked at Exponent, a consulting company well known for defending companies in pollution cases.

In a 2005 report on one of the pollutants, perchlorate, the National Academy of Sciences said of Morgan’s study and others like it, “Because ecologic studies do not include information about exposure and outcome in individuals, they are considered to be the weakest type of observational studies.”

Still, Morgan’s work has been cited as evidence that cancer clusters are often creations of an ill-informed media. Morgan handed over an old clip from ABC’s 20/20 in which John Stossel uses his work to debunk the claims in Erin Brockovich that drinking hexavalent chromium can hurt people.

The American Council on Science and Health, a group whose stated mission is to present sound science in public debates, posted some of Morgan’s research on its website, Riskometer.org. On the site, the group says, “Americans are bombarded daily with warnings of dire threats to their health. … But in reality, most if not all of these warnings have little to do with the real threats to our health and lives.”

Morgan offers a list of toxic chemicals that includes dioxins and hexavalent chromium, chemicals that the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as known carcinogens. But Morgan concludes that in 2002, no one in American died of cancer from being exposed to any of these chemicals.

“It’s actually a ridiculous statement,” said Lester, a toxicologist at the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. He said although science may not be able to say what caused a person to get cancer, that doesn’t mean chemicals aren’t to blame.

Morgan now says he doesn’t remember the details of this analysis, done in 2007, or where he got his information.

Former Hinkley resident Julie Heggenberger watched her mother, who grew up across the street from the PG&E station, suffer from a host of painful diseases. In 1976, her maternal grandfather died of thyroid cancer. And Heggenberger says that on the day she was born in 1974, her grandmother died of stomach cancer.

Court records show the family may have been exposed to the worst contamination of all. A nearby well in 1965 had a reading of 15,000 parts per billion or nearly 5,000 times worse than any exposure today.

When you know your family drank a chemical known to cause cancer and you see them suffering, you don’t want to wait for the science to be perfect, she said, adding, “How much hurt has to happen before they say, well yeah, it was hurting people all that time?”

Presidents often live to regret some of the words speechwriters put in their mouths. The first President Bush paid a steep price for his ill-advised “Read my lips. No new taxes!” promise in 1988. He lost his bid for a second term.

No doubt President Obama regrets saying, with equal bravado: “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.”

That was just plain stupid. For starters, he and his speechwriter either didn’t understand or chose to ignore this reality: for most Americans, whether or not they keep an existing health plan is not up to them or the government. Insurance companies and our employers are the ones making those decisions.

Like most Americans, Obama probably had never heard of terms like “benefit buy-down” and “full replacement.” Insurance company executives use them frequently, but almost never to anyone other than their corporate customers and Wall Street financial analysts.

If the employer-sponsored health plan you have today has fewer benefits or requires you to spend more of your own money for medical care than the plan you had last year — the one you liked but can’t keep — you have been the victim of benefit buy-down, a practice employers have been using for years to limit their share of the cost of providing coverage to workers.

And if you were in an HMO or PPO but found out during open enrollment that your employer has eliminated those options in favor of a high-deductible plan, you have become a victim of full replacement. The health plans you liked were fully replaced by a plan enabling your employer to shift more of the cost of care to you.

So if the President’s speechwriters were paying attention to what has been going on in the health insurance world, they would have found some other way of saying what Obama reportedly meant — that the reform he supported would build on the uniquely American employer-based system while reducing the number of folks without coverage. In other words, people would not have to give up their private insurance and enroll in a government-run plan, even though many consumer advocates believed something like Medicare-for-all would have been a better way to go.

As we get closer to the date when most Americans will be required by Obamacare to enroll in a private health plan if they’re not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, it’s becoming clear, especially to the president’s critics, that the law will indeed mean that health plans offering the least protection from financial ruin after a serious illness or injury — especially in the individual market — will soon go away. That is unless, as I wrote last week, insurance companies are able to take advantage of loopholes in the law that will enable them to continue selling junk insurance.

Banning junk insurance is a good thing for consumers, but making such policies unlawful — as Obamacare will do — means that people who are currently enrolled in them will have to find health plans that offer real coverage by January 1 of next year.

Obama’s speechwriters should have been thinking ahead to the day when Obamacare will protect us from buying the equivalent of snake oil. If they had, they might have understood why the president didn’t want to promise folks they could keep existing plans.

The advantage that Obamacare’s critics have is that many people who buy junk insurance don’t realize they’ve been paying good money for almost nonexistent coverage — that is, until they wind up in the hospital after getting sick or hurt. And because most Americans stay relatively healthy and injury free, those who are in junk plans can go years without testing the limits of their coverage.

States are starting to disclose how much insurers plan to charge for the policies they sell through the online health insurance marketplaces beginning Oct. 1, and so far, we are seeing little evidence of the “rate shock” some politicians and insurance executives were predicting earlier this year. But it won’t be long before people who are enrolled in plans with the skimpiest benefits will find via cancellation notices from their insurers that their plans won’t be available next year. Some inevitably will find that premiums for more comprehensive coverage — which many undoubtedly will insist they don’t need or want — will be considerably higher than what they were paying for junk.

That’s all the president’s political opponents will need to claim, with some justification, that Obama made a promise he didn’t keep when he was trying to sell the public on the need for reform. The president’s speechwriters better be thinking now how to get him out of the trap they set for him four years ago.

A newly formed super PAC has invested more than $12,000 into 11th-hour efforts to turn out the vote for Republican House candidate Jason Smith in Missouri, federal records show.

But voters in the Show-Me State's 8th Congressional District won’t know the source of the money behind the pro-Smith messages until long after the polls close in Tuesday's special election.

That's because the Conservative StrikeForce Super PAC, which registered with the Federal Election Commission in March, didn't spend money until last week — well after the final pre-election reporting deadline. The groups isn't required to publicly disclose any of its donors until July 4, when post-election reports must be submitted to the agency.

The Conservative StrikeForce Super PAC spent about $10,000 on Thursday toward a tele-town hall event and telephone calls designed to get voters to the polls, according to a report filed Friday with the FEC. The group, whose address is a mailbox at a UPS store in northern Virginia, also reported spending about $2,000 for robocalls to be placed today and Tuesday.

When the Center for Public Integrity contacted Scott B. Mackenzie, the group’s treasurer, he declined to comment, saying, “I really don’t have anything to say to you. Nice talking with you.” Other Conservative StrikeForce Super PAC representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Conservative StrikeForce also operates a traditional political action committee, which raised $6 million during the last election cycle, according to FEC records. Ahead of the 2012 election, it directly contributed more than $100,000 to GOP politicians and spent nearly $500,000 on messages that advocated for Republican candidates, including Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Allen West, R-Fla.

On its website, the Conservative StrikeForce PAC says it was launched by a “small group of devoted conservatives who wanted a way to effectively support candidates by motivating like-minded voters at the grassroots level.”

The super PAC’s expenditures in Missouri rank it as the largest independent spender in the race where Smith, a state representative, is a heavy favorite in the GOP-leaning district, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal records. His opponent is Democrat Steve Hodges, a fellow state representative and self-described "conservative Democrat" who supports gun rights and abortion restrictions.

Three other PACs have made modest independent expenditures on Smith’s behalf: the National Right to Life Victory Fund, the Missouri Farm Bureau PAC (Southeast District) and the Conservative Campaign Committee — an organization formerly known as the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama. The three groups together have reported making roughly $8,000 in expenditures in the race.

Tuesday’s special election follows the resignation of Republican Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, who left Congress in February to head the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which was her No. 1 campaign contributor during her career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The eldest son of South Korea’s former President Chun Doo-hwan obtained an offshore company in the Caribbean in 2004 amid a tax evasion probe into his younger brother’s alleged involvement with their father’s bribery-fed slush fund.  

Prosecutors are aggressively seeking the ex-president’s hidden assets in the face of an approaching statute of limitations deadline for his unpaid fine of 167.2 billion won ($149.3 million).

Chun Jae-kook, the oldest child of the former military strongman, became a director and shareholder of a secret company in the British Virgin Islands with the help of a law firm and an offshore services provider in Singapore, according to records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and reviewed by the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism (KCIJ), also known as Newstapa.

Chun Jae-kook, CEO of the country’s major publishing house, Sigongsa, did not respond directly to requests for comment for this story.

He released a statement saying that his offshore company had nothing to do with his father and that it was not created for evading taxes or concealing assets. He explained that his involvement in offshore came about as he moved the money he had for studying and living in the United States to Singapore when he returned to South Korea in 1989.

“I have never taken assets out of the country, and am currently holding no assets abroad,” he said.

Dictator’s Ill-gotten Wealth 

Chun Jae-kook’s 2004 acquisition of the offshore company came months after his younger brother, Chun Jae-yong, was arrested on charges of evading taxes on 16.7 billion won, money that the younger Chun said he inherited from his maternal grandfather. 

A court ruled that at least 7.3 billion won of the money came from his father’s slush fund.

Chun Doo-hwa ruled the country from 1980 to 1988 after seizing power through a military coup in 1979. He was convicted in 1997 of amassing a huge slush fund of hundreds of billions of won in bribes funneled to him by businessmen during his presidency.

The former president was also convicted of charges stemming from the 1979 mutiny and a bloody crackdown in the southern city of Gwangju in May 1980, in which hundreds of pro-democracy protesters were massacred by police.

Chun Doo-hwan was initially sentenced to death in 1996 for his role in the Gwangju slaughter, but was later pardoned. 

Chun Jae-kook, the eldest son, has faced suspicions that he, like his younger brother, may have been associated with the management of his father’s slush fund, but no evidence has been found linking him to the father’s concealed assets.

Unpaid fines

In 1997, the former president was ordered to repay 220 billion won of the ill-gotten gains he was found to have amassed while in office.  

He has paid only a quarter of the total. He still owes 167.2 billion won in outstanding fines.

Chun Doo-hwan told a court hearing in 2003 that he had only 290,000 won in savings, claiming that he was unable to pay the rest of the fine.

His children’s assets, meanwhile, are estimated to be some 200 billion won, and the father has come under fierce public criticism for a lavish lifestyle that includes trips to prestigious golf resorts. He also donated more than 1,000 million won to the Korea Military Academy, his alma mater. 

Prosecutors have come under increasing public pressure to track down Chun Doo-hwan’s wealth before the statute of limitations in his case expires in October. They recently launched a special task force to step up their investigation. The deadline in the case can be extended if prosecutors uncover traces of the hidden assets.

Prosecutor General Chae Dong-wook encouraged the newly-established team to use “every possible means” to locate the ex-president’s illegally accumulated fortune.

Yoojung Lee is a reporter with the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism.

A Michigan financial adviser says Saddam Hussein long ago stole a chunk of his land that now houses a U.S. and Iraqi military installation — and he wants the real estate back.

What to do?

Hire a pair of well-connected lobbyists in Jason Poblete and Mauricio Tamargo, partners at the D.C. and Coral Gables-based firm Poblete Tamargo who both once worked for the federal government.

Their mission: Help Walid Habboo, who fled Iraq in the early 1970s to escape persecution and now works for Wells Fargo Advisors in Farmington Hills, Mich., recoup a disputed 35- acre plot in southeast Baghdad that Habboo says once belonged to his family.

Poblete and Tamargo registered to specifically lobby Michigan’s congressional delegation on Habboo’s behalf regarding issues that involve “confiscated property and related claims against the Republic of Iraq,” according to U.S. Senate disclosure filed Friday and an interview with Poblete.

The two men have also served as his lawyers for about a year.

“For a U.S. citizen to resolve a property claim in a foreign country, it’s a pretty tall order,” said Poblete, who served as a staffer for Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., and the House Administration Committee before joining the private sector in 2003.

Lobbyists-for-hire typically represent corporations, unions or moneyed special interest groups. Picket signs, petitions and public meetings account for more traditional methods for private citizens attempting to voice frustration to federal lawmakers.

But for international cases like Habboo’s, retaining a lobbyist might be the only way for U.S. nationals to resolve the issues, Poblete said.

“People like the Habboo family are usually the last people dealt with because they don’t have the clout to reach into this process.” Poblete said. “A lot of these Iraqi-American families haven’t had the recourse that a lot of big companies have had.”

Habboo, a U.S. citizen, and his family are Chaldean Christian, a sect of Assyrian Christians who have sometimes faced violent marginalization in Iraq.

Habboo, who when reached by phone directed questions to his lobbyists, argued through them that Hussein’s regime expropriated land from his family. This includes a large tract called Camp Rustamiyah, an Iraqi military academy that was captured by U.S. armed forces during the Iraq War.

The United States officially turned over the training facility to the Iraqi military in March 2009, although many U.S. military forces and privately-contracted soldiers still populate the base, according to a U.S. Army document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request made by Habboo’s legal counsel and reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

The U.S. Army’s heavily-redacted response, dated Nov. 26, revealed that the base houses about 3,000 soldiers. Additional U.S. personnel, according to the document, include:

• 600 employees of the government contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root
• 136 interpreters
• 24 Army Air Force Exchange Service personnel
• 40 Iraqi police advisers

Tamargo, Habboo’s other personal lobbyist, is no stranger to the reams of bureaucratic red tape that can block U.S. citizen from resolving a property claim in a foreign country.

From 2001 to 2009, Tamargo chaired the U.S. Department of Justice Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, which evaluates claims similar to those of Habboo and adjudicates how much U.S. citizens are owed by a foreign government. He's also a former chief of staff and general counsel to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.

Tamargo, who with Poblete has met with the Iraqi ambassador other Iraqi emissaries in Washington, D.C., would not disclose his client’s asking price for the land. But he says he’s hopeful that they will settle the claim with the Iraqi government amicably — and without involving the DOJ commission.

“We’re hoping that we can persuade the Iraqi government to simply settle the matter before it’s something that has to go to the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission or any kind of tribunal,” Tamargo said.

When the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission pitched a plan to allow more media mergers earlier this year, he received support from a curious source: the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, once an ardent critic of industry consolidation.

Julius Genachowski wanted backing for a proposed loosening of a rule that bars the same company from owning a newspaper and a radio or television broadcast station in a top media market.

MMTC and its executive director, David Honig, have historically opposed relaxing ownership restrictions, saying they protect minority interests. Yet last week, the group released a key study arguing the opposite position.

So why the change of heart?

Critics say MMTC’s position may have something to do with its extensive industry funding. This includes more than $440,000 in luncheon sponsorships since 2010 from broadcast giants who favor the rule change.

In an 18-page response to questions for this article, Honig says the support does not influence the group’s positions.

“The most valuable asset that a nonprofit organization has is its integrity, and to imply that donations and fees influence our positions on issues is to suggest that we lack integrity, something we do not take lightly,” he wrote.

MMTC, which acts as a pro bono law firm on FCC issues for civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was vital if Genachowski was to get his plan approved.

Two previous attempts to change the rule were slapped down by the courts, in part because of concern that greater media consolidation would reduce the number of minority media owners.

MMTC offered to commission the study in February, after voicing its support for Genachowski’s proposal.

Once a shoestring operation dependent almost solely on the volunteer efforts of Honig, MMTC has evolved in recent years into a potent organization that exercises much influence on the commission through its ability to shape the positions of large civil rights organizations on relatively obscure FCC issues.

The media ownership rules passed in the 1970s stemmed in part from the FCC’s failure to take action against TV stations in the South that blacked out coverage of the civil rights movement. They were also inspired by the perceived failures of large media outlets to report on grievances of inner cities that led to the race riots of the late 1960s.

It was believed that restrictions on ownership would lead to greater competition, more locally focused programming and more opportunities for minority ownership.

Consolidation has long been favored by many large broadcasters and newspaper companies, which seek savings by combining advertising and newsroom operations.

After years of defending the rules, Honig, wrote in a blog post in December that the cross-ownership ban should be relaxed, citing concern in minority communities about the decline of newspapers.

What he didn't disclose was the hundreds of thousands of dollars his group had received from CBS Corp., radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc., Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and the National Association of Broadcasters, an industry lobby group. All four have previously gone to court in an effort to end the ban. News Corp., which Los Angeles Times and a rule-change would clear the way for such a deal.

Clear Channel and News Corp. did not respond to questions for this article. Spokesmen for the NAB and CBS say their organization’s donations weren’t intended to change MMTC’s positions on cross-ownership or other matters.

Honig said the Center’s calculation of sponsorship totals — which were taken from MMTC materials — were “inaccurate.” He said the group may bump up the level of sponsorship of donors “for good will purposes.”

He did not provide alternate figures.

MMTC took in just under $2 million in 2011. Of that, $1.7 million was derived from sponsorships, donations and fees from companies, lobbyists, lawyers and religious broadcasters with interests before the FCC, according to an IRS filing.

“It is important to look at David’s source of funding to determine who David really represents,” says Mark Lloyd, a former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the FCC from 2009 until last year. “I think that would tell you a great deal.”

The MMTC ownership study, released last week, concluded the impact of greater consolidation in media ownership on women and minority ownership can’t be a “material justification for tightening or retaining the rules.”

Critics argue that other studies have shown that more media concentration harms small broadcasters, and that most women- and minority-owned broadcasting companies control just a few stations each.

Net neutrality position raises eyebrows

MMTC has also received support from telecommunications and cable firms and its position on broadband regulation and other issues has dovetailed with theirs.

“He’s making arguments that are no different than those made by the big companies and yet they’re presented as those of the civil rights community,” says Craig Aaron, the executive director of Free Press, a group that opposes media consolidation. “Those are his views, but it’s curious how often they’re in line with the filings of Comcast and AT&T.”

Honig says MMTC aims to promote equal opportunity in broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband and that its positions are often in conflict with those of its donors. He pointed to a letter accompanying the ownership study which noted there was "an indication that an especially extensive" cross-media merger could hurt minority ownership in smaller markets."

MMTC’s position on “network neutrality” early in President Barack Obama’s first term angered consumer groups and many technology companies that wanted the government to force Internet service providers to treat all traffic equally.

Proponents of an open Web were concerned that without strong network neutrality rules, broadband providers would be free to offer preferential treatment to deep-pocketed media outlets.

Honig sided with the Internet service providers, arguing that new rules would hurt the ability of cable and telecommunications companies to expand broadband in poor, minority neighborhoods.

"We think that closing the digital divide should be the top priority and that net neutrality should be second," he told the Los Angeles Times.

From 2009 through 2011 MMTC received at least $725,000 in contributions and sponsorships from network neutrality foes including Verizon, Time Warner, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, according to MMTC tax filings and sponsorship lists.

MMTC’s relationship with Verizon demonstrates the group’s various methods of obtaining industry revenue. In 2009, at the height of the net neutrality debate, Verizon made a direct $40,000 contribution to MMTC. From 2010 to 2013, MMTC documents list Verizon as funding at least $160,000 in MMTC conference sponsorships.

Additionally, MMTC worked with Verizon on a $189 million sale of wireless spectrum licenses to minority-owned Grain Management this year — a deal announced in conjunction with a larger $1.9 billion license sale to AT&T. A spokesman for Verizon says money paid to MMTC wasn’t intended to influence its policies but to support its mission of promoting inclusion in the industry.

Some saw Honig playing a key role in organizing traditional civil rights groups like the National Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to sign on to anti-network neutrality filings with the FCC.

Honig is “the nerve center for much of the action we've seen on the part of the civil rights groups,” blogged James Rucker, then the executive director of ColorOfChange.org, a technology-oriented civil rights group that supported network neutrality.

“In my opinion, Honig is leading many of the respected civil rights groups he is advising off of the digital cliff,” he added.

Rucker isn’t alone in the view that Honig uses his credibility with civil rights organizations and expertise in communications law to influence them to take positions on complex issues that primarily benefit industry players.

Honig “undermines trust in his organization’s legacy” when he urges groups to join his advocacy campaign and they later find out the issues aren’t quite what they expected, says Cheryl Leanza, co-chairwoman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights’ media and telecommunications task force.

“He does a disservice to his past work when other organizations take his advice and they don’t know the consequences or implications of that advice.”

Leanza says her views are her own, not those of the LCCR.

Civil rights activist

Honig began his civil rights activism in the 1960s as a high school student, when he became a youth leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Rochester, New York.

He earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1983, and after the FCC under President Ronald Reagan suspended key minority broadcast ownership rules, he co-founded MMTC on a shoestring budget.

He mixed MMTC’s advocacy with litigation on behalf of civil rights groups. In the 1990s he led a high profile but unsuccessful legal battle representing the N.A.A.C.P. in its effort to prevent Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent of Fox Broadcasting Co. and the owner of a New York City television station, from gaining a waiver from the cross-ownership rule to buy the New York Post—the same rule Honig now favors eliminating.

In 1991, on behalf of LULAC, the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups, his legal work helped spur an FCC investigation and long-running legal fight with the country’s largest Christian television network, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN).

Known for its broadcasts of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and network founders Paul and Jan Crouch, Honig accused TBN of setting up a sham minority corporation to win additional FCC broadcast licenses.

Honig helped spur the FCC to restore equal employment rules to the cable and broadcast industry in 2002 and pass a 2007 rule preventing advertisers from instructing their agencies not to place spots on radio stations with large black and Hispanic audiences.

By the late 1990s, Honig had also found a way to successfully fund MMTC. In 1998, MMTC began collecting fees from broadcasters in return for helping them sell stations to minority buyers — earning $450,000 that year alone by helping Clear Channel sell a Boston station for $5 million, according to a report in the trade newspaper Broadcasting & Cable. The story noted that Honig was able to begin paying himself a $41,125 salary.

The report also said that rival brokers were complaining that one MMTC client, CBS Corp., did not typically use brokers and had retained Honig “only to curry favor with the diversity-minded FCC.”

In 2002, the group added an annual “Access to Capital” fundraising luncheon, which helped net it $22,806. Honig’s compensation had risen to $161,000, according to tax filings.

By 2006, the luncheon had become so successful at attracting industry interest it had been expanded to two days and was addressed by three of the FCC’s five sitting commissioners — MMTC raised $291,334.

Station donations

Additionally, the non-profit MMTC began accepting donated broadcast properties.

In 2008, Mega Communications, a Spanish radio network owned by New York art collector Adam Lindemann, donated a Tampa Bay area AM station to MMTC. Honig says the station was used to train women and minorities. MMTC sold the station for $1.15 million last year to Christian broadcaster Salem Communications.

In 2010, Trinity Broadcasting Network donated 147 low-power television stations to MMTC. That year MMTC awarded TBN, along with Clear Channel, its “Extraordinary Service Award,” an annual prize given for those “who have far exceeded the call of duty in the service of the civil rights cause,” according to MMTC’s website.

The FCC soon reclaimed the licenses of many of the TBN stations, but in 2011 MMTC sold 78 of the stations for $390,000 to a Tennessee company run by broadcast entrepreneur Henry Luken, whose holdings include The Nashville Network and the male-oriented Tuff TV.

TBN declined to comment on the donation. Honig says MMTC did not solicit the donation from TBN, and that Luken has pledged to enact a training program for women and minorities as part of the deal.

By the time of the sale of the former TBN stations, MMTC had grown substantially. In 2011, the last year for which tax forms are available, it reported almost $2.8 million in net assets.

Honig’s salary had also increased to $212,072. His addresses included a waterfront home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore assessed at $856,700, according to Maryland property records.

Today its website lists eight lawyers, two researchers and a communications director. Its brokerage team includes three others, two of whom are former Clear Channel staffers. MMTC ranked as the seventh-largest broadcast broker in the U.S. in 2011, and has worked on deals valued at $1.8 billion over the past 15 years. Honig, 63, says he plans to semi-retire next year.

Comcast and AT&T

Among the group’s most generous donors is cable giant Comcast, which, according to MMTC documents has spent at least $375,000 on fundraising luncheons and conferences in Washington hosted by MMTC between 2009 and this year.

In addition to taking Comcast's side on Net Neutrality, Honig publicly hailed its 2011 buyout of NBC Universal.

Honig publicly hailed Comcast’s 2011 buyout of NBC Universal saying the $16.7 billion merger was “a win for all Americans, especially minority and low-income consumers who have largely been left out of the digital equation.” The deal required Comcast to expand broadband to low-income Americans and create 10 new television channels in partnership with minorities.

NBC Universal contributed $150,000 to MMTC in 2010, and retained MMTC’s brokerage arm to help it sell a Los Angeles TV station as required under terms of the deal.

“We supported MMTC's work for years prior to the NBC Universal transaction,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcast, in an email response to questions about the relationship. “We support a wide variety of organizations and they don't always support all of our policy positions just as we don't always support all of their policy positions.”

MMTC also supported a failed attempt by AT&T to buy T-Mobile in 2011 for $39 billion, the group’s first endorsement of a media and telecom merger in its 25-year history. The combination would benefit minority broadband consumers by allowing AT&T to expand service to more than 97 percent of consumers, Honig wrote in a brief to the FCC.

Groups such as the National Hispanic Media Center and the Center for Media Justice disagreed, arguing that T-Mobile was the low-cost carrier and that its elimination would not only harm consumers but disproportionately affect minority customers.

In 2010 and 2011, AT&T and T-Mobile provided $240,000 in sponsorships to MMTC fundraising events, according to MMTC documents. A number of other civil rights groups such as the NAACP and Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation also backed the proposed merger and also received AT&T funding.

At the time the chairman of MMTC’s board, former FCC Commissioner Henry Rivera, worked at law firm Wiley Rein, which represented T-Mobile in the merger. Julia Johnson, then MMTC’s treasurer and its current board president, runs a public relations firm whose clients have included AT&T, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Ari Fitzgerald, a communications lawyer at Hogan Lovells and secretary of the board at MMTC, has done FCC work for T-Mobile both before and after the failed merger proposal.

AT&T relayed questions about the relationship to Honig, who defends MMTC’s stance in the merger, citing AT&T’s record of hiring minority staff and suppliers. Johnson, Fitzgerald and Rivera recused themselves from voting on MMTC’s position on the merger, he said.

“MMTC’s officers and directors are highly skilled, experienced individuals, and they all serve pro bono,” said Honig, adding: “No MMTC officer or director would tolerate attempts at ‘purse-string advocacy.’”

Growing Entity

Long-time public interest lawyer and MMTC board member Andrew Schwartzman says a turning point for the group came when it entered telecom advocacy. He says Honig is “well-motivated” but on some telecom issues “misguided rather than improperly influenced.”

Schwartzman’s own organization, the Media Access Project, closed its doors last year due to a lack of funds. He does not see MMTC’s positions as being “dictated by specific corporate contributions.”

“I don’t see these as a sudden transactional relationship but something longstanding,” he added, in reference to the donations.

Alex Nogales, the director of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, is less forgiving.

"We're disappointed in David," said Nogales. "He's gotten a bit too chummy with the industry and he's tried to drag us into those machinations and I don't appreciate it."

He says he resigned his spot as a member of MMTC’s board because of concerns about its growing corporate ties.

Whether the MMTC’s cross-media ownership study will lead to a relaxation of media ownership rules is a matter that will be decided under its next chairman.

Either way, the MMTC is looking to remain a key player at the FCC under the new regime.

President Obama’s pick for the spot, Tom Wheeler, a former cable and wireless industry lobbyist, was endorsed by the group just hours after news of his selection was leaked to the media.

John Dunbar contributed to this report.

Sometimes great investigative reporting is a game changer — meaning extraordinary journalism can have such significant impact that the issue it illuminates will forever be cast in a different light.

Such is the case with our offshore tax haven project. Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Money Maze by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) continues to reverberate, especially in Europe. Tax havens will be high on the agenda when the G-8 countries sit down for their summit meeting in Ireland in a little more than a week. That’s in part because of ICIJ’s investigative work, which has received more than 11,000 worldwide media citations in just two months.

According to EU Commissioner Algirdas Semeta, the Offshore Leaks investigation by ICIJ and its partners has transformed tax politics and hardened political will to tackle the problem of tax evasion. "I personally think Offshore Leaks could be identified as the most significant trigger behind these developments ... It has created visibility of the issue and it has triggered political recognition of the amplitude of the problem", he told the EU Observer. He added that tax transparency overrides the principle of data privacy.

Likewise, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy says there has been a "real breakthrough" in the EU's efforts to combat offshore tax evasion. According to Reuters, Rompuy said the current aggressiveness of the EU's push is "unprecedented. We couldn't speak in those terms on those issues, let's say, a month or two months ago. . . . There is a strong political will by the leaders, not only the Europeans but also on a global level, to go forward in attacking tax fraud and tax evasion."

Again, the difference in political will seems to be that ICIJ’s offshore tax haven stories beginning in early April have engaged the public, and now have galvanized the politicians.

As part of a multi-year project,  ICIJ started stripping away the biggest mystery associated with tax havens: the owners of anonymous companies. Drawing from a trove of 2.5 million leaked files, ICIJ led what may be the largest cross-border journalism collaboration in history — now encompassing 110 journalists in more than 50 countries.  ICIJ’s investigation revealed the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con artists, and the mega-rich in more than 170 countries.

Look for more of ICIJ’s tax haven reporting in the weeks and months ahead. And look for action on what British Prime Minister David Cameron calls “the scourge of tax evasion” at the G-8 meeting —action that’s occurring because of ICIJ’s investigative work.

Until Next Week,

Bill 

One of Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s last bills could represent the best chance to update the nation’s chemical safety regulations by requiring proof that a chemical is safe before it can be used.

But the legislation is drawing deep skepticism from some environmental groups and state officials who fear it could actually weaken safety standards.

Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat who died Monday of viral pneumonia at age 89, worked for decades on environmental legislation, including a 1986 law that created the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, a database that allows members of the public to track pollution.

Lautenberg’s newest proposal, the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, was the product of a compromise with Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana. Introduced May 22, it won the endorsement of nine Senate Republicans, along with the influential American Chemistry Council, a trade group.

 A council spokesman called it “a balanced, comprehensive approach to updating the law, which will give consumers more confidence in the safety of chemicals, while at the same time encouraging innovation, economic growth and job creation by American manufacturers.”

An earlier, stricter chemical safety bill — essentially unchanged from legislation Lautenberg had put forward in each Congress since 2005 — failed to draw Republican support.

Lautenberg’s latest bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, which has not yet scheduled it for a hearing.

Meanwhile, prominent environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council have expressed misgivings.

The bill “still leaves too many gaps in protecting the public,” Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney with the group, said in a statement May 24. Rosenberg said it lacks statutory deadlines for the EPA to review chemicals and may do little to improve on the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which many dismiss as ineffective because it makes it difficult to require that chemicals be tested.

The existing law “has never accomplished its goal of protecting the public from dangerous chemicals,” Rosenberg said.

Others worry that the legislation could preempt stricter chemical regulations in states like California, known for its environmental laws, many of which were passed by voters in referendums or signed by Republican governors.

A 2003 law, for example, banned lead, cadmium, mercury and hexavalent chromium from product packaging, and was updated three times during Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration. State lawmakers have also banned the sale of jewelry containing lead, and enacted a 2011 law to toughen fines against retailers who violate the restrictions.

In a statement Thursday, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control said it was “reviewing the federal legislation and looking at what effect the preemption could have on our laws and regulations.”

In a May 31 letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., an official with the agency warned that the bill could impair the state’s decision-making because its authority relies on obtaining waivers from the EPA.

Under the proposed law, “the criteria to qualify for such a waiver make obtaining one nearly impossible,” wrote Josh Tooker, the department’s deputy director for legislation.

Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the bill could override the requirements of California’s Proposition 65, which requires the state to maintain a list of chemicals that cause cancer or reproductive harm. Businesses are then required to notify customers when those chemicals are present. The list contains about 800 chemicals, according to the website of the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

Some states also ban bisphenol A, a chemical used in food packaging and other products, and certain flame retardants that federal officials have been slower to act on, Denison said.

“That’s why the industry has come to the table,” he said. “There’s got to be some expansion of preemption or there’s no reason for them to even play.”

While the bill would require the EPA to review an initial list of chemicals and test them for safety, if a chemical were found to be safe, states would be bound by that decision with few exceptions. Denison said it might be possible for industry to stall the EPA and put state rules on hold while new research was pending.

Denison wrote in a blog post Wednesday that he thought the legislation’s problems could be resolved in negotiations between Democrats, Republicans and industry groups.

Even in its current form, the bill is “significantly better than the status quo,” Denison wrote.

South Carolina’s legislative session came to a close Thursday with a conspicuous absence: ethics reform. While the House passed an ethics bill April 30, and the Senate appeared to be briskly moving the measure through its own legislative process, in the end the upper chamber failed to garner enough support for the bill before the session’s clock ran out.

The measure would have required that legislators begin disclosing their sources of income, while limiting independent political spending and giving an independent Ethics Commission authority to investigate complaints brought against lawmakers. But by most accounts, the bill’s defeat had little to do with its contents.

“The bill became a political soccer ball and I don’t think it was blocked because of the substance of the bill,” said John Crangle, executive director of Common Cause South Carolina.

With time running out on this year’s session, a block of conservative Republicans wanted instead to focus their energies on passing legislation to block federal health care reform in the state; that effort did not pass. Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, blamed Democrats for holding up the ethics bill in final days. Some Democrats have said they support the effort but want more time to vet the bill.

But the bill’s supporters say failure to pass legislation this year is only a minor setback and that they’re confident the measure will be a top priority when the legislature resumes the second half of its two-year session in January.

“It’s on special order to be the first thing we take up,” said Sen. Wes Hayes, a Republican who has been a strong proponent for tougher ethics laws.

Still, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Last year, leaders from both parties and Gov. Haley called ethics a top priority for the session, and they established four advisory panels to develop the key components of ethics legislation. They were responding in part to a surge in public support for reform after former Gov. Mark Sanford, former Lt. Gov. Ken Ard and House Speaker Bobby Harrell were each either accused or convicted of violating ethics laws over the past few years. And they were also reacting to the failing grade issued the Palmetto State last year by the State Integrity Investigation—a collaboration of the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. 

The advisory groups released their recommendations and the House quickly took up the cause. But the effort faced questions and controversy from the start. First, Republican leaders in the House introduced a bill but kept its contents secret. When they posted the language, it showed that the legislation would actually decriminalize some ethics violations. Representatives soon changed the language, and the House eventually passed a bill on April 30.

The Senate took up the issue and even improved the language, Crangle said. But politics quickly got in the way. In May, Sen. Robert Ford, a Democrat, resigned in the midst of a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into whether he used campaign funds for personal expenses. Days later, a spokesman for Haley said the case was evidence of the need for ethics reform. That in turn angered Democrats, with one saying that Haley, who was cleared in 2012 by the House Ethics Committee on charges of illegal lobbying, is the real example of why reform is necessary. In the end, the bill’s backers did not win enough support from Democrats and right-wing Republicans to pass the bill before the close of the session.

Bickering aside, there is one remaining major policy sticking point. Currently, legislators police themselves through House and Senate ethics committees, a system that watchdogs and even some legislators have criticized.

Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Luke Rankin, a Republican, told The State that the House Committee, which cleared Haley, has “swept some things under the rug over there.”

Rankin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ethics bill would allow the independent Ethics Commission, which oversees the executive branch, to investigate complaints against legislators, but would still leave final decisions on how to handle a case to the legislative committees.

Hayes said the issue of who ultimately decides on ethics matters, and whether the Ethics Commission should even be allowed to investigate legislators, are the only substantive questions that legislators will need to address when they return to January. “There’s a lot of people in the Senate that think that the system that we have, in terms of policing ourselves, works pretty well,” he said.

Some Democrats had said there was no reason to rush a bill through in the final weeks of this year’s session when the issue can be rolled to next year. Crangle of Common Cause South Carolina said the wait will give him time to work on some amendments that would strengthen the financial disclosure provisions and close loopholes in the state’s campaign finance laws.

“I can’t say that I’m disappointed in the failure to pass the ethics bill,” he said. With Haley and the entire House up for reelection in 2014, Crangle added, it may be easier to push for stronger reforms next year anyway. It’s been decades since the state passed serious ethics legislation, Crangle said, so he wants to make sure the bill includes as much as possible. “We only get a chance like this once every generation.”

The Pentagon has been paying hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year to people and companies that don’t deserve it, but its financial management shortcomings are so severe that it’s made little progress in halting the errors or even measuring their magnitude, according to a report released by a Senate committee Thursday.

Although the Defense Department reported making over $1.1 billion in overpayments in fiscal year 2011 to military personnel and retirees, civilian defense workers, contractors, and others, investigators from the Government Accountability Office said that figure is not credible due to missing invoices and other flawed paperwork, as well as errors in arithmetic.

The Pentagon is required by law to ferret out programs susceptible to significant payment errors and then use statistical sampling to estimate the size of those errors, so that Congress can determine the size of the problem. But GAO found defense finance officials didn't have procedures in place to collect and maintain the data they need to come up with a credible estimate.

Even when the department could find and document mistaken payments, it frequently did not take cost-effective steps to recover the money, the GAO said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, has spent $256,000 since 2009 on an automated overpayment-detection program that has recovered just one improper payment of $20.79, GAO said.

The Pentagon’s payment system is so weak that sometimes it doesn’t pay what’s owed.  By its own estimate, for example, the Pentagon made $238.2 million in overpayments and $48.4 million in underpayments related to travel alone during fiscal 2011, for a total of $286.6 million in incorrect payments.

But when pressed by GAO, defense finance officials were only able to identify $1.6 million, or less than 1 percent, of the program's estimated overpayments as recoverable, explaining that they lacked supporting documentation for a significant portion of the total.

The Defense Department "is at risk of foregoing the detection and recovery of potentially substantial funds owed to the government," the GAO report said.

Instead of conducting cost-effective audits to identify funds that can be recovered, GAO said the Pentagon relies on such methods as self-reporting by defense contractors and other recipients of the money, random sampling of payment records, and findings by the Defense Department inspector general or other auditors.

Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which released the GAO report, expressed anger and frustration  over the findings. Several accused the Pentagon of failing to comply with a 2010 law requiring federal agencies to identify, prevent and recover payments made in error.

“The Department spends about a trillion dollars annually, but officials have no idea how much of that money it loses to waste and fraud. This is simply unacceptable,” said Committee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., who co-sponsored the law with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and others.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., ranking member of the committee, cited the GAO’s conclusions while promising to reintroduce legislation requiring the Defense Department to conduct an accurate audit of its books, as required by federal rules the Department has repeatedly flouted.

“When our largest federal agency cannot produce a viable financial audit, it should be no surprise DOD cannot account for how much money it wastes on improper payments,” said Coburn, who vowed to use all the oversight tools at his disposal to expose and prevent defense finance abuses.

“Improper payments should be low-hanging fruit when it comes to eliminating government waste—but that clearly hasn’t been the case here,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who leads the panel’s Financial and Contracting Oversight subcommittee.

The problem is an old one at the Pentagon. Twenty years ago, GAO delivered a scathing report to the same Senate committee documenting a military payroll system that was so badly managed the Army had inadvertently paid $6 million to 2,269 troops who had already quit the service, were absent without leave or had deserted their units. In one case, a dead deserter was sent a paycheck.

A separate probe at the time revealed that managers at a defense finance and accounting center had miscalculated the pay of more than 201,000 Air Force retirees in 1986, giving them an extra dollar or two each month.  It took nine years for managers to correct the error, which ended up costing taxpayers $16 million. Officials said they decided not to try to recover the money because the some of the retirees were probably dead, and the effort to collect would be too expensive.

In the report released Thursday, GAO said the Pentagon acknowledged overpayments in military pay and military retirement pay as part of the $1.1 billion in erroneous payments in fiscal 2011. In addition, the Pentagon made overpayments of military health benefits, civilian pay, travel pay, commercial pay to vendors and contractors and Army Corps of Engineers travel and contractor fees.

GAO faulted the Defense Department comptroller not only for these mistakes, but for doing a poor job of reporting on the issue to Congress. In one instance, the department claimed it would recover $67.6 million in improper military retirement payments while estimating that only $18.8 million in overpayments had actually occurred, GAO said.

Defense officials also failed to do “risk assessments” to determine what kind of corrective action is needed to reduce mistakes, GAO said. They failed to identify the “root causes” for errors, such as whether manual or automated controls were insufficient or even working.

In addition, GAO said the department did not comply with the 2010 law requiring “recovery audits” to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of procedures to recover money paid improperly to companies whose contracts have a total value exceeding $500 million in a fiscal year.  According to GAO, defense officials said they were having a hard time tracing transactions and finding the original justifications for them, preventing them from conducting effective recovery audits.

If the Defense Department does not implement strategies to comply with federal improper payment laws, GAO warned, it will remain “at risk of continuing to make improper payments and wasting taxpayer funds.”

In a written statement released with the report, Robert F. Hale, the Defense Department’s comptroller, said the department is now developing risk assessments and corrective actions, reviewing its recovery efforts to ensure that they are cost effective, and working to ensure its reporting is complete and accurate.

“I continue to believe this program [to deal with overpayments] is fundamentally sound and I remain fully committed to comply in all respects with current statutory requirements,” Hale said.

Efforts to obtain further Pentagon comment Thursday were unsuccessful.

Most lobbying firms are not in a hurry to pad politicians' political coffers early this election cycle, with only a few either raising or spending significant cash, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records indicates.

And that's for the lobby shops that have PACs: More than half of the nation's top 40 firms, ranked by 2012 lobbying income, do not sponsor one at all, the analysis shows. While this doesn't represent a major shift from the lobbying world status quo, the trend stands in stark contrast to the actions of other industries' largest corporations, which generally sponsor PACs as a means to support and interact with politicians and candidates.

Among the PAC-less government affairs powerhouses are Podesta Group; Ogilvy Government Relations; Peck, Madigan & Jones; Prime Policy Group and Dutko Worldwide.

For top lobbying firms that do sponsor PACs, only four — Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; K&L Gates; Ernst & Young and DLA Piper — have reported spending more than $100,000 during the year's first four months, mostly on donations to political candidates and committees. This figure could rise slightly in July, as eight of the nation's top 40 PACs have chosen to report their finances semiannually this year.

DLA Piper's PAC, on balance, is the nation's most active among firm-sponsored committees, raising about $198,500 and spending more than $196,300 between Jan. 1 and April 30.

That's still a pittance compared to what is typically the most active corporate PAC overall — Honeywell's PAC, which has raised almost $1.3 million and spent more than $951,000 for the same period. 

All the same, DLA Piper's PAC has spread the cash it is spending far and wide, federal records show.

On the left, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark N.J., and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., are among its four-figure recipients. On the right, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., also rank among four-figure beneficiaries.

PACs are capped at donating $5,000 per election to a candidate committee and $15,000 per year to a national party committee.

The DLA Piper PAC also ended April with more than $143,800 in reserve — behind only Ernst & Young, the accounting giant that also runs a lobbying division.

DLA Piper's long lobbying client list includes broadcaster Al Jazeera America, Comcast, drugmaker Merck, the PGA Tour, defense contractor Raytheon and ZTE USA, the American subsidiary of a Chinese telecom company that has recently come under heavygovernmentscrutiny. 

DLA Piper officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Ernst & Young's PAC, for its part, ended April with nearly $445,000 cash on hand after spending an industry-leading $423,000 during the first four months of the year — at least among those that have reported their figures. 

But it hasn't raised a cent during 2013, relying instead on its surplus cash to contribute four-figure amounts to the likes of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.; Michael Grimm, R-N.Y.; Steve Israel, D-N.Y. and James Clyburn, D-S.C.

Ernst & Young's dozens of lobbying clients this year include corporate titans such as insurer Aetna, Barclays, Boeing, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, General Electric, insurer MetLife, Microsoft, New York Life Insurance and drugmaker Pfizer, according to U.S. Senate filings. 

Spokesman John La Place said the company had no immediate comment about its PAC activity.

It may seem logical for companies so steeped in politics to operate an institutional PAC, and conversely, odd for a lobbying firm to forego doing so.

But since most large lobbying firms are not industry or issue specific — as opposed to other kinds of corporations, which usually are — it doesn't always make sense for firms to operate PACs, said Monte Ward, president of the American League of Lobbyists.  

"Firms are better served if their clients have PACs to enhance that direct connection between constituent and member," Ward said.

That doesn't mean that lobby shops without PACs aren't represented on the D.C. political fundraising scene, where lawmakers host an endless string of campaign events that provide professional influencers prime opportunities to connect with the candidates — for a price.

In some cases, quite the opposite is true.

Perhaps there is no better example of this than No. 3 lobbying firm Podesta Group, whose leader, Tony Podesta, ranks among the most active individual political donors in the nation and frequently hosts fundraisers for Democratic candidates.

Meanwhile, employees of PAC-free Ogilvy Government Relations made about $110,000 in reportable donations to federal-level candidates and committees during the 2012 election cycle, FEC records show. 

While Cornerstone Government Affairs also doesn't sponsor a PAC, its D.C. offices are among the capital's more popular venues for politicos looking to generate campaign cash, according to the Sunlight Foundation's event tracker Political Party Time.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, who signed an order requiring Verizon to give the National Security Agency telephone records for tens of millions of American customers, attended an expense-paid judicial seminar sponsored by a libertarian think tank that featured lectures from a vocal proponent of executive branch powers.

Vinson, whose term on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began in 2006 and expired last month, was the only member of the special court to attend the August 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, according to disclosure records filed by the federal judge.

The Center for Public Integrity collected the disclosure records as part of an investigative report that revealed how large corporations and conservative foundations routinely sponsor ideologically driven educational conferences for state and federal judges.

It’s unclear which lectures Vinson attended during the “Terrorism, Civil Liberty, & National Security” seminar. FREE’s website only provides a general agenda for the program and no lecture transcripts.

But Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor who delivered two lectures, argued in a 2007 book he co-wrote — Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts— that “the executive branch, not Congress or the judicial branch, should make the tradeoff between security and liberty.”

The book also asserts that while “no one doubts that injustices occur during emergencies, the type of judicial scrutiny that would be needed to prevent the injustices that have occurred during American history would cause more harm than good by interfering with justified executive actions.”

The seminar, conducted in Montana, also included separate lectures entitled “Terrorism & the U.S. Constitution,” “Decision-Making in Counter Terrorism Dilemmas” and “The Triumph & Pitfalls of the Security State.”

Update, 3:11 p.m.: From 2005 to 2009, FREE received a total of $430,000 in general operating support from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, of which billionaire businessman Charles Koch is a director. The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, however, is listed as the sole funder for the national security conference that Vinson attended.

John Baden, FREE’s chairman, says that while his recollection of the seminar is hazy, it included experts from “both sides” of the national security debate.

One such conference speaker was University of Utah law professor Amos Guiora, who describes himself as a proponent of judicial review and checks on executive power.

He notes that his views regarding the balance of civil liberties and national security are very different from those held by Posner.

“Eric and I totally disagree,” he says, noting that he and Posner were the conference’s primary lecturers.

Vinson, a senior-status judge, also attended a 2009 economics seminar hosted by Northwestern University and sponsored by the conservative Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others.

He and Posner did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Sheldon Snook, a spokesman for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, had no comment about the seminar but did release a statement from Presiding Judge Reggie Walton responding to criticism of the surveillance court that has recently surfaced in news reports.

“The perception that the court is a rubber stamp is absolutely false,” Walton’s statement reads. “There is a rigorous review process of applications submitted by the executive branch, spearheaded initially by five judicial branch lawyers who are national security experts, and then by the judges, to ensure that the court’s authorizations comport with what the applicable statutes authorize.”

In April, Vinson approved the government agency’s “top secret” request ordering Verizon on an “ongoing daily basis” to give the NSA telephone records for all its customers’ phone calls “between the United States and abroad,” as well as those made within the United States.

Vinson, who made headlines two years ago when he invalidated President Obama’s health care law, signed the order authorizing telephone surveillance as a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a special eleven-member court established in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to review applications for warrants related to national security investigations. The court is composed of federal district judges who are appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States and who serve staggered seven-year terms.

News reports of the highly classified court order, first reported by The Guardian newspaper Wednesday, sparked outrage among many Americans, especially civil libertarians. Legislators and White House officials downplayed the growing controversy, claiming that the monitoring of phone calls is “nothing new” and defending the agency’s efforts as an effective way to gather intelligence on terrorists.

When they aren’t busy handing down landmark decisions, professing the law or attending the opera, U.S. Supreme Court Justices can make millions in book deals.

The high court’s authors raked in nearly $2 million in publishing advances, appearances and royalties during 2012, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor taking home the lion’s share, according to new personal financial disclosure documents reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

Sotomayor collected more than $1.9 million in advances and promotion for her memoir, My Beloved World, published by Knopf Doubleday.

As the third woman and first Hispanic justice appointed to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor’s rags-to-riches tome became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller after its January release.

See Sotomayor's full disclosure filing here.

The publishing industry was also good, but not as good, to Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia.

Breyer made roughly $30,890 in book royalties, while Scalia — his ideological adversary on the bench — collected nearly $64,000.

Scalia co-wrote Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts last year with Bryan Gardner, legal scholar and editor and chief of Black’s Law Dictionary. Breyer wrote Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, released in 2007, and 2010’s Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View.

Bipartisanship is so rare on Capitol Hill these days, especially in regard to health care, that when such comity breaks out, it’s worth reporting.

Around the time the House of Representatives was voting for the 30-somethingth time to repeal Obamacare, two lawmakers from Texas — Democrat Gene Green and Republican Joe Barton — introduced legislation to fix a problem that most folks with private insurance know nothing about. That’s because it only affects the poorest among us who are eligible for Medicaid.

The problem is referred to by policy wonks as “churn.” Because of the way Medicaid is administered by the states, millions of Americans enrolled in the program lose coverage temporarily every year because of often minor fluctuations in their income or even a change of address. Many are removed from the rolls simply because they can’t take time off from work to go to a Medicaid office to re-verify their incomes every three months, which some states require.

It’s called churn because most people who are “disenrolled” — to use insurance industry jargon — are eventually reinstated. Their eligibility for Medicaid never changed. They lost coverage solely because of paperwork requirements or a slight and fleeting bump in pay because of having to work overtime during a given week.

This is unknown in the private insurance world because once you enroll in a health plan, you can stay enrolled in that plan for a year, so long as you keep paying the premiums on time. It doesn’t matter if you move from one street to another or work an extra shift to make a few extra bucks.

But staying covered for a full year under Medicaid is not a given, and the consequences of this churn are costly, and not just for those most directly affected. The situation is costly to taxpayers, too, because of the unnecessary administrative expense. It costs hundreds of dollars per enrollee to verify income multiple times a year and to process all the paperwork involved in reinstating a beneficiary. When you consider that 58 million of Americans are currently enrolled in Medicaid — a number that will grow substantially next year when many states expand coverage under the Affordable Care Act — billions of taxpayers’ dollars are being wasted because of churn.

Those who fare the worst, though, are eligible beneficiaries who get dumped into the ranks of the uninsured.

“Even short gaps in coverage can lead to delay or avoidance of needed care,” says Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Human Services, who along with colleague Erika Steinmetz studied the effects of churn. They released their findings in a report last month.

They found that gaps in coverage often lead to significant increases in hospitalization  for chronic diseases like diabetes, asthma and mental disorders.

“Churning has a pervasive negative impact on health for low-income Americans,” says Margaret A. Murray, CEO of the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), an organization representing health plans serving Medicaid beneficiaries, which commissioned the study. “It stymies the efforts of plans serving Medicaid populations to provide consistent, coordinated care. Worst of all, churning interrupts care for many people and forces them to go to an emergency department rather than their primary care doctor because they don’t have the coverage they thought they had.”

The problem will be even more acute when the states’ online health insurance exchanges, or marketplaces, begin enrolling folks this coming October. Most Americans who do not have coverage will be able to shop for it in these exchanges, which the Affordable Care Act requires states to set up.  Murray cites research showing that up to half of the 28 million adults with incomes less than twice the poverty level — an annual income of $22,340 for an individual or $38,180 for a family of three — will have income fluctuations that will require them to switch between Medicaid and private coverage offered through the exchanges in a given year.

“This shift in eligibility may trigger a sudden change in plans and provider networks, which can have serious repercussions for the enrollee’s financial and health status,” says Murray.

What ACAP advocates — which Green and Barton’s bill would achieve — is a guarantee of 12 months of continuous eligibility to everyone with Medicaid. At the end of the 12-month period, eligibility would be re-evaluated. That’s what a few states do now for children enrolled in the program and in their Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP).

The idea has also been endorsed by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC). Other advocates include the Children’s Hospital Association, the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems and the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

If Green and Barton’s bill makes it through Congress — no sure bet considering the gridlock that seems to prevail on Capitol Hill — it would save us all a lot of money and give millions of low-income Americans greater peace of mind.