BOGOTA, Colombia — Cesar Florez is often hesitant to answer his phone because there might be another death threat at the end of the line. Sometimes the threat comes in a phone call, other times in a text message or an email. In April, flyers were posted in the restroom stalls at Florez’s workplace, declaring him and his colleagues “permanent military targets.”

Until last month, Florez served as a local president of Sintramienergetica, a labor union in Colombia that represents the employees of Drummond Company, a U.S.-based coal-mining firm, in a country known for some of the world’s most severe violence against union leaders. Florez has been a Drummond employee for 17 years and active in the union for the last 14. Most recently, he worked as a marine operations technician in Drummond’s port near Santa Marta, where its coal is shipped out on barges.

But his position as a union leader has also meant he’s attracted a significant number of threats, including attempts on his life, which happen to spike around labor disputes, he said. In July 2013 the union went on strike, calling for a pay raise and to move from an hourly wage to a salary, among other demands. For 53 days the strike wore on amid tense negotiations, while the threats that Florez and his colleagues received only accelerated.

“They said if we didn’t lift the strike we’d be a target,” Florez said, describing some of the phone calls he received. “They said they already knew where my family was.”

Many of the written threats that Florez received bear the watermark of Los Rastrojos Comandos Urbanos, an active paramilitary group with ties to drug trafficking.

The Center for Public Integrity made numerous attempts to reach Drummond for comment on allegations that it has used the group to try to intimidate Sintramienergetica leaders like Florez; a spokesman said he could not respond to any questions on the matter. In a recent statement, the company’s lawyers asserted, “Drummond has never paid or otherwise assisted any illegal group in Colombia, whether paramilitary or guerilla [sic].”

Nonetheless, Drummond has been named in several lawsuits alleging financial ties to paramilitary groups since the mid-1990s.

Drummond — a closely held company based in Birmingham, Alabama, with revenues that reached $3 billion last year—has helped Colombia become the world’s fourth-largest coal exporter. Heman Drummond started the business in 1935 on the backs of mules that were used to haul loads of coal from its mines in Alabama. Under the leadership of his son, Garry, the company expanded, securing a contract to extract coal in La Loma, in the Cesar Department of Northeast Colombia in the late 1980s.

While its Colombian operations quickly became a significant revenue stream for the company, security issues and labor disputes have always been substantial obstacles for Drummond’s business. And, according to its workers, intimidation has become routine in a country where trade union leaders are often viewed as subversives.

Killings, threats and lawsuits

On March 12, 2001, a bus carrying Drummond workers — including Valmare Locarno, 42, the local affiliate president of Sintramienergetica and Victor Hugo Orcasita, 36, its vice president — left the mine in La Loma at approximately 6:15 p.m. Locarno was on a three-month leave from the company, but according to one account of the event, he had been called to the mine that day for a meeting with management to discuss some of the complaints of the workers. Both Locarno and Orcasita were negotiating new contracts for the union at the time.

Two trucks — one green and one wine-colored — pulled up alongside the bus and intercepted it a short time later as it drove under a passway. Alcides Manuel Mattos, a member of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group who used the alias “Samario” was the first on the bus, according to his account of the incident, and several others filed in behind him. As he moved to the back of the vehicle, another AUC fighter identified Lacorno and pulled him off the bus, shooting him to death in front of his colleagues. Orcasita was driven away in one of the trucks, and taken to “Tolemaida,” the commander of the Juan Andres Alvarez Front of the AUC. He was killed later that night. And Gustavo Soler, who succeeded Locarno as president, was murdered just seven months later, with two gunshot wounds to his head also while on his way home from work.

Nearly 15 years later, these murders remain on the mind of Cesar Florez. The threats against Sintramienergetica’s leaders have only sharpened, he said in an interview in Bogota.

Four lawsuits — three of which are pending — have been filed against Drummond in U.S. courts by human rights lawyer Terry Collingsworth, who also has taken on companies like Dole Foods Inc. and Chiquita Brands International. One alleges that Drummond is responsible for the deaths of the three Colombian union leaders and financially supported the AUC. The case was dismissed, but an appeal was heard last August after ex-paramilitaries testified under Colombia’s Peace and Justice Program. The 2005 law, which was amended the next year, allowed for reduced sentences in exchange for demobilization and a full confession to one’s crimes. Several paramilitaries who had operated in the area made statements under oath against Drummond.

The decision of the appeals panel in Alabama’s 11^th Circuit is pending; Collingsworth said he expects a ruling soon and is optimistic about the outcome.

“A win here would absolutely establish that companies will be held accountable and this will have a tremendous effect on future conduct of this sort,” he said. “Up until now, companies assumed that they could literally get away with murder in countries like Colombia.”

A Center review of hundreds of pages of court documents and testimony paints a grim picture of the Cesar Department during one of Colombia’s most brutal periods.

When Drummond began operations in Colombia, the country was still embroiled in a civil war led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Kidnappings and extortion schemes were common, and landowners were heavily affected, as guerrilla activity blocked them from their crops and cattle. Ranchers in the Cesar Department began to form self-protection groups in the early 1990s, but when these groups failed to significantly combat guerrilla troops, an initial 60 paramilitaries were recruited to Cesar from the nascent group that later became the AUC. Between 1996 and 2006, the organization grew into a strong militant force of its own that terrorized the region in its mission to defeat the FARC.

By the mid-1990s, as the AUC began to solidify its ranks, security had already become a major concern for Drummond, as it had for the ranchers. The coal from Drummond’s mine is transported along a 120-mile railroad line from La Loma to the port near Santa Marta — a tranquil tourist town tucked into the northern Caribbean coast of the country. But the railroad line soon became a target because of the valuable load it was carrying. Even today, abandoned houses along the route are riddled with bullet holes.

The 41^st front of the FARC attacked the trains with dynamite on multiple occasions. According to a former paramilitary who patrolled the area, palm oil producers would sometimes try to buy the coal illegally from trucks carrying coal along the route as well. Concerns also grew within Drummond’s management over its workers being kidnapped.

Garry Drummond, who is described as both “charismatic” and “brilliant” by men who have worked for him, became desperate to protect his coal, according to testimony. Any delay in shipments could damage the business if he didn’t deliver on valuable contracts that he had secured with European firms. 

In May 1995, the company recruited James Lee Adkins for a job as a security advisor. Adkins had worked with the CIA for 20 years but was placed on leave and said he was later forced to retire from the agency for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, in which the U.S. government came under fire for diverting funds from covert weapons sales to Iran, to rebel militant groups in Nicaragua known as Contras. Drummond managers had met Adkins in Miami during a conference on terrorism in 1988, where the actions of the former CIA agent were lauded in a standing ovation.

Shortly after accepting the position with Drummond, Adkins was making regular flights between Colombia and Alabama on a company plane. In Birmingham, he gave presentations to employees on how to keep from being kidnapped and what do to if it happened. In Colombia, Adkins recommended security protocols to protect Drummond’s railroad line. But according to the testimony of several ex-paramilitaries, Adkins also played a key role in a plan to financially support the AUC as a source of protection for the company.

In a deposition, Adkins said he had “no knowledge of such payments” between Drummond and paramilitary groups. His lawyer declined to comment further on the matter. But memos produced as part of the trial reveal that Adkins knew the FARC had accused Drummond of paying paramilitary groups and that he was aware of paramilitaries guarding the railroad line near banana and palm oil properties.

Jaime Blanco, who grew up in a wealthy family in Valledupar, a city in the Cesar Department, won a bid to become the food contractor for Drummond’s dining facility around the time Adkins joined the company in late 1995. The cafeteria later became known as “the casino,” and according to testimony, miners complained about the number of paramilitaries that spent time there. Blanco had close ties to the AUC, including Rodrigo Tovar, a rancher and childhood friend of Blanco who went by the name of “Jorge 40.” By 1997, Jorge 40 rose to become the commander of the AUC’s entire Northern Bloc when several fronts of the groups unified.

According to Blanco’s testimony, Drummond wanted the AUC’s help to secure the railroad line. Blanco went on to allege that he received $10,000 cash payments directly from Adkins when he returned from his trips to Birmingham. The food contractor, he testified, was also told to overcharge for certain items through his company, so that overages could be directed to the AUC. In his deposition, Adkins denied making payments through Blanco and said that the food contract with Drummond was already in place before he had met Blanco.

Contracts awarded to Blanco’s company to provide meals for the workers show a 40 percent increase in the cost of meals over an eight-month period in 1996, while the Consumer Price Index only rose a few percentage points. In his account of events, Blanco says this is one way that money was funneled from Drummond to the AUC.

Still, there are numerous discrepancies between the testimonies of the former paramilitaries. Collingsworth attributes this to the time that has lagged since the original events, while defense lawyers say it is evidence of falsehood.

Lawyers on behalf of Drummond have vehemently denied any connection to paramilitary groups that have operated in the area since the first lawsuit was filed in 2002. And in Adkins’ testimony, he reiterates this and says there was a company policy against funding such groups, despite the security situation at the time.

Blanco is serving a 38-year sentence in connection with the deaths of the union workers after being convicted in January of last year by a Colombian court. He also alleges in his testimony that Drummond directed the AUC to kill the union workers because they were threatening to strike and that this could delay coal shipments. In response to evidence that surfaced in Blanco’s trial, the judge called for an investigation into CEO Garry Drummond and three other managers.

Worker safety concerns

Sintramienergetica workers continue to have serious concerns over pay and worker safety. Fears of death threats and job insecurity for union affiliation remain rampant. While Drummond describes its relationship with the union as a positive one, union members have repeatedly criticized the company’s treatment of its workers.

On March 22, 2009, Dagoberto Clavijo lost control of the tanker truck he was driving, and died after his vehicle slipped off an embankment outside of the mine in La Loma. He was just one month into his job. Sintramienergetica workers in the Santa Marta port and La Loma mine went on strike the next day in protest, calling for safer working conditions and complaining that Clavijo hadn’t received proper training. The strike lasted four days. But Drummond responded by declaring the strike illegal, and Colombia’s Supreme Court later agreed. The company fired 35 workers, nearly all who were a part of the union’s leadership, Florez among them. 

With the help of lawyers, Florez had his contract reinstated but was fired once more in 2011. In early June, he lost his appeal and his contract with the company was terminated. He attributes Drummond’s actions to his union activity and the fact that he suffers from heart arrhythmia.

“The sick are always fired,” said Florez. “Drummond has this arrogance. They say, ‘So sue!’ Since they know that the workers are not going to win.”

Anibal Perez, another former member of Sintramienergetica, suffered a work-related accident in May 2009 and today leans on a cane. The ligaments in his right ankle never healed properly as he tried to continue working under the instructions of his supervisor and against those of his doctor. The next month he lost his job anyway. Perez went on to organize the Association of Sick Workers of Drummond Ltd Port of Santa Marta in March of 2010. In testimony, he cited between 8,000 and 10,000 work-related accidents, 25 deaths and 1,500 cases of lung cancer among the employees of Drummond since it began operations in the early 1990s.

Perez said he received death threats after he began advocating for improved conditions and condemned Drummond for its labor and human-rights violations.

After Perez denounced Drummond at a human rights conference in Santa Marta in August 2012, armed men showed up at Perez’s house, warning that now they would really act because he had ignored their previous messages. His wife would find him in a pool of blood, “because they didn’t like snitches or sons of bitches or human rights defenders,” Perez said. After this incident, he sent his family to live in another country; as of March of 2013 he was under government protection.

Although the AUC formally disbanded in 2006, many former groups that have been demobilized have simply re-organized into criminal gangs and go by a different name. The threats continue against labor union leaders across the country, not just for those with Sintramienergetica. According to the National Labor School, an organization based in Medellin that researches labor issues, between 2010 and 2013 alone there were 1,634 threats made against union workers and 139 assassinations. Union leaders contend these numbers likely underestimate the scope of the problem.

Human-rights advocates familiar with the issue see the threats as a means to undermine the collective bargaining power of workers, in order to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights. It seems to be working: The disincentives to joining a union are so strong that for most workers, it’s simply not worth it. A mere 4 percent of Colombian workers boast union affiliation.

Union members and leaders across Colombia told the Center that the government has been negligent in protecting workers and that the problem is so widespread it impedes the true purpose of labor unions.

“Our work has become about defending the lives and safety of our fellow members. So now the fight is not to get paid better wages or rights for workers, but to avoid being killed,” said Edgar Paez, who works on international relations with the food workers union, Sinaltrainal.

While the government offers protection to those who are facing threats through its National Protection Unit under the Ministry of the Interior, there is fierce competition for this limited resource. Many union leaders also complain that the scope of the services is insufficient to protect them.

“They argue that the zone is now at peace and that is not true. In the region where we work and especially where there is union activity, there is a continued presence of paramilitary groups,” said Florez, who was denied protection while serving as one of Sintramienergetica’s leaders.

These problems have not completely escaped the attention of the international community. When the United States signed a Free Trade Agreement with the country in 2006, Congress hesitated to enact the agreement because of Colombia’s poor labor rights record. In response, a Labor Action Plan was signed in 2011 to pressure Colombia’s government to create more protections for unions. It called for a number of criminal justice reforms, as well as outlawing union breaking collectives and temporary service agencies — commonly used tools that undermine the bargaining powers of workers. 

Critics have called the plan a tool to ease the consciences of U.S. policymakers rather than provide the teeth Colombia needs to make real adjustments. And a report published last year by U.S. Reps. George Miller, D-Calif., and Jim McGovern, D-Mass., highlighted the continued obstacles union workers faced.

Gimena Sanchez, a senior researcher at the Washington Office on Latin America says the action plan has helped put a dent in the problems union workers face. “Trade union workers were on the verge of becoming extinct,” she said. 

But difficulties remain. “There’s still an enormous amount of pressure to not investigate these cases [of intimidation], because of the economic interests involved and because it would bring to light the true intellectual authors of these crimes,” Sanchez said.

Questions linger about how to mitigate the problem. Some union workers see court cases like the ones Drummond faces in the United States as an important step toward creating greater corporate accountability.

With few other options, the danger of being part of a union remains a necessary sacrifice for some.

 “Of course I feel fear,” Florez said. “To not feel fear is to not be human. But we have a duty and a commitment to fight these injustices, and so we put our fate in the hands of God.”

Lawmakers celebrated the fourth anniversary of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, known as Dodd-Frank, with the release of dueling reports, one by Republicans and the other by Democrats.

The Republican report, written by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., denounced the financial reform law for failing to eliminate “too big to fail,” the situation when banks are so large that their failure would destabilize the U.S. financial system.

In a statement accompanying Monday’s report, McHenry, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said, “rather than institute market discipline and a clear rules-based regime, four years later, Dodd-Frank’s failed policies have only worsened the risks within the financial system and recklessly handed financial regulators a blank check for taxpayer-funded bailouts.”

During the 2008 financial crisis, the Republican administration of George W. Bush, with the blessing of a Democratic Congress, created a $700 billion fund to bail out banks and other financial firms that were teetering on the brink of collapse. The move angered many who saw the government protecting the financial industry over taxpayers.

Under the new rules, the Federal Reserve has the power to break up a bank if it doesn't believe it can go bankrupt or be wound down without harming the overall financial system, said Alexis Goldstein, communications director of Other98.com, an activist consumer group. 

"Dodd-Frank gives the regulators the tools they need to end 'too big to fail,' but thus far they have lacked the spine to use them," she said. 

Republicans see the government's authority to wind down banks as a back door way to bail them out. They plan to introduce legislation “to repeal Dodd-Frank’s bailout fund,” Hensarling said.

Criticism of Dodd-Frank is nothing new. Since the law passed, Republicans in the House have proposed more than 30 pieces of legislation targeting parts of the law. Most of these attempts were led by lawmakers identified by the Center for Public Integrity as the “banking caucus” in an April investigation, because of their strong ties to and support of the financial industry. The "banking caucus" includes Democrats.

Former Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., who was co-author of the reform law, will defend the law at a committee hearing Wednesday.

The Republican report labels the Financial Stability Oversight Council, created by Dodd-Frank to assess systemic risks to the financial system, an “unwieldy conglomerate” and attacks plans such as orderly liquidation authority — which allows the government to wind down major financial institution whose failure would otherwise threaten the economy — for failing to live up to their task of ending “too big to fail.”

Banking caucus members have proposed bills to repeal orderly liquidation authority and to weaken the authority of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

Democrats on Financial Services released a counterpoint Monday detailing the successes of Dodd-Frank. They say the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency created by Dodd-Frank, has returned $4.6 billion to consumers. The reform has also reduced risk, boosted oversight and added transparency to the industry and forced banks to shift “away from speculative trading to investments in the real economy,” the Democrats’ report said.

“This progress has been regularly stymied by a concerted effort by the Majority to underfund regulators’ operations, relentlessly pressure them to weaken regulations, and otherwise erect roadblocks to implementation,” the report said.

In a statement, Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on Financial Services, accused her Republican colleagues of “an unrelenting campaign to destroy Dodd-Frank while not providing an alternative.”

Civil rights groups filed a federal complaint Tuesday challenging a Texas city’s ban on providing housing to “refugees” or foreigners such as the Central American children who’ve been turning themselves in at the border.

The complaint against an ordinance adopted July 8 by League City, a Houston suburb, was filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, and Appleseed, a Texas public-interest law group. Appleseed has researched dangers faced by Mexican and Central American migrant children.

The complaint argues that the ordinance — one of a number being contemplated in Texas — is discriminatory and violates the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “There is particularly ugly language about Muslims in this League City ordinance also,” said Maddie Sloan, an Appleseed attorney.

The number of children from Central America showing up along the U.S.-Mexico border has surged this year.  Since last October, more than 52,000 minors, many of them without parents, have been detained, double the total number of such kids detained during all of last year. For some kids, a Department of Homeland Security assessment found, violence in their countries is so great that the risk of traveling alone “is preferable to remaining at home.”

Marisa Bono, a MALDEF attorney, said the complaint against League City “is a warning to other municipalities that are considering similar resolutions. Cities can’t accept federal funds, and then use them to discriminate.”

The complaint asks the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate and halt ordinances aimed at “vulnerable children.”  

The League City ordinance, approved in a 6-2 vote, lists a number of allegations that elected officials say motivated them to outlaw the provision of housing for children.

Language in the housing ban makes the claim that illegal immigrants carry diseases “endemic” to their countries of origin — an allegation that international health experts say is factually unfounded, as the Texas Observer reported.  

The United Nations Children’s Fund reports that 93 percent of children in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are vaccinated against measles, compared to 92 percent of American kids.

Federal officials have not approached League City about placing children there at federal cost, as they have in other communities with suitable shelters.

But supporters of the ordinance said they wanted to take a stand, and protect taxpayers from having to shoulder costs for schooling or other services for children. The ordinance also asserts a need for a ban because “radical Islamist terror groups continue to exploit the situation to infiltrate the United States” — an allegation that has also not been proved or linked to the influx of Central Americans.

“Be it resolved,” the ordinance says, that all agencies in League City are “instructed to refuse requests or directives by federal agencies to permit or establish any facility for the purposes of processing, housing, or detaining any illegal aliens, designated as ‘refugees,’ or otherwise.”

Heidi Theiss, the council member who wrote the ordinance, talked to KPRC television in Texas about why she proposed the housing ban. “We are a very safe city, here in League City,” she said, “and it’s that way because we’re proactive.”

Some minors taken into custody at the border say they fear gang violence and reprisals and other dangers in Central America, an impoverished region struggling with organized crime and drug cartels, as the Center for Public Integrity has reported. 

Debate is on over whether to alter existing federal legislation so that Border Patrol agents can quickly deport more of the minors rather than put them in shelters where social workers can assess them and they can get immigration court dates.

Advocates for children argue that as children, the minors need a safe place to reveal their circumstances and talk about whether they might be eligible to seek asylum or another type of legal status, or agree to be returned to their home countries in an orderly fashion.

As election season spools up and an already lethargic Congress readies for recess, federal lobbying efforts among elite special interests are sputtering, too. 

About three-fifths of the nation’s top 100 lobbying entities spent less during this year’s second quarter than they did during the same period in 2013, according to a Center for Public Integrity of analysis of new congressional disclosure reports and Center for Responsive Politics data. Spending by several others remained stagnant.

Unlike last year at this time, members of Congress are more concerned about getting re-elected than passing legislation.

The second-quarter thriftiness reverses what amounted to a modest spending uptick earlier this year, at least among lobbying powerhouses. 

The American Medical Association ($3.9 million, down from $4.3 million during the second quarter of 2013), American Hospital Association ($4.4 million, down from $5 million) and General Electric ($2.8 million, down from $3.6 million) rank among the top decliners.

The defense industry generally deployed less legislative firepower, with contractors United Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics cutting lobbying spending.

Many large oil and energy production interests also spent less, including Southern Co., Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Exelon Corp., Duke Energy and BP.

A surprise lobbying spender of 2013 — the upstart National Association for Gun Rights, which spent more than $3 million during last year’s second quarter and easily trumped the National Rifle Association in this regard — invested $1.24 million during this year’s second quarter.

Last year “was the biggest year on gun legislation in Congress in two decades, and NAGR was the main player in defeating every gun control measure anti-gun legislators tried to pass,” National Association for Gun Rights spokeswoman Danielle Thompson explained.  “We will continue to fight against any infringement against our Second Amendment rights and push for repeal of anti-gun laws that are already in the books.”

Everytown for Gun Safety Action, the Michael Bloomberg-led group formerly known as Mayors Against Illegal Guns, spent just $100,000 from April to June after spending $580,000 during the same time frame last year.

Even top lobbying spenders can largely thank midterm congressional campaigns, not policy battles, for their prolific output.   

That’s because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($28.8 million during second-quarter 2014 compared to $19.1 million during second-quarter 2013) and the National Association of Realtors ($16.5 million versus $9.1 million) opt to disclose state- and grassroots-level lobbying, as well as issue and political advertising, alongside its federally focused efforts. Most lobbying entities don’t.   

Chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff Holmes attributed second-quarter spending to a “significant voter education campaign … highlighting candidates’ positions on issues important to the business community with the goal of electing people who understand how jobs are created and are interested in governing.”

To date, the Chamber has spent nearly $15 million during the 2014 election cycle advocating for or against federal candidates. Its top beneficiaries so far include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss.; Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. and Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Back on Capitol Hill, the Chamber continues to lobby heavily on “critical job creation issues being considered by Congress,” such as transportation, infrastructure, energy and trade matters, Holmes said.

The Realtors association has likewise this cycle spent about $1.5 million on direct candidate advocacy through its super PAC — Cochran, and Reps. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, and Pete Sessions, R-Texas, are favored politicos — and counts that money toward its lobbying output. 

“Since it’s an election year, yes, our numbers are up over last year,” Realtors’ spokeswoman Jenny Werwa confirmed.

There are several exceptions to the second quarter’s lobbying slump.

Notable among them: the tech and telecom industries, which have wrestled Congress, the White House and federal agencies on a variety of issues ranging from corporate mergers to net neutrality to National Security Agency surveillance.  

Companies and trade groups reporting lobbying spending increases during 2014’s second quarter from 2013’s second quarter include Google ($5 million from $3.7 million), the National Association of Broadcasters ($4.7 million from $3.2 million), AT&T Inc. ($3.8 million from $3.7 million), Verizon Communications ($3.5 million from $3.3 million), CTIA-The Wireless Association ($2.2 million from $1.9 million), Facebook ($2.1 million from $1 million) and the U.S. Telecom Association ($1.35 million from $1.3 million).

Among communications companies spending less during this year’s second quarter, Comcast Corp. is most well-known.

Twitter spent $90,000 on lobbying during the second quarter — a pittance compared to other tech titans, but significant considering the social media company only began lobbying the federal government late last year and has been increasing expenditures ever since. Data security and privacy matters topped its agenda, according to its federal filing.

Spending by financial interests was up from April to June, as many continue to snipe at elements of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which this week marked its fourth anniversary.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association ($2.1 million from $1.3 million), JPMorgan Chase and Co. ($1.6 million from $1.3 million) and Wells Fargo ($1.6 million from $1.4 million) led the way, although the American Bankers Association and Financial Services Roundtable posted lobbying declines.

Meanwhile, top K Street lobbying firms, which make their money from clients of all sizes, not just the biggest of the big, reportedreasonably good second-quarter income.

For more than a year, InsideClimate News and the Center for Public Integrity have been reporting on air pollution caused by the fracking boom in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas. Despite hundreds of complaints from residents, many of them about noxious air emissions, we discovered that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution and rarely fines companies for breaking emission laws.

On our 11 trips to Texas we encountered many residents who asked what seemed to be a reasonable question: If a state regulatory agency — in this case the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — isn’t doing much to curb the industry's air pollution, why isn’t the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepping in? The EPA, after all, is ultimately responsible for enforcing the federal Clean Air Act.

In February, after we published our first stories on the Eagle Ford, we began trying to answer that question by seeking on-the-record interviews with EPA officials in Washington, D.C., and Texas. Five months later, no such interviews have been granted.

Instead, EPA press officers have told us to put our questions in writing, an increasingly common response from federal agencies under the Obama administration. The process usually goes like this: A journalist calls the press office to schedule an interview but instead is told to submit written questions.  Once these are in, a press officer gets answers from scientists or other officials and then crafts a written response. In most cases, nobody involved in the process — not even the EPA press officers — will agree to be quoted by name.

Journalists object to this policy because clarity and accuracy are easily compromised when they're forced to discuss complex issues through intermediaries who aren't subject-matter experts. To ask follow-up questions, the laborious process must begin all over again, with no opportunity for the natural give-and-take of a conversation.

The EPA’s non-responsiveness in the Texas air pollution story is especially troubling because it keeps taxpayers in the dark about the agency’s handling of a critical environmental issue. Concerns about the oil and gas industry's air pollution — which contains benzene, toluene and other chemicals known to damage human health — extend far beyond Texas. Similar problems exist in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, the Upper Green River Basin of Wyoming and the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania.

Our first attempt at an on-the-record interview was with Ron Curry, the administrator of EPA Region 6, which includes Texas. We discussed our request with David Gray, the region’s director of external and government affairs, by phone. Gray suggested we start with an initial interview on background, which meant we couldn’t quote or identify any EPA officials on the call. He then handed off our request to Cathy Milbourn, a press officer at EPA headquarters.

Milbourn set up an interview, but the only EPA participants were herself and a senior public affairs advisor in the EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards in North Carolina.

The two officials answered a few of our questions and provided some general information on EPA rules, most of which we already knew through our reporting. Neither had the expertise to give us what we really needed: answers to our complex questions about enforcement and regulations.

In early April we asked for an on-the-record interview with the EPA official we believed could best address these questions: Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. As the agency’s highest-ranking air official, McCabe — perhaps with an assist from technical staff — seemed a logical candidate for a frank discussion about what the EPA can and can’t do under the Clean Air Act.

At first, the EPA seemed to be considering our request. Spokeswoman Julia Valentine emailed back, saying she would respond "shortly." After three weeks, we’d heard nothing. So we checked in with Valentine again, and she again promised to get back to us. Another four weeks passed. After further prompting, we learned that our request had been sent to Milbourn, the spokeswoman we talked with in March.

In subsequent emails with Milbourn, we described the topics we wanted to cover, provided links to our Eagle Ford Shale stories and answered all of Milbourn's questions. We repeatedly explained the need for an on-the-record discussion with McCabe. To accommodate McCabe's busy schedule, we listed July 15 as our deadline — six weeks from our first email to Milbourn, and three months after our initial interview request.

The emails continued until Milbourn wrote on July 12, "An interview on this issue isn't possible."

The Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News have decided to publish all of the emails that accumulated during our failed attempt to get an interview with McCabe because we believe the nation’s top environmental agency should talk directly about a problem that is of increasing concern to millions of Americans.

Our problems with the EPA are not unusual. Earlier this month, 38 journalism and communications organizations wrote a joint letter to President Obama urging him to put “an end to this restraint on communication in federal agencies.” The letter came shortly after the Society of Environmental Journalists protested the EPA's refusal to release the names of the technical experts who participated in a media conference call to discuss new carbon regulations.

When the EPA dismisses members of the media, it is dismissing the public — the people the agency is supposed to serve, said Michael Nelson, a professor of environmental ethics at Oregon State University.

“They are charged with protecting the public good, and the public is who they ultimately answer to," he said. “There’s no way they’re acting on behalf of the public good unless there’s transparency and communication.”

Nelson called our email exchange with the EPA “quite stunning.”

“This is a great example where you have a lot of communication, but at the end of the correspondence there’s no evidence that anybody’s working on behalf of the public good,” he said.

InsideClimate News and CPI will continue asking the EPA for interviews with officials and scientists who have the information we need to make our stories as clear, complete and accurate as possible. We remain hopeful that the Obama administration will come to realize the public deserves at least that much, not just from journalists but from the federal government itself.

Lisa Song is a reporter with InsideClimate News.

These are the bureaucratic explanations. The ambitious effort also appears to have been undone by a simple fact, which might have been foreseen but was evidently ignored: Afghans don’t like the taste of the soy processed foods. This view survived even the U.S. government’s use of what it called “food technologists” to teach families how soybean products can be used to make tasty meals.

As one of the project’s managers said, it was a “risky but honorable endeavor,” meant to improve the nutrition of malnourished Afghans by raising the level of protein in their diets. As such, the project’s problems model the larger shortcomings of the estimated $120 billion U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, including what many experts depict as ignorance of Afghan traditions, mismanagement and poor spending controls.

No one has calculated precisely how much the United States wasted or misspent in Afghanistan, but a special congressionally-chartered group known as the Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated in 2011 that it could be nearly a third of the total. A special auditor appointed by President Obama the following year said he discovered nearly $7 billion worth of Afghanistan-related waste in just his first year on the job.

“We didn't have a reconstruction effort, we just spent a lot of money,” mostly to get the Afghan military working and keep its government afloat, commented Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East specialist and former defense intelligence analyst who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit group in Washington. The funds allocated to rebuild the country mostly went to “short-term aid projects, without an assessment of the overall economy, with reliance on contractors. And for most of the time you didn't have effective auditing procedures,” Cordesman said.

The Afghan diet reform effort, formally known as the Soybeans for Agricultural Renewal in Afghanistan Initiative, was overseen by the Agriculture Department (USDA) and implemented by the main trade association for the industry, the American Soybean Association. It encountered problems from the start.

The first crop failed, and subsequent harvests didn’t produce enough soybeans to operate a special factory in Mazar-e-Sharif — constructed and managed by a nonprofit organization based in Iowa at a cost of at least $1.5 million — that was meant to create a local soybean economy. Afghan farmers participating in the project, discouraged by crop failures, largely abandoned their growing efforts.

As a result, the factory has instead been forced to use at least 4,000 metric tons of soybeans imported from America at a cost of more than $2 million. But its operation has been so hobbled by shortages that those involved in the project worry that its equipment could soon be dismantled and sold by its local owner.

In March, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko met with project and government employees in the country who told him there is no ”significant demand for soybean products in Afghanistan,” as he wrote in a letter the following month to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. “This should have been expected, since Afghans apparently have never grown or eaten soybeans before,” Sopko wrote.

Moreover, those running the program told him that “Afghans don’t like the taste of bread made with soybean flour,” Sopko wrote. He requested that the department turn over all of its internal documents on the program.

Then, after reviewing the documents, Sopko wrote Vilsack again in June, expressing alarm that a feasibility study was not performed before the department started spending tens of millions of dollars on the idea, and that it was not halted when problems were flagged in a USDA-financed review this February.

“What is troubling about this particular project is that it appears that many of these problems could have been foreseen and, therefore, possibly avoided,” Sopko said.

Asked for comment, the Agriculture Department called Sopko’s criticisms “premature.” Spokeswoman Gwen Sparks said, “The project has produced positive results in the direct distribution of soybean products, renovation of irrigation systems and rehabilitation of farm-to-market roads.” She also said the effort, slated to end in five months, was modified after the special expert review and would be reexamined before it is extended.

But Food for Progress, the USDA program financing the soybean project, has a broader history of mismanagement and oversight failings, according to a March 2014 report by USDA Assistant Inspector General for Audit Gil H. Harden.

The program has “significant … management control weaknesses,” Harden wrote about Food for Progress. His audit did not encompass the soybean project. But 10 of 11 food aid projects it did examine lacked required status reports, and so they could not be properly assessed by those in charge, his report said.

A large program sprouts from a small taste test

By all accounts, the idea for the soybeans-in-Afghanistan endeavor came from Dr. Steven Kwon, a food biochemist who first visited the country eleven years ago, while he was a nutritionist in California with the Nestlé food company, to give a lecture at Balkh University in Mazar-e-Sharif. He became convinced that Afghans needed more protein in their diets, according to Sonia Kwon, his daughter, who handles public relations for the effort.

During a subsequent visit to Mazar-e-Sharif, Kwon held a blind taste test between two beverages — one a soy-based product, the other milk-based — with about 20 participants, including university faculty and students, local government officials and community leaders, according to Sonia Kwon. She said that every member of the panel preferred the soy-based product.

This tiny, unscientific survey formed the foundation of the U.S. government’s four-year effort to change the Afghan diet, according to multiple sources.

To promote his vision of a soybean-filled Afghan future, Kwon formed a nonprofit company called Nutrition and Education International, retired from Nestlé, and started trying to teach Afghans the wonders of the bean. His funding came solely from private donors, and by 2009 his budget of $752,000 funded small-scale soybean projects in 26 provinces.

Eventually, Kwon reached out to Jim Hershey, who runs the American Soybean Association’s longstanding effort to promote the use of soybeans in food aid. They were at a 2008 soybean trade conference in St. Louis when Kwon approached Hershey and said, “Let’s do a project together,” Hershey told the Center in an interview.

Kwon said that after Hershey accompanied him on a trip to Afghanistan, Hershey suggested they obtain federal funding for the effort. The trade group was a logical partner. Hershey’s operation, known as the World Initiative for Soy in Human Health, had overseen several dozen food aid projects since its creation in 2000, mostly in Central America and Africa — albeit at a comparatively low annual budget of around $2 million. The association has repeatedly touted how such projects create new soy markets.

A 2009 project with food processors in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua noted, for example, that “this type of technical assistance … opens the door for increased sales of U.S. soy ingredients.” The program’s chairman, David Iverson, wrote in a 2010 annual report that “three powerful sources influence our compass: More people. More demand for soy protein. More buying power in developing countries.”

The association previously had little experience with teaching large-scale soy cultivation, or overseeing the construction of soy protein factories, Hershey acknowledged. But he said the association’s board had approved a strategic plan for 2009-2010 that called for expanding its development work. “We saw it as an opportunity to put our shoulder to the wheel,” Hershey said, distinguishing this aim from “building the demand side of the value chain.”

The association had, moreover, forged close ties to officials in Washington.

Its annual conference in Washington, typically held at a hotel on Capitol Hill and co-hosted with agriculture giants such as Cargill, Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, regularly attracts foreign aid officials from USDA and other agencies, as well as lawmakers such as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, D-Ill., providing its co-sponsors with coveted access to key decision-makers.

The USDA did not ask for a feasibility study, Hershey said. So he and Kwon jointly submitted a proposal to USDA in the summer of 2009, where it eventually wound up on the desk of Janet Nuzum, the assistant administrator of the Foreign Agricultural Service, who signed it. She’s an Obama political appointee and former registered lobbyist for the International Dairy Foods Association, where she was general counsel and vice president for international affairs from 1997 to 2002. In 1999, she and Steve Censky, the soy association’s top official, were both members of the same USDA advisory committee on foreign trade agreements.

Censky said he did not recall meeting Nuzum there, and Nuzum did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the reasons she signed off on the funding. But Ron Croushorn, director of the Food Assistance Division at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, said in an interview that the department was mostly impressed by what Kwon had accomplished.

He said the USDA staff-level evaluator for the proposal noted the absence of any prior feasibility analysis for a major program but hailed the fact that “there had been a lot of work in the soybean sector” in Afghanistan by Kwon’s group.

Nuzum and Censky agreed in September 2010 on the scope, duration and funding for the project, making it the second-most costly such grant approved by USDA that year. The contract specified that the project managers would use existing soybean association affiliates as subcontractors. So an Iowa-based nonprofit, SALT International, whose president had done previous work for the association, was brought on board to build and manage the soybean processing factory and train its workers.

In December, the first of the project’s three country directors was hired, and Nuzum went to Portsmouth, Virginia, to celebrate the first shipment of 80 tons of American-made soy flour — provided by Cargill — for Mazar-e-Sharif. The program, Nuzum wrote on the USDA blog after her visit, would ultimately benefit 400,000 Afghans, and help transform Afghanistan from a “food insecure nation — unable to produce or procure enough food to feed its people.”

“It’s more than soy flour,” Nuzum wrote. “For many Afghans, it’s a hope.”

A few months later, however, Kwon and his organization — which had played a key role in winning the contract — withdrew from the effort altogether, following a dispute with the trade association over the project’s goals. They couldn’t agree on “strategy and vision,” a program participant said. They “would not have been good partners.”

Steven Kwon told the Center in an interview that he disagreed with the soybean association’s demand that farmers sell soybeans to the processing factory, instead of using the product to feed their families at home. “They used us to get the grant and then, when they received the grant, they started dictating, overriding our core value,” Kwon said.

Jim Hershey told the Center that Kwon’s group’s insistence on teaching the farmers how to cook soybeans for home use was “a dealbreaker.”

“That's their philosophy, but it wasn't the philosophy of this development project,” Hershey said. “The farm is just the first step in the value chain. If the farm is consuming the soybeans, that runs counter to the project."

Kwon’s departure in the spring of 2011 — two months before the first planting took place in June — initially left the association without a partner to manage soy production, as well as the cooking and nutrition seminars and soy distribution. Those tasks were subsequently picked up by a nonprofit Minnesota company originally hired to construct and repair roads and irrigation systems, known as Shelter for Life.

But “the loss of NEI as the production partner in the first few months of implementation … has had a negative impact on the possibilities for success,” according to the February 2014 independent evaluation of the program financed by USDA, a copy of which was obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Sowing but not reaping

The program ran into early trouble when its new planting managers, who had prior experience in the northern Afghan province of Takhar, decided to plant a soybean seed variety there that required four months to reach maturity. A major snowfall occurred in late September, before the harvest, and most of the crop was lost.

“The season in Takhar,” the independent evaluation noted, “is just too short.”

As it turns out, a feasibility study conducted three years earlier by a British group, Joint Development Associates International, for the principal British foreign aid organization highlighted the special challenges posed by Afghanistan’s weather patterns. It concluded that “the crop production cycle and available water means that soybeans do not fit profitably into the Afghan farming system.”

The group’s report, obtained by the Center, said it “strongly advise[d] against any further encouragement of farmers growing soybeans in Afghanistan.” It bluntly noted that while many government agencies “have been approached by people wanting to promote soybean production,” agreeing to do so would result in “the waste of development funding.”

Hershey said he was unfamiliar with the British report until 2013, and that ”had we known about the report, we might have approached things a little bit differently.”

According to the independent evaluation for USDA, the Afghans recruited into the U.S.-led effort were predominantly illiterate, small subsistence farmers, who resisted planting soybean seeds as densely as they should have, sharply reducing crop yields. They also had no crop insurance, so the early crop failure due to weather killed their family income.

It “put the program in total jeopardy because farmers are told this is going to work, we’ve got your market, and then the crops fail because you don’t have the varieties right,” said Don Dwyer, a private agricultural consultant who has worked on crop substitution in Afghanistan with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.

The independent evaluation, conducted by EnCompass LLC, based in Rockville, Maryland, said that while thousands of farmers received training and planted soybeans in 2011 and 2012, less than 100 of those farmers replanted in 2013.

The project’s first country director left in November 2012, and the second left the project on Oct. 15, 2013. The third was the association’s former regional office director in Istanbul; he was teamed with an Afghan spokesperson to serve as a liason to the Afghan government, part of what Hershey called the “Afghanization” of the project.

The program also cycled through five chief agronomists over a three-year period, according to the EnCompass report. “It was a revolving door,” one of the project’s members told EnCompass, which concluded that staffing gaps “seem to have undermined implementation.” The report added that those with a stake in the project’s success concluded that “leadership in-country did not have the requisite experience in agriculture or rural development to oversee the project.”

The program also ran into a host of troubles that have afflicted other U.S.-led Afghanistan aid programs:

• Shelter for Life staff members were unable to reach some soybean “production areas” due to security risks, which included three kidnapping threats and farmers who responded with guns in hand when the staff attempted to verify that seeds had been received and planted, according to the EnCompass report.
• One of the agronomists quit when Takhar was hit by riots, Hershey said. Bombings there made clear that “we were dealing with a place with all kinds of risks I hadn’t dealt with before,” he said.
• The soybean processing factory was initially supposed to be constructed at an industrial park in Kabul, the capital, but “security issues” there forced its construction instead in Mazar-e-Sharif, roughly 100 miles from where the soybeans were planted, the report said. It said this drove up costs.
• Traditional discrimination made it hard for women to pick up soy shipments and attend sessions meant to train them on using soy flour.

Due to these and other problems, indigenous farmers in 2013 produced less than 3 percent of the 4,500 metric tons per year needed for the factory to operate at full capacity.

The soybean association responded to the evaluators’ blunt critique that success would take more time — at least five to seven years “to introduce a new crop,” according to the report.

But the signs are not good. As of this spring, the report said, the program’s managers still had not figured out a “mechanical” planting method and the best cultivation techniques to increase yields. And data show that soy is not “more profitable than alternative crops,” giving farmers in the program little incentive to keep going.

The largest challenge, however, may be the most fundamental one — namely, how to make Afghans appreciate the product’s taste and want to buy it.

The soybean association, in its formal response to the evaluation, said it was “in the process of conducting a baking study to determine the optimum amount of low fat soy flour that can be incorporated into Afghan naan [bread] while maintaining total acceptability to local Afghan people.”

In the interview, Hershey said that “most of our acceptability work” suggests that making naan with four to five percent soy flour will extend its shelf life without greatly changing its traditional flavor. But many Afghans, he added, still “aren't ready to pay a little more” for what’s being sold under the label “Strong Naan.”

City officials in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C., simultaneously petitioned the Federal Communications Commission Thursday to pre-empt laws in their states that ban the cities from expanding their high-speed Internet networks.

Chattanooga’s Electric Power Board, which runs its network, has received requests to expand its broadband service to nearby communities, said Danna Bailey, the board’s vice president of corporate communications.

A state law passed in 1999, however, prohibits Chattanooga from offering Internet service beyond the area where it provides electric power. North Carolina has similar restrictions.

These restrictions frustrate the intent of Congress, which is to ensure that every American has access to broadband, the Chattanooga petition said. Wilson officials argued that North Carolina’s law creates an “impermissible barrier to broadband deployment and competition.”

The cities asked the FCC to pre-empt the state laws and declare them unenforceable. 

The cities’ actions mark the first effort by municipalities to enlist the FCC in challenging a state law that restricts local governments from offering Internet service to residents. There are similar restrictions in 20 states. The Center reported on Tennessee’s plans earlier this month.

“We expect the commission to open a couple of proceedings at least, and take public comment,” said Jim Baller, the lawyer who worked with Chattanooga’s EPB and the city of Wilson.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly said  he plans to pre-empt state laws that ban or place barriers on cities that want to build or expand broadband networks.

Sharon Curtis-Flair, spokeswoman for Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper, said she wasn’t aware of the petition.

More than 130 cities operate their own Internet networks, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Chattanooga’s network covers 600 square miles and serves 60,000 people. It has been lauded for attracting high-tech business to the area and for providing residents with Internet speeds they couldn’t purchase from private providers such as Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc.

“For our city to have the economic development that we desire, we need a regional approach that means making high-speed Internet available not just in our city but across a wider area,” said Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga

Telecommunications companies argue it is unfair for them to compete with government, which doesn’t have to make a profit or pay taxes.

The state laws restricting municipal broadband have been backed, and sometimes written, by telecommunications companies led by AT&T Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast.

The companies are among some of the biggest contributors to state lawmakers’ campaigns and spend millions of dollars more on lobbying statehouses. AT&T has given nearly $140,000 to Tennessee lawmakers’ campaigns in the 2014 election cycle, the most for any state, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Comcast gave $76,800 during the same cycle, also surpassing totals given in any other state.

Misusing taxpayer money? Nope.

Luxuriating on special interest-funded junkets? Sorry.

Accepting ethically questionable gifts? Close, but no tobacco industry-bestowed cigar.

Since early 2009, nearly half of the Office of Congressional Ethics' investigations into U.S. House members and staff involve election activity such as potential campaign finance violations, according to a new report the independent office published this week.

The Office of Congressional Ethics — the U.S. House's independent, internal watchdog — has been much less likely to investigate members' and their staff's official activities.

Shenanigans involving travel (17 percent), outside employment and income (11 percent), gifts (8 percent), official allowances (6 percent), financial disclosure (3 percent) and "other" (9 percent) account for the rest of the office's 137 investigations since early 2009, the report shows.

The focus on election activity comes at a time when the frequently gridlocked Federal Election Commission, the government agency tasked with policing campaign matters, is slapping political committees with fewer and fewer penalties.

Congress grants the Office of Congressional Ethics the jurisdiction to investigate any alleged violation of a "law, rule, regulation or other standard of conduct."

But it can't dole out penalties.

Instead, it refers the results of some investigations to the House Committee on Ethics, which in turn may conduct its own investigations, and in rare cases, vote to recommend punishments to the full U.S. House.

Notable campaign finance-related investigations initiated by the Office of Congressional Ethics include those involving Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who the House ultimatelycensured, and Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who decided not to seek re-election amidmultipleinvestigations.

The saga of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., is another recent example, as is a super PAC-related flap involving Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill.   

In all, about one-third of Office of Congressional Ethics investigations are referred to the House Committee on Ethics, the office said.

The Society of Professional journalists has honored the Center for Public Integrity with its 2014 Sunshine Award, which recognizes news organizations for shining a light on the inner workings of government.

Judges cited the Center’s work for being at the “forefront of preserving democracy by investigating and uncovering corruption to better service interest of the public.”

Specifically mentioned were several Center projects and coverage areas:

• Consider the Source identifies ‘shadowy’ political organizations after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling;

• Justice Obscured examines the financial holdings and activities of the nation’s most powerful judges;

• Poisoned Places looked at the EPA’s secret “watch list” of Clean Air Act violators;

• Juris Imprudence found judges that admitted to conflicts of interest in the cases they ruled on;

• Comerica contracts documented how a government initiative aimed at saving money hurt poor people and earned banks millions in fees.

Executive Director Bill Buzenberg said of the award: "The Center for Public integrity is deeply honored by this Sunshine Award recognition for our important contributions to open government. I firmly believe that our nonpartisan investigative reporting on corruption and holding governments at all level accountable to the public does indeed serve the interests of democracy". 

The other honorees were the Guardian US, honored for its coverage in exposing the work of the National Security Agency; Robert Freeman, executive director for the NYS committee on Open Government; and Kathryn Foxhall, a longtime freelance reporter in Washington, D.C.

The winners will be honored at the SPJ President’s Installation Banquet at Excellence in Journalism 2014 on Sept. 6 in Nashville, Tenn.

Read more in the official press release from the Society of Professional Journalists, or learn more about the Sunshine Award.

The Center for Public Integrity will expand its reporting on the influence of special interests on government with a new project that will examine the flow of money and influence in state-level politics.

The multi-year endeavor, part of the Center’s “Consider the Source” money in politics coverage, will be launched prior to the 2014 election, when 36 states will elect governors and 46 states will host legislative races.

Reports will monitor advertising spending on all state races and ballot initiatives in the 2014 election cycle as well as contributions to candidates. The project will then track elected officials from the time they take office through at least the first two years of their terms.

The project will allow the Center to “do investigative reporting at the state level,” said Center Executive Editor Bill Buzenberg, who noted it is especially important given the “sharp decrease in statehouse reporting across the country.”

The project is funded by a $2.88 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF). It is one of the largest single grants in the Center’s 25-year history.

The Center’s “in-depth coverage and analysis will support greater transparency in state-level decision-making and will provide factual information to support government accountability,” said Kelli Rhee, the foundation’s director of venture development.

Prior to the 2014 election, the Center will identify the top financial backers in state politics with a special focus on outside spending groups like super PACs and nonprofits.

It will produce reports about elected officials’ voting records, an analysis of policies that may have been influenced by donors and profiles of national groups that are active in state politics.

The reporting, profiles and other information will be hosted on a Web platform that will serve as an information hub for the public and other news media.

In coming years, the project will also delve into the top state-level lobbying interests and the financial holdings of state legislators. 

John Dunbar, the Center‘s deputy executive editor and editor of political and financial reporting, conceived and will oversee the initiative. Reporter Kytja Weir, who worked on the Center’s recent groundbreaking investigations of state and federal judges, will be project manager.

Former congressional staffer Scott Lilly, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill last week that lawmakers might be able to reach a bipartisan consensus on how to improve the congressional budget process if Washington were not ruled by public relations people and message mavens.

Lilly, who served as clerk and staff director of the House Appropriations Committee before moving to the liberal-leaning think tank, suggested to lawmakers, who are considering a move from an annual to a biennial budget, that the “biggest failing of the current process is that it has truly failed to inform our citizenry as to why the federal budget is growing at such a rapid pace.”

In a commentary shortly after his testimony, Lilly added that, “The current Congressional budget process is too elaborate, too time consuming and worse off controlled by message makers instead of legislators.” (Emphasis added.)

Lilly’s words could have applied to every other issue members of Congress take up, especially health care. Had message-makers not been in control of the debate over health care reform from the get-go, our citizenry would not be so ill informed about “Obamacare.” Even that word itself was coined by message-makers no reason other than to persuade us to think a certain way about the Affordable Care Act and to vote against any politician who supported it.   

Obama had not been in office more than four months when pre-eminent pollster and message-maker Frank Luntz sent Republican politicians and operatives a 28-page document entitled “The Language of Healthcare 2009: The 10 Rules for Stopping the ‘Washington Takeover’ of Healthcare.”

This was not a policy paper. There was hardly a word about what Republicans should do to improve the U.S. health care system.  It was a PR strategy for how Republicans could capitalize by using emotion-laden words and phrases to condemn anything the Democrats came up with. Keep in mind that congressional leaders and the White House were still in the process of exploring options for legislation at the time. Actual bills that Congress would ultimately vote for or against would not materialize for many months.

“This document is based on polling results and Instant Response dial sessions conducted in April 2009,” Luntz wrote. “It captures not just what Americans want to see but exactly what they want to hear. The Words That Work boxes that follow are already being used by a few Congressional and Senatorial Republicans. From today forward they should be used by everyone.”

And they were. Especially the phrases “Washington takeover” and its cousin “government takeover of health care.” They were used repeatedly even though the legislation that was enacted was based in large part on Republican proposals from earlier years.

While message-makers have plied their trade for decades to influence public policy and to help candidates win elections, I can remember a time not so long ago when bipartisanship, civil debate and compromise were possible not only in Washington but also in the state capitals.

As a young reporter, I covered politics in Tennessee when Republican Winfield Dunn was governor and Democrats controlled both the state Senate and House of Representatives. Dunn, and later Republican Gov. and now Sen. Lamar Alexander, who also served while Democrats controlled both houses, had to reach across the political aisle to get any of their policy initiatives enacted. They both succeeded by doing exactly that.

Later I covered Congress and the White House when Jimmy Carter was president, Democrat Tip O’Neill was House Speaker and Republican Howard Baker of Tennessee was Senate Minority Leader. Baker, who died last month, was a true moderate and a master at brokering compromises and getting legislation enacted.  He was proud to be called “The Great Conciliator.”

Fast forward to today. Thanks to the rule of message makers, the term “moderate” and “compromise” have become descriptors Republican candidates seeking re-election fear most.

Alexander, who is running for a third term, bears little resemblance to the man who governed Tennessee in a bipartisan fashion and who was first elected to the Senate as a moderate in 2002.

Because he is facing a primary challenge from the right — Sarah Palin just last week endorsed his opponent, state Rep. Joe Carr — Alexander is trying to persuade Tennessee GOP voters that, despite allegations to the contrary, he’s a dyed-in-the wool conservative.

Undoubtedly following the advice of message-makers, he of course is running against Obamacare — and stooping to misinform the citizens of Tennessee about the law — to burnish his conservative bona fides. The Washington Post’s fact check column awarded him “two Pinocchios” earlier this month for misleading folks with his fuzzy math and suggesting that health insurance premiums have risen 50 percent since the law went into effect. The truth is that hundreds of thousands of his constituents now have health insurance they can afford, thanks in part to subsidies made available by “Obamacare,” and that many of them couldn’t buy coverage at any price prior to the law because of pre-existing conditions.

Politicians have misled voters for as long as there have been politicians. At times, though, and not so long ago, it was not a death wish to claim to be a moderate willing to work with members of the other party. That’s hardly possible when message makers call the shots.

Since the start of his presidency, Barack Obama has been clear that one of his major goals was to secure nuclear weapons and materials, and as recently as March, at the Nuclear Security Summit in Holland, the president declared that “it is important for us not to relax but rather accelerate our efforts over the next two years.”

Instead, to little notice, the administration has decided to spend money at an even greater rate than before to refurbish and modernize nuclear weapons while slashing the amount it is spending to prevent terrorists from making or getting their own.

According to a new analysis of nuclear security spending by a bipartisan group at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the administration in its proposed 2015 budget chose to cut nuclear nonproliferation programs in the Energy Department by $399 million while increasing spending on nuclear weapons by $534 million.

In addition, despite missing a self-imposed deadline of April 2013 for ensuring that nuclear materials were safe from terrorists across the globe, the White House at about the same time rejected a confidential Energy Department-sponsored plan to accelerate those efforts by 2016, the year Obama is slated to convene a fourth international summit on the issue.

The proposal, which appears in a May 2013 report obtained recently by the Center for Public Integrity, was intended to address the huge amount of unfinished work in the Obama administration’s nonproliferation plan.It said that more than two tons of portable, easily-weaponized uranium were still being held in scores of nuclear research reactors, while the world’s supply of another nuclear explosive, plutonium, was growing at a rate of about 740 bombs’ worth a year.

Despite progress, there remained enough nuclear explosive material in the hands of civilians to cobble together 40,000 atomic bombs.

The 12-page May 2013 report called for an acceleration of efforts to lock down or eliminate more of these dangerous materials — as well as radioactive isotopes that could be used in bombs that could contaminate large urban areas. But the White House, after an interagency struggle that climaxed at a Cabinet-level meeting in January, produced a 2015 budget proposal that slighted many of the report’s key recommendations and reduced spending on nonproliferation programs. It did so, officials and experts say, to ensure the government could devote more funds to refurbishing and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

“As they were putting the administration’s budget together, there were debates,” said Matthew Bunn, a former White House official and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Should they provide more money for nonproliferation, or more money for weapons? It’s clear that weapons won that debate.”

Laura Holgate, the White House senior director for weapons-of-mass-destruction terrorism, did not dispute the budget analysis, but said the reductions in nonproliferation spending reflected the achievement of many of President Obama’s goals.

"The President's nonproliferation and nuclear security priorities were protected,” she wrote in an email. “The decreased budget reflects natural and predictable declines based on project completion. The U.S. commitment and capacity to support global nuclear security activities remains strong and unparalleled.”

The report describing urgent unfinished business in nuclear security was prepared by the staff of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, part of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-independent arm of the Energy Department. The NNSA also oversees the production of nuclear warheads, so internal budget skirmishes between those who favor nonproliferation and those who seek more spending on the nuclear arsenal are frequent.

For the current year, fiscal 2014, Congress authorized $1.95 billion in spending by the NNSA on nonproliferation programs. The White House budget for 2015 proposes $1.56 billion — a 20 percent reduction.

In fiscal 2010, NNSA spending on nuclear weapons was about three times as high as for nonproliferation. Under the proposed White House budget, weapons spending would outstrip nonproliferation spending by over five-to-one.

The NNSA report said that because of the administration’s four-year effort, “the world today is unquestionably more secure from the threat of nuclear terrorism than it was four years ago.” But the report added that there were “still serious threats that require urgent attention.”

“Experts continue to believe that terrorists are seeking a nuclear or radiological weapon — either by making one or stealing one,” the NNSA report says. “A handful of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium the size of a grapefruit is all that is needed to make a nuclear bomb with the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people. A small capsule of cesium the size of a pencil is enough for a radiological ‘dirty bomb’ that could contaminate an entire city and result in billions of dollars in economic devastation.”

To blunt these threats, the NNSA report — marked “For Official Use Only” — sought to set the following ambitious, new goals, to be achieved by December 2016:

• It called for removing or eliminating 1.1 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium and 400 kilograms — over 880 pounds — of plutonium from sites around the world.

• It urged the removal of all highly-enriched uranium — that is, uranium that could be fashioned into a bomb — in eight more foreign countries by the same date.

• It proposed that the administration make a better accounting of existing plutonium stocks, decide the best ways to dispose of it, and persuade other countries to balance production with consumption so that the net global stockpile will finally begin to shrink. This would be a major accomplishment, since the world’s total accumulation has instead been rising steadily, by 100 metric tons since 1998.

• It proposed accelerating U.S. efforts to convert research reactors that use weapons-grade uranium to burn a form of uranium that cannot easily be used to fuel weapons — calling for 13 more such reactor conversions by the end of 2016.

None of these proposals was adopted.

Postponing goals

“Despite President Obama’s well-deserved reputation as an advocate for nuclear security, the Obama administration has been cutting nuclear security programs year after year for most of its term in office,” wrote Bunn, a former Clinton White House official; William Tobey, deputy administrator for the NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation office during the Bush administration; and Harvard researcher Nikolas Roth, in their own, 32-page report.  

Besides flagging these reductions, the Harvard report's authors said they anticipate reduced spending on nonproliferation programs in the State and Defense departments, a conclusion based on congressional reports and briefing notes, discussions with agency officials, and internal documents, including a copy the NNSA report — which the Center obtained separately.

The 2015 budget proposal would leave enough money to upgrade security for just 105 buildings where dirty bomb materials are stored — 53 in the United States and 52 abroad — by September 2015, the end of the fiscal year, according to the Harvard study’s analysis.

That would leave about 12,800 buildings worldwide in need of such upgrades, and delay completion of the work from 2025 to at least 2044.

The proposed 2015 budget would also cut $40 million from the reactor conversion program, instead of boosting its funding as the program managers sought. As a result, the Harvard study says, the conversion program would not be wrapped up until 2035, instead of 2020. “That is 15 more years that weapons-usable nuclear material will continue to be used — often in inadequately protected facilities,” it stated.

The 2015 budget provides enough funds only to eliminate or secure about 1,540 pounds of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium abroad by 2016, about half the goal that the program managers sought.

While the NNSA proposal called for securing radiological materials at 450 foreign and domestic sites by the end of 2016 that could be used to make a so-called dirty bomb, a conventional explosive device designed to spread dangerous radioactive material over a wide area, the budget provided funds for only 410 such sites. While that gap may seem small, the proposal noted that just a tiny amount of one such isotope -- cesium chloride, widely used to sterilize blood -- could wreak havoc in a major city.

Budget documents submitted to Congress by the administration also contain no mention of the proposed goals of removing weapons-grade uranium from eight additional countries, eliminating plutonium on three continents, and halting the net growth of foreign civilian stocks of plutonium, according to Bunn.

Bunn said some administration officials concluded that the more ambitious agenda was impractical, because countries with remaining stocks of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium have resisted giving up those materials. But he said the government will have a hard time locating needed funds if those countries’ policies shift.

The cuts followed a bruising debate within the administration over a bid by newly-appointed Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to get an extra billion dollars from the Office of Management and Budget so he could expand both nuclear weapons and nonproliferation spending at the same time. The extra funds would have had to come from the Pentagon’s allotment, in a budget transfer.

But the Defense Department opposed the idea, having provided $4.5 billion to DOE over the past four years to keep the weapons programs moving along, albeit at a slower pace than the Pentagon wanted.

And so, during a Cabinet-level meeting to resolve the dispute in January, a former White House official said, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, nonproliferation coordinator on the National Security Council, agreed with Sylvia Burwell, director of the Office of Management and Budget, that nonproliferation spending would be reduced while weapons programs were protected. Sherwood-Randall was subsequently nominated by Obama to be the deputy energy secretary.

The former official, who spoke on condition he not be named in order to characterize the internal deliberations, said that there was a consensus that the administration’s four-year nuclear security effort had already accomplished the easier, high-payoff projects. “They had basically achieved their goals,” said the official. “The stuff that was left was the stuff that was hard to do.”

When asked at the Aspen Institute’s security forum July 25 why President Obama’s 2009 goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years had not been met, Laura Holgate said the White House effort had aimed to “make a big dent” in the world’s civilian stockpiles of nuclear materials.

“I don’t think … we can say it was not met,” she said. “What he was talking about is a global effort over that four-year time, like a sprint in the middle of a marathon. Nuclear security is perpetual. As long as you have materials, you have to have security. The point of the speech was to say let’s work as hard as we can, over the next four years, to make a big dent in the amount of material that is vulnerable. And we’ve succeeded.”

“In that time 12 countries eliminated all fissile material on their territories that could be used in a weapon, including Ukraine,” she said. “Think how differently we would be thinking about the Ukraine situation now if the 50 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium — that's a couple of bombs worth — were still at that Kharkiv Institute, which the rebels have taken over. That’s a very different situation than what we would have today.”

Derrick Robinson, deputy press spokesman for the NNSA, added that some of the ideas in the internal proposal that were not funded might still be put into “out-year budget projections.” He also said they may wind up being “funded by countries other than the United States or through international organizations,” such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN group.

A popular policy among Republicans

According to a study by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the Obama administration will spend at least $179 billion from 2010 through 2018 to maintain the United States’ nuclear stockpile.

Because of plans to replace the “triad” of land-based missiles, nuclear-armed subs and nuclear bombers, the Center reported last September, the costs are expected to grow to $500 billion over the next 20 years.

Those costs include billions to repair, replace and modernize components to extend the shelf life of many of the the roughly 7,400 warheads and bombs in the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal. Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, at a March 5 Senate Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing, called the White House’s proposed nuclear weapons budget “pretty close to where we need to go … It seems like we have had a move that recognizes the triad’s importance and the need to modernize nuclear weapons.” In the same hearing, he later tempered his praise with criticism of what he said were delays in the modernization effort.

As the program was getting underway in 2010, Vice President Joseph Biden defended it by saying it was part of the path toward the administration’s goal of a nuclear weapons-free future.

“This investment is not only consistent with our nonproliferation agenda; it is essential to it,” Biden said in a speech at National Defense University in Washington. “Guaranteeing our stockpile, coupled with broader research and development efforts, allows us to pursue deep nuclear reductions without compromising our security.  As our conventional capabilities improve, we will continue to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.”

The White House’s decision to favor new bomb-building over nonproliferation angered arms control advocates and some Democratic lawmakers, but was welcomed by Republicans, who have found themselves in close agreement with Obama’s White House and Defense Department appointees.

“The administration is actually [the] first to come to our assistance in fighting back reductions” to nuclear weapons-related spending, a Republican congressional staff member commented.

Critics of the administration say its budgeting reflects excessive zeal to implement Obama’s pledge, made during Senate debate over ratification of a 2010 nuclear arms treaty with Russia, that he would spend many billions of dollars to refurbish and modernize the nuclear weapons that remained after agreed reductions.

At a Senate Energy and Water appropriations subcommittee hearing April 9, Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed Moniz on the issue of reducing nonproliferation spending. “What I see are additional cuts to well-managed programs that have made this country safer from nuclear terrorism, at the expense of increased funding for poorly-managed nuclear weapons programs,” she said.

Moniz responded that the administration had made a commitment to “sustain the fundamental [nuclear weapons] stockpile posture,” and that “regrettably — and I say that quite honestly, quite regrettably — within our relatively small part of the [defense] budget we must support weapons, nonproliferation, naval reactors, environmental cleanup and intelligence programs.”

Tobey, one of the Harvard study authors, said he was “perplexed” by the administration’s decision to cut the proliferation budget.

“If you listened to the president’s rhetoric at the nuclear security summit in the Netherlands [in March], he talks about stepping up our game and not coasting to the finish” of his administration’s nonproliferation drive, Tobey said.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said, “There is a mismatch between the administration’s budget request and their statements about the urgent need to accelerate efforts to work globally to secure weapons-usable nuclear materials. We think this mismatch needs to be corrected. The administration needs to put its money where its mouth is.”

The 60 Plus Association — a nonprofit senior citizen advocacy group funded largely by billionaire businessmen Charles and David Koch’s conservative political network — appears to have vastly understated its level of election spending on federal tax filings, a Center for Public Integrity review of documents indicates.

The Virginia-based organization told the Federal Election Commission that it spent about $4.6 million on political ads and “voter contact” phone calls endorsing or denouncing federal candidates during the three months prior to the 2012 election.

But it reported spending a mere $35,000 on “direct and indirect political campaign activities” during its entire 2012 fiscal year to the Internal Revenue Service. It didn’t count toward that amount $4 million in spending it reported separately as “educating seniors by influencing the election of political candidates.”

It’s a felony to “willfully” file IRS tax returns containing fraudulent information.

Whether the organization violated the law is difficult to say given the vagueness of the government statutes that regulate nonprofits, but it does appear the group is using aggressive accounting to come across as less political — a move that could help it avoid IRS scrutiny.

Reached July 22 via email, 60 Plus Association spokesman Gerry Scimeca wrote, “Very busy day, will respond when I can.” Scimeca did not respond to numerous follow-up attempts seeking information about the apparent discrepancy.

The 60 Plus Association is a so-called “social welfare” nonprofit, organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Such organizations are prohibited from making electoral politics their primary purpose. They are not required to publicly disclose the names of their donors — unlike candidates, parties and political action committees that are.

Campaign finance reform advocates for years have called on the IRS to investigate politically active nonprofits that spend significant portions of their budgets on election-related ads, but the agency has been slow to act. At the same time, the IRS has found itself embroiled in multiplecongressionalinvestigations regarding its alleged targeting of conservative nonprofits for additional scrutiny during the tax-exempt application process.

The 60 Plus Association’s apparent reporting discrepancies first began during the 2010 midterm elections, federal records indicate.

The group, which touts“a free enterprise, less government, less taxes approach to seniors issues,” spent about $6.7 million that year on advertisements that mostly attacked Democratic candidates, according to FEC records. When it later filed its required annual tax return with the IRS, it initially told the agency it spent about $7.2 million on “direct and indirect political campaign activities.”

Eighteen months later, in November 2013, however, the group amended that filing, changing the $7.2 million figure to $103,000.

The amended filing, which has never previously been reported, included a note saying the form was “now properly completed to reflect the organization’s political activities” — without further elaboration.

The group also asserted in the filing that it spent $7.2 million to “provide educational awareness about the effects of healthcare reform for seniors including influencing the election of political candidates and certain legislative initiatives.”

Adam Rappaport, senior counsel at the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the 60 Plus Association’s actions “simply outrageous” and not compliant with the law.

“This definitely merits a complaint,” Rappaport continued, arguing that both the IRS and Department of Justice should take action against the conservative-leaning nonprofit.

Cleta Mitchell, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who represents numerous conservative groups, offered this potential explanation: Nonprofits may divide up how election-related ads are accounted for “based on time.”

Assume, for instance, that a nonprofit like the 60 Plus Associations spends $1 million on a series of 30-second television ads attacking a Democratic politician for supporting an issue such as Obamacare.

But, say, only five seconds of the ad directs urges viewers to vote against the candidate.

The nonprofit, Mitchell argued, could then report only a small portion of the $1 million as political spending, while the rest would be deemed “educational expenditures.”

Other tax lawyers don’t buy it.

“I don’t know of any way you can legally come to the reporting position they’ve taken,” said Marcus Owens, a former director of the IRS exempt organizations division. “It’s kind of a thumb in the eye of the IRS.”

At minimum, Owens continued, the 60 Plus Association is “asking for an audit.”

Founded in 1992, the 60 Plus Association is led by James L. Martin, a former journalist who served as chief of staff to a Republican senator during the 1960s.

Its president is Amy Noone Frederick, a political professional whose husband formerly served as the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. Iconic singer and actor Pat Boone serves as its national spokesman.

The association describes itself as nonpartisan, but it generally backs Republican candidates.

For years, the group’s budget typically hovered between $1 million and $2 million.

But during the five most recent fiscal years for which it has reported, the 60 Plus Association raised more than $67 million, or about $13 million per year.

This funding spike roughly aligns with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010, which allowed nonprofits like the 60 Plus Association to call for the election or defeat of political candidates — so long as the spending is not coordinated with the candidates they support.

Tax records show that the 60 Plus Association’s burgeoning budget is due in large part to the Koch brothers’ political network, which also has flourished since the Citizens United decision.

According to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal tax documents and data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, five nonprofits that are part of the Koch brothers’ network supplied nearly $42 million — about 60 percent — of the more than $67 million raised by the 60 Plus Association from mid-2008 to mid-2013.

The Koch-connected Center to Protect Patient Rights alone transferred about $17 million to the 60 Plus Association from 2009 to 2012, according to tax records.

And the nascent Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, which Politico dubbed “the Koch brothers’ secret bank,” contributed nearly $16 million to the 60 Plus Association from November 2011 to December 2012.

Another top 60 Plus Association donor is the Iowa-based American Future Fund, a nonprofit that has itself received tens of millions of dollars from the Center to Protect Patient Rights and Freedom Partners.

In 2012, the American Future Fund gave the 60 Plus Association $4.55 million. This appears to account for about one-fourth of the nearly $19 million the association raised during its 2012 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2013.

In recent years, the 60 Plus Association has also received smaller amounts from a handful of other advocacy organizations, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of tax documents maintained by CitizenAudit.org.

They include never-previously reported donors such as Milwaukee-based Mobile Consumers for Choice and Competition (about $200,000), Atlanta-based Citizens for a Digital Future ($92,000), Indianapolis-based Coalition for the New Economy (about $15,000) and Phoenix-based Coalition for a Connected West ($10,000).

So far this year, FEC records show the 60 Plus Association has spent more than $250,000 on political ads, mostly in Nebraska’s GOP U.S. Senate primary, where it endorsed Midland University President Ben Sasse, who ultimately won the contest. The group has also been active at the state level, spending more than $240,000 to date on attack ads in Arizona’s upcoming GOP gubernatorial primary.

Anyone who applies for a federal security clearance has some tough questions to answer. The questionnaire is 120 pages long, and among its demands is whether an applicant has any financial problems that might create a security vulnerability. Did the applicant file tax returns and make required payments? Does he or she have any tax debts?

More than 3 million Defense Department employees and contractors have filled out the questionnaire. But surprisingly, about 26,000 of them managed to get high-level clearances while having unpaid taxes, the Government Accountability Office reported on July 28. The grand total of these delinquent sums is about $229 million.

Lying on the questionaire is a felony that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. So if all the applicants told the truth, then the officials who granted the clearances decided they did not care about tax delinquencies. That’s despite periodic betrayals by the likes of Aldrich Ames, a notorious CIA official who traded secrets to the Soviet Union for cash that he used to cover his debts.

“It is astonishing that there were so many cleared persons who owe so much”, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, and an expert on classification issues. “One would expect the security clearance population to be more law abiding on average than the general public.”

GAO was able to prepare its estimate by matching Social Security numbers from the IRS Unpaid Assessment database with Defense’s database of security clearances, the Joint Personnel Adjudication System.

But the IRS is ordinarily legally constrained when it comes to sharing taxpayer information with other agencies, even with those reviewing security clearance applications. GAO previously recommended that reviewers check applications against a different database, known as the Treasury Offset Program, which helps agencies subtract delinquent debts from federal salaries and similar payments. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has jurisdiction over clearances, studied that possibility, along with the IRS and the Office of Personnel Management, but the agencies dismissed the idea for “legal and logistical challenges,” according to the GAO report, which did not provide specifics.

Federal law doesn’t specifically bar someone with tax debt from being granted a security clearance, but guidelines on granting clearances advise caution. “An individual who is financially overextended is at risk of having to engage in illegal acts to generate funds, ” the regulations state. Officials are supposed to weigh that risk, including tax debt, when granting security clearances.

The GAO looked at all Defense personnel eligible for security clearances, including some who didn’t have them. Among those holding clearances, about 6,200 debtors had access to the highest levels of information, including top-secret clearances, despite owing about $84 million in delinquent federal taxes.

Some individuals in this rarified caegory owed millions, according to the report. Contractors and other nonfederal employees owed more than federal employees, apparently, about $52 million out of the $84 million.

Aftergood said security officials may not see tax debt as a problem, as long as it’s disclosed, and noted that lying about it, if exposed, would likely trigger felony charges. But, he said, “It renders such people vulnerable to coercion or temptation. Particularly on this scale, it seems a review of policies would be in order."

The GAO report noted that the IRS and the Director of National Intelligence have formed a working group to find an answer. One solution would be to create an exemption to the tax laws so that debtor information can be shared with security agencies for clearance decisions. But while their goal is to work it out by 2017, action is not imminent.

“Project plans were still in development; funding had not yet been established; and technologies were not yet fully developed,” the GAO said, after talking to working group members.

The Pentagon has shipped hundreds of thousands of small arms to Afghanistan over the past decade for that country’s Army, while creating an elaborate system to track their whereabouts, in hopes of keeping them out of the wrong hands.

Unfortunately, the system failed, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, and for reasons that could easily have been foreseen.

The bookkeeping has been so slipshod that it’s not possible to say how many weapons are missing. At one place the auditors looked, the Afghan National Army Central Supply Depot in Kabul, the auditors looked at records for 4,388 small arms. But only 3,837 of those arms — a subset of the total there — could be located, representing an error rate of 12 percent.

It turns out there are three databases meant to track the small arms, which include rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns. One is a Defense Department listing of all those shipped from the United States. The second is a Defense Department listing of all those received in Afghanistan. They rely heavily on the serial numbers of the arms.

But these numbers must be entered manually, and the two databases — one showing shipments and one showing receipts — are inexplicably not linked together. The results are not pretty: Of the 474,823 serial numbers recorded in the second database, for example, 203,888 had missing information or were duplicates, according to the report by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko. 

More than 20,000 serial numbers in each of the DOD databases were repeated two or three times, the report said.

The third means of accounting is a database kept by the Afghan National Security Force, which relies on what Sopko’s report called “a commercial, off-the-shelf inventory software system” that was “not designed to account for weapons.” It does not record the serial numbers of the guns at all, and relies on hand-written records and occasional Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

The report said that because of the unsatisfactory data, there is “real potential” for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents.

The inspector general report recommended that DOD reconcile its two databases and correct all data errors within six months. It also recommended that the Pentagon work with Afghan forces to complete a full inventory of small arms, and determine how to recover or destroy excess weapons.

In response to the first recommendation, Michael Dumont, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, said his department is now merging the two databases into a single system to track these weapons — 13 years after the U.S. intervention there began. He said it would be completed within six months, as most U.S. forces move towards the door. They also said that while they cannot compel the Afghan government to conduct a more comprehensive inventory, they will request one.

In response to the second recommendation, he said without explanation that a one-time inventory wouldn’t solve the inventory problems. But small arms transfers might be dependent on full inventory checks in the future, he said.

The inspector general called these ideas “positive steps toward better weapons accountability.”

Lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives are introducing legislation aimed at combating campus sexual violence this week, building on a series of recent federal initiatives aimed at tackling the issue — the focus of a landmark Center for Public Integrity investigation.

At a morning press conference attended by students and victims’ advocates, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill designed, they say, to better protect those victimized by campus sexual assault, as well as to hold colleges and universities more accountable. Known as the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, the measure targets what the senators call “a scourge of sexual violence against students.”  The group — led by Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and including Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, among others — has been drafting the legislation for months, collecting information by hosting three Senate hearings for students and advocates, as well as conducting a survey of nearly 450 colleges and universities nationwide.

Following the event, Senator McCaskill said in a statement that “students need to be protected and empowered, and institutions must provide the highest level of responsiveness in helping hold perpetrators fully accountable.”

“That’s what our legislation aims to accomplish,” she stated.

In the House, Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, is today introducing her own bill, dubbed the Hold Accountable and Lend Transparency on Campus Sexual Assault Act, or HALT. That proposal represents the first of two anticipated pieces of legislation: this morning, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., announced that, following the August summer recess, she will file a House version of the newly filed Senate bill.

“Sexual assault on our college campuses has reached epidemic proportions,” said Maloney in a statement. “And more must be done to address the ambiguities in the law, beef up protections, improve reporting, and strengthen enforcement.”

Two additional lawmakers — Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in the Senate, and Susan Davis, D-San Diego, in the House — also introduced their own legislation to address the problem today. Known as the Survivor Outreach and Support Campus Act, this bill would require colleges and universities to establish an independent, on-campus advocate to support victims of sexual assault.

Of the two most substantive proposals, the House measure drafted by Speier’s office differs from the Senate bipartisan legislation in its language. But they share some common provisions. Among the most notable: a requirement for school administrators to conduct surveys on the scope of sexual assault on their campuses — a requirement recommended recently by a federal task force as well. The Senate bill, in particular, calls for making such annual surveys standardized and anonymous, and requiring schools to publish the results online.

Other key provisions aim to beef up the federal government’s own enforcement. For instance, the Senate and House measures would create more substantial fines and first-ever sanctions against colleges and universities for violating the Clery Act and Title IX, the two federal laws covering sexual assault on campus. The Senate bill would actually boost penalties for Clery Act violations from the current $35,000 per violation up to $150,000; for Title IX violations, it would institute sanctions equaling one percent of an institution’s operating budget. Both bills would also increase funding for the Education Department to hire more Title IX and Clery Act investigators, and force the department to make public all of its compliance reviews and settlements involving colleges and universities.

This new legislative effort is but the latest action on a variety of fronts to curb what everyone from President Barack Obama to Vice President Joe Biden to Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called an “epidemic” of sexual violence on college campuses. In April, a White House task force announced recommendations for helping colleges and universities respond to the problem, issuing new guidance and launching a new website. Within days, the Education Department released for the first time a list of every college and university currently under investigation for possible violations of federal law because of the way they have handled campus sexual assaults; so far, that list comprises more than 70 schools.

All of this comes just 15 months after the president signed into law yet another piece of federal legislation aimed at combating campus sexual violence, as part of a bipartisan renewal of the Violence Against Women Act: the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, known as Campus SaVE, which will take effect this fall.

Much like that act, this new legislation is meant to address problems highlighted in an investigation of campus sexual assault by the Center for Public Integrity. Published in a six-part series starting in 2009, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice”— done in collaboration with National Public Radio — showed that campus judicial proceedings regarding allegations of sexual assault were often confusing, shrouded in secrecy, and marked by lengthy delays. Those who reported sexual assaults encountered a litany of institutional barriers that either assured their silence or left them feeling victimized again. Even students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults often faced little punishment, while their victims’ lives were frequently turned upside down.

“The legislative proposals currently being considered by Congress deal more with the gaps in federal enforcement identified by the Center for Public Integrity,” said Daniel Carter, a long-time victims’ advocate now with the VTV Family Outreach Foundation. An original backer of Campus SaVE, he notes that its provisions are largely focused on institutional failures at the campus level.

“We haven’t seen the benefit of the Campus SaVE Act yet,” Carter adds. “These bills signify that campus sexual violence has become a top priority in Congress.”

He and other advocates who have worked for decades to highlight the prevalence of campus sexual assaults are delighted — and somewhat stunned — by all the national attention.

In a statement, Scott Berkowitz, of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, who attended the Senate event, said: “We’re grateful that so many Senate leaders are working hard to solve the problem of rape on campus, and look forward to working with them to pass a bill that will help victims and help reduce the number of violent assaults.”

High-profile nonprofits that invest millions of dollars in political campaign ads regularly omit from their tax returns information about the companies they hire, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

These annual tax documents are signed under the penalty of perjury when submitted to the Internal Revenue Service. Nevertheless, deep-pocketed groups — both conservative and liberal — appear to have bungled reporting rules requiring nonprofits to disclose the names of their highest paid independent contractors.

Three of these groups — Crossroads GPS, the Club for Growth and Patriot Majority USA— acknowledged their errors when informed of them and said they plan to correct them.

At least four others — Americans for Tax Reform, the American Future Fund, the 60 Plus Association and the Revere America Association — also appear to have made reporting mistakes but did not respond to requests for comment.

The groups’ mistakes ranged from the relatively minor — excluding one particular vendor from a longer list — to the wholesale omission of vendor information.

Take, for instance, Americans for Tax Reform and Patriot Majority USA — ideologically opposed “social welfare” nonprofits that each unleashed a barrage of political attack ads ahead of the 2012 election.

Both groups hired media buying firms and consultants to help execute their spending plans and produce advertisements, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

But when the IRS asked each group how many independent contractors received more than $100,000 in compensation, both said “zero.”

Americans for Tax Reform, a Republican-aligned group headed by anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, paid seven firms nearly $16 million for TV ads and other messages that advocated for the election or defeat of politicians, according to FEC filings. And Patriot Majority USA, a Democratic-leaning operation led by strategist Craig Varoga, told the FEC it spent about $7.5 million on such expenditures.

In an email, Varoga said his group’s answer on its tax return amounted to “an inadvertent omission.”

He said Patriot Majority USA would file an amendment that showed the nonprofit had actually paid 17 firms more than $100,000 in 2012, with media buying firm Waterfront Strategies garnering the top spot at nearly $9.4 million.

Waterfront Strategies, which is closely tied to President Barack Obama’s political machine, is favored by several high-powered liberal political committees, as well as union and environmental organizations.

Patriot Majority USA’s other top vendors were: The New Media Firm, a media buying company (paid $2.8 million); Bynum Consulting Group, a direct mail firm ($1.6 million); Mullen & Co. for “digital media buys & production” ($1.2 million) and Fieldworks for “voter registration” ($1 million).

This type of vendor data omission could be an “intentional misstatement” to understate a nonprofit’s political activity, said Greg Colvin, a San Francisco-based attorney who specializes in nonprofit tax law — although Colvin added that they could also arise from “inadvertent mistakes.”

Marcus Owens, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who previously served as the director the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt organizations, agreed, noting that these groups “are players with sophisticated counsel.”

“These are not scout troops and soup kitchens,” Owens said.

This is not the first time Americans for Tax Reform’s tax returns have attracted scrutiny.

In its 2012 return, Americans for Tax Reform told the IRS that it spent $9.8 million on “direct and indirect political campaign activities” — about $6 million lower than it reported spending to the FEC on ads that endorsed or denounced specific candidates. The higher FEC figure amounted to 51 percent of the group’s spending in 2012, as previously reported by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an advocacy group, has previously filed complaints with the IRS against Americans for Tax Reform, alleging that it underreported its political expenditures and may be abusing its tax-exempt status.

Likewise, CREW officials have criticized the 60 Plus Association for characterizing the bulk of its FEC-reported political spending as “educational” rather than “political campaign activities,” as the Center for Public Integrity first reported Wednesday.

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling in 2010, social welfare nonprofits — which are organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code — have been allowed to use funds to call for the election or defeat of federal candidates so long as they do not coordinate such spending with the candidates they seek to aid.

Such overt political spending, however, must not be these groups’ primary purpose, according to federal rules. And too much spending on elections could lead the IRS to strip 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status from a group.

That’s what happened to a Democratic-aligned nonprofit called Arkansans for Common Sense earlier this year. The group spent more than $1 million in a failed effort to help Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., win re-election in 2010.

In recent years, activists and lawmakers have called on the IRS to ensure that groups are not abusing their tax status. These social welfare nonprofits are allowed to keep their donors anonymous, unlike candidates, parties and political action committees, which must publicly disclose their funders.

The IRS is also supposed to enforce rules that prohibit a nonprofit from using its funds for the private benefit of its officers.

Tax filings for other politically active nonprofits appeared to be missing information about at least one vendor that should have been listed among the top five highest paid. These nonprofits appeared to fully report their overall political spending elsewhere in the filings.

For instance, the conservative Club for Growth paid Arizona-based political consulting firm Blue Point LLC about $660,000 in 2012 for “mail production costs” and “postage,” according to FEC records. The Club for Growth failed to disclose this relationship in its IRS filing.

And while Republican-aligned Crossroads GPS paid media buying firm Mentzer Media Services about $7.75 million in 2012 and about $650,000 in 2010, the firm was not listed among Crossroads GPS’ top five highest-paid independent contractors either year.

Moreover, the Republican Jewish Coalition didn’t list media buying firm Jamestown Associates in its IRS filing for either 2010 or 2012, despite paying the company at least $1.1 million in 2010 and $4.5 million in 2012, according to FEC records.

Jeffrey Altman, an attorney for the Republican Jewish Coalition, maintained that the group correctly filed its disclosures, citing “different reporting requirements” for the FEC and IRS. Media buying expenses, Altman argued, did not need to be reported to the IRS as “payments for services.”

But other tax lawyers contacted by the Center for Public Integrity expressed skepticism at this rationale.

“The media buyer is acting, presumably, as an agent or something like an agent of the nonprofit for the purposes of acquiring air time,” said Owens, the former IRS official. The firm “should show up on the list of independent contractors.”

The IRS itself instructs nonprofits that the definition of independent contractors encompasses "organizations as well as individuals and can include professional fundraisers, law firms, accounting firms, publishing companies, management companies and investment management companies."

A spokesman for the IRS did not respond to requests for comment.

James E. Doyle’s ordeal with Washington began one morning in early February last year, when his supervisor stopped by his desk at Los Alamos National Laboratory and told him that senior managers wanted copies of all his publications.

The 55-year-old political scientist asked the reason for the request, and he eventually was told that someone at the House Armed Services Committee wanted to see the publications. But Doyle said officials refused to tell him who it was or why.

Later that day at the lab’s New Mexico campus, he said, two members of a Security Inquiries Team abruptly arrived with a special, silver-colored briefcase for secure documents, and pulled out an article he published a few days earlier on the website of a London nonprofit group.

They claimed that the article, an impassioned critique of the political theories undergirding the nuclear arms race and a defense of President Obama’s embrace of a nuclear weapons-free future, contained classified information.

The assertion astonished Doyle, since the laboratory’s security authorities had already reviewed the article and declared it unclassified. But it was the start of a series of events in which Doyle first had his pay docked and his security clearance withdrawn, and then eventually was fired.

He got that final news last month -- on July 8, a day after the Center for Public Integrity asked the Energy department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the nation’s nuclear labs, about the dispute over his article. “I was shocked,” he said, shortly afterward. “I am still shocked.”

Experts say Doyle’s treatment raises questions about the commitment of the nuclear weapons labs — which face increased competition for resources amid declining military interest in their key product — to intellectual independence in their workforce. Top lab and Energy Department officials have responded to the case by urging that all writing by their employees on topics related to their work be subjected to pre-publication review, even when written on their own time.

Doyle, officially a contractor, said he was told that he was being let go as part of a program of layoffs at the New Mexico lab. But he says he believes the sudden firing was instead part of a Washington-inspired campaign of retribution for his refusal to stay on message and support the lab’s central mission, namely its continued development and production of nuclear arms, at a cost of almost $2 billion per year there.

“Classification has been used against me for the purposes of censorship of the article and retaliation against me for writing the article,” said Doyle, who is now looking for work with two children in college and another headed there.

Los Alamos officials did not respond to several requests for an interview with an official who could discuss the case. Derrick Robinson, a spokesman for the Energy agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees Los Alamos, said he was seeking official comment. But none was received by press time.

Doyle’s treatment has nonetheless already attracted criticism from former Obama appointees and from his editor at Survival, a journal published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies where the article appeared in February 2013.

“It sure looks like he’s being fired for supporting the President’s policy,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a special adviser on nuclear matters to Vice President Joseph Biden from 2009 to 2012 who knows Doyle.

“Nobody would go after this article on classification grounds unless they were pursuing a political agenda, and it is amazing to attack someone politically for writing an article in support of a policy of the president of the United States,” said Matthew Bunn, a former White House official under President Clinton and now a nonproliferation expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“The classification system, of course, is not supposed to be used for political purposes,” Bunn said. “It is only to prohibit the release of information if it would damage the security of the U.S. And there’s nothing in this article that could in any way damage the security of the United States.”

Calling nuclear deterrence an outmoded myth

Although Doyle has left Los Alamos, he said in a telephone interview that he cannot discuss the published article that started it all — not even its name or the title of the publication it appears in. Doing so might violate the Laboratory’s nondisclosure agreement pertaining to information it deems classified.

An Energy department Office of Hearings and Appeals decision last month, which dismissed a whistleblower claim Doyle filed over his treatment, also did not name Doyle’s article, in keeping with lab classification rules.

But the Hearings report said it was published in “an international journal” in early February 2013. Doyle’s 8,644-word article, entitled “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons,” is the only article Doyle published in an international journal around that time. Its subtitle asserted that “the world must reject the myths and expose the risks of the ideology of nuclear deterrence if it is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century” — foreshadowing its detailed critique of the nuclear policies supporting most of Los Alamos’ work over the past 71 years.

Doyle, who holds a doctorate in international studies from the University of Virginia, has been at Los Alamos for the past 17 years. Before he joined the lab, he said, he wrote the Department of Energy’s strategic plan for keeping weapons-grade uranium and plutonium stored at hundreds of sites scattered across the former Soviet Union from falling into the wrong hands. He referred to this risky state of affairs as “the babushka-with-uranium-in-the-chicken-shed” problem.

As a nuclear safeguards and security specialist in the lab’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Division, which has 250 employees and an annual budget of about $185 million, Doyle has studied ways to verify reductions in United States and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles beyond the current levels. He also edited a textbook, Nuclear Safeguards, Security and Nonproliferation: Achieving Security with Technology and Policy, which, he said, is used in three dozen universities in the U.S. and abroad.

To perform his analytical work, Doyle long held a “Q” clearance giving him access to sensitive nuclear weapons-related information, as well as a separate clearance to review secure, compartmented information on foreign nuclear programs. He was trained to classify documents and, he says, for a time wrote the weekly intelligence briefings for the Los Alamos lab director.

Doyle said he worked for months, in his spare time, on the article at the center of the controversy. Since it was not prepared at work, lab rules didn’t require him to submit it for pre-publication classification review, according to a Sept. 26, 2013, internal Los Alamos review of the episode, obtained by the Center. But he did so anyway, “in the spirit of following best practice,” the review said.

He expected it to cause a stir, partly because of management's reaction to his 2010 article for Defense News proposing that Congress set aside $75 million to $100 million annually for research into new technologies to implement the Obama administration’s ambitious arms reductions goals.

Doyle said Tammy Taylor, a former White House official and then the leader of Doyle’s division at the lab, told him at the time that he should not suggest how federal policies should be implemented and that in the future, under a new policy, articles would be reviewed for “message and political content” as well as classification.

Doyle said he objected that this would violate academic freedom. But he said Taylor, who is now a manager at the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, didn’t agree. Taylor did not respond to requests for comment.

So this time, Doyle sent a draft of his new article on the flaws in nuclear deterrence in late 2011 or 2012 to Bryan Fearey, director of the Los Alamos National Security Office. Fearey told him he needed to balance his anti-nuclear views with pro-nuclear arguments, Doyle recalls.

Fearey’s clear message, Doyle recalled, was that otherwise it would hurt the laboratory. But Doyle said Fearey never raised any concerns about classification. Contacted by telephone, Fearey declined to answer questions about the meeting.

Richard Wallace, who was Doyle’s supervisor at the time in the Nonproliferation Division and is now retired, suggested that Doyle’s views had long made him a bit of a fish out of water at the lab. “He was extremely knowledgeable; he was well respected in his field,” Wallace said. But it had been hard in recent years to find funding for “the expertise he had. The lab isn’t known for looking at political issues related to nonproliferation and disarmament.”

Still, Wallace said that no one at the meeting involving Fearey, which he also attended, raised classification concerns. “They didn’t necessarily agree with the logic that he used and the conclusion he came up with,” Wallace said, but “they wouldn’t ask the laboratory to stop publication.”

Wallace said his impression was that Fearey and other senior managers wanted Doyle to “re-evaluate” his approach. Doyle said he asked Fearey to send him suggested changes, but Fearey never did.

Another laboratory employee familiar with the controversy, who spoke without approval and so asked not to be named, said that Doyle’s views upset management, but not the scientists and others who worked with him and who expect the labs to respect academic traditions of open inquiry.

“It’s a well-argued opinion piece by a subject matter expert,” the employee said. “A scientist can respect that. Los Alamos National Labs should not be political.”

Doyle argued in the piece that nuclear deterrence was a “myth” and that declassified documents showed that the world avoided several nuclear catastrophes during the Cold War only by sheer “luck.” He said that “a growing number of strategists and technical and political elites regard nuclear weapons and deterrence theory as anachronistic,” since even limited nuclear exchanges would have damaging consequences elsewhere in the world.

He wrote that nuclear weapons don’t build confidence in crises but raise the price of miscalculation. There is, he added, little evidence that building nuclear weapons keeps one’s enemies at bay, noting that Egypt, Iraq, and Syria have attacked Israel at various times, Argentina attacked Britain, and Al Qaeda attacked Pakistan, Britain, the United States, and Israel.

“Eliminating nuclear weapons is profoundly in the [U.S.] national-security interest,” Doyle concluded. Though it hardly appears to have been necessary, a note appended to the printed article said its views “are the author’s own and do not represent those of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.”

Dana Allin, the editor of Survival, said in an interview he had heard that there was a reaction to Doyle’s article at Los Alamos but not that any disciplinary measures were taken. “This was a think piece,” Allin said. “This was driven by a keen understanding of concerns about nuclear deterrence. It’s the kind of thing we publish all the time.”

He added: “The idea that this is revealing secrets is ridiculous.”

Doyle’s references to Israel’s nuclear arsenal could not possibly be considered secret, said Nate Jones, who deals with nuclear-related, declassified documents at the nonprofit National Security Archive, affiliated with George Washington University. “We have a bunch of postings on our site [referring to Israel’s bombs] that were declassified officially through regular channels,” he said.

Jones said that as far as he can tell, the article did not betray any secrets.

Demanding the surrender of a home computer

 After his “international journal” article was published online Feb. 1, 2013, Doyle’s life at Los Alamos took on a surreal quality, according to his recollection.

First came the mysterious demand Wednesday, Feb. 6, for his published works.

Did the office really want all of the scores of publications? he asked officials. Doyle had published more than 100 articles in a variety of journals, magazines and websites since joining the lab in 1997. Yes, he said he was told, they wanted everything. His superiors would not tell him why, emails obtained by the Center show.

Scott Gibbs — the associate director at Los Alamos for threat identification and response at the time and Doyle’s superior — provided some answers in a telephone interview. He said he heard complaints about Doyle’s article from a scientist with the lab’s Weapons Program Directorate, which makes the products the article savaged.

It was a sensitive moment for an anti-nuclear message to emerge from within the lab. During this period, Los Alamos officials and their Republican supporters on the House Armed Services committee were trying to find the funds for a new $6.5 billion factory at Los Alamos for plutonium “pits,” the baseball-sized spheres that form the core of most nuclear weapons.

Although the Obama administration had sought to defer the project’s start, Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, who in 2012 chaired a strategic forces subcommittee, sponsored a successful amendment that year requiring construction of the factory by 2024 and authorizing $160 million to keep design work going. Obama signed the bill on Jan. 2, 2013, that included Turner’s amendment, but it still lacked support from appropriators.

Gibbs said he personally did not agree with the views expressed in Doyle’s disputed article because he believes in the mission of the weapons lab. “One of the reasons Los Alamos exists, one of the reasons I spent my career there, is to ensure that the things that we are able to do in this country, no one else is able to do, can be done,” he said.

But Gibbs said in the interview that the complaint he heard from the weapons directorate, after its publication, was that it might contain classified information. He declined to specify which details had raised this concern. But he said he immediately alerted the lab’s Security Inquiries Team and called the classification office. Officials there told him the article had been cleared before its publication.

Within hours, he said, he got a call from the lab’s top government relations office in Washington, Patrick Woehrle, a former congressional staffer who had worked closely with the Energy Department and whose job it now is to ensure smooth relations between the lab and the lawmakers and staff who fund its work.

Gibbs, who retired in May after 28 years at the lab, said Woehrle told him someone — Gibbs said he didn’t know who — on the House Armed Services Committee staff had also raised concerns that the article might contain classified information. He said the staffer to his knowledge had not complained about its content or point of view.

“We’re looking at it, and we’re on top of it,” Gibbs recalls telling Woehrle. He added that “it’s not unusual for them to call and ask the lab questions if they see something they question,” referring to the committee staff. Woehrle did not respond to requests for comment.

On Feb. 7, 2013, according to the internal lab report and Energy Department documents, the lab’s chief classification officer Daniel Gerth summoned Doyle to a meeting in his office. There, three “derivative” classifiers — people who have been trained to review documents for classified material — told Gerth that they found no secret information in the article.

But Gerth overruled them all and declared that the document —published a week earlier on a website that reaches thousands of people a month, according to Survival editors — was classified. Reached by phone, Gerth declined to discuss the meeting or his rationale but said that he had the final word on classifying the article. “I’m the only classification officer at the lab,” he said.

Gerth and other lab officials made no effort to have the published article withdrawn from circulation, according to Survival's editor. But for Doyle, events took an even stranger turn. After a computer expert on the security team learned Doyle had transferred drafts of the article, retroactively deemed classified, between his work computer and his home computer, lab officials ordered him to bring his home computer to the office so all traces of it could be expunged.

Doyle promptly refused, and the internal lab report described him as “initially combative and uncooperative,” though he later was fully cooperative.

Doyle admitted he was upset, but denied losing his temper. “This doesn’t feel good to me and I’m not doing it,” he recalls telling them. But he relented, he said, because officials told him that for every day he refused to surrender his home computer, he would lose a day’s pay.

He said he then watched as a security expert spent 20 minutes searching his computer, which held one of his children’s college applications and his personal banking and insurance information, purging drafts of the article. He said he later discovered that they had missed one of the copies.

As a result of his initial resistance, the lab also suspended his Q clearance for one month. And it suspended all his work-related travel.

Later in February, Doyle said, they also “withdrew” — but did not revoke — his access to Sensitive Compartmented Information on foreign nuclear programs.

Gibbs said the decision was part of what he called a “routine” review of such clearances. “If you’re not working on a project in which you need clearance, you don’t get it,” he said. “You get it back later if you’re working on a project that requires it.”

Mark Zaid, Doyle’s Washington-based lawyer, said that if the clearance had been revoked, Doyle could have appealed. But instead the lab said it would no longer sponsor Doyle’s clearance.  “That’s not uncommon,” Zaid said. “That is a retaliatory tool that agencies can use without affording employees, or contract employees, any type of due process because there’s no challenge that can be made to that. It’s not viewed as a retaliatory action. That can be incredibly significant to their career.”

Doyle, deeply shaken by the lab’s handling of the incident, was unwilling to let the episode drop. He emailed the laboratory’s chief representative in Washington, asking who at the Armed Services committee had contacted him. Woehrle responded in an email: “Please run this request up through your management chain.”

Doyle also pressed Gibbs for the name of the person at HASC who raised questions about his article. “We will not release information about the individuals from HASC who provided feedback about your article, nor will we go into the specifics of that feedback,” Gibbs wrote in an email. “We consider those communications to be in confidence. You are free of course to contact any member of the HASC or their staffs as a private citizen.” But he warned Doyle that he couldn’t use his Los Alamos email to do so.

A knowledgeable congressional source said the complaint about the Survival article did not come from the Democratic side of the House committee. Claude Chafin, a spokesman for the Republican staff, said “we have a constant back and forth with the agencies we deal with on a variety of topics.” But he said “I’m not going to comment on conversations this committee has with anyone we routinely engage with.”

“I’m not confirming or denying that any complaint was ever forwarded [to Los Alamos],” Chafin said. “If DOE has taken some kind of action against one of their employees, ask them about it. I think this is silly.”

Confusion and ambiguity but no relief

Before being fired, Doyle lodged several complaints about his treatment with ethics officers at the lab and the Energy Department, without any success.

In Sept. 2013, David Clark, program director of the lab’s National Security Education Center, wrote in a 5-page report for its research integrity office that did not mention Doyle by name — but clearly addressed his case — that he had examined whether the lab had used classification policy “to suppress his views on nuclear weapons policy” and later retaliated for his protests by withdrawing his security clearances.

In his report, Clark concluded the employee in question had followed the rules and acted “in good faith.” He also wrote that the lab’s policies regarding privately-conducted work were unclear and that enforcement of classification guidelines was marked by poor training and the absence of consensus. For Los Alamos employees, Clark wrote, “this is an unacceptable situation.”

But Clark also concluded that those who felt the article in question contained classified information “were all acting in good faith” and so he found “no evidence of infringement of intellectual freedom.” His opinion did not detail how he reached this conclusion, but recommended that in the future the laboratory make clearer to its employees that anything they write as private citizens must be submitted for classification review if it relates to their lab work.

The director of DOE’s Classification Office in Washington, Andrew Weston-Dawkes, also turned Doyle’s appeal aside, ruling instead that Gerth had reasonably decided the Survival article was classified. Weston-Dawkes, who has been in the office for the past 20 years, further warned that anytime a lab employee is identified as such in any publication — even a privately-written one — “it is inferred to express the knowledge gained as a cleared Government employee” and thus needs review.

Doyle’s complaint was also reviewed by the State Department’s classification office, which affirmed that the Survival article contained classified information pertaining to national security. (The department has no jurisdiction over atomic energy secrets.)

A State Department spokesman did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the case. But Gibbs, in the interview, noted that the material at issue was the subject of a “long-standing disagreement” within the government over whether it should be considered classified.

“I certainly don’t see any classified or even sensitive information in this article,” said Steve Fetter, a nuclear physicist and associate provost at the University of Maryland who served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during President Obama’s first term. “I can only imagine that Doyle is being punished for the policy views that he espouses.”

Doyle also filed a complaint with a whistleblower protection office at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which funds and oversees the labs, claiming that the lab had broken the law by retaliating against him for protesting the article’s retroactive classification.

His complaint was summarily dismissed by NNSA, and when he appealed to the Energy Department’s Hearings and Appeal Office, director Poli A. Marmolejos ruled in June this year that Doyle’s case didn’t meet the agency’s standard for whistleblowers.

To qualify for special protection, Marmolejos wrote, Doyle would have to have disclosed “substantial” law-breaking by the lab. “In our view, a debatable assertion that an official misapplied classification guidance does not rise to the level of disclosing a ‘substantial violation’ of a law, rule or regulation,” Marmolejos wrote.

Doyle’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, said that the decision was an example of how the executive branch agencies don't take the manipulation of classification rules as seriously as they should. “Misclassifying information… is clearly a violation of a rule, law or regulation to me. It goes to the heart of our system,” Zaid said. Marmolejos referred requests for comment to the public affairs office.

Clark’s report, however, makes clear that both Los Alamos and the Energy Department have had difficulties following classification guidelines. He said that the lab had declared another article was unclassified that DOE said was classified, after its publication. “The subject area in question is subjective and ambiguous,” he wrote.

Doyle said he is not certain where he will end up, though he plans to continue to work on nonproliferation and disarmament issues. “I pursued a career in national security with the motivation of improving the national security policy of my country,” he said. “And there’s nothing conflicting in advocating the elimination of nuclear weapons and maintaining the security of the United States.”

Managing editor for national security R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this article.

The Center for Public Integrity’s Pulitzer Prize-winning environment and labor team is pleased to announce the hiring of two reporters.

Talia Buford joined the Center on July 28.

She spent three years as an energy reporter for Politico, where she covered natural gas and the Interior Department and authored the daily Afternoon Energy newsletter.

Previously, Buford spent five years with The Providence (R.I.) Journal as a legal affairs and municipal reporter.

She earned a master’s degree in the study of law from Georgetown University Law Center and studied print journalism at Hampton University.

Her work has been recognized by the Rhode Island Press Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Foundation. 

Jamie Smith Hopkins will join the staff on Sept. 2.

Hopkins comes to the Center after nearly 15 years with the Baltimore Sun, where she spent most of her time as a business reporter. Her coverage of the housing market, before and after the 2008 economic crash, drew awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

SABEW also honored a 2011 data-driven investigation into a pervasive property-tax break that left neighbors with identical homes paying dramatically different tax bills. Hopkins was the valedictorian of her class at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The five-member CPI environment and labor team has been honored with more than three dozen national awards for projects such as “Breathless and Burdened,” “Toxic Clout” and “Hard Labor.”

Founded in 1989 by journalist Charles Lewis, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the country's oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. Our mission: to enhance democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

Contacts:

William Gray, Media Relations Specialist, Center for Public Integrity

(202) 481-1232, wgray@publicintegrity.org