POGO Podcasts

The Congressional Management Foundation offers the Gold Mouse Awards annually to members of Congress who make the most of the opportunity the digital world offers them. POGO spoke with members of Rep. Mike Honda's communications team about their award.

Mia Steinle talks about POGO's involvement in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and the hurdles to increased transparency for oil, gas and hard rock minerals here in the U.S.

POGO's Scott Amey talks about the growing private intelligence industry that includes major federal contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, the former employer of Edward Snowden. Podcast with Joe Newman, Aimee Thomson, Jana Persky and Andre Francisco.

POGO's Ben Freeman just released his book The Foreign Policy Auction, so we sat down with him to find out who is paying to change U.S. foreign policy and how they are doing it.

How many secrets does the government have, and where are they keeping them? POGO's Joe Newman and Suzie Dershowitz sit down with Amy Bennett from OpenTheGovernment.org, which just released its annual Secrecy Report, to discuss how secret the federal government was last year.

The only man to be employed by a Republican and a Democrat at the same time discusses the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Congress's more spending = more defense ideology.

On this week's podcast, Adam Miles, from the Office of Special Council, gives an overview of how OSC works with federal whistleblowers. Miles was a speaker at the July meeting of POGO's Congressional Oversight Training Series. The series is put on by POGO to train congressional staffers about the art of congressional oversight.

In May 2010, leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a rule that would require NIH-funded researchers to publicly disclose their financial arrangements with drug and medical device companies. This proposal would bring a much needed dose of transparency to federally funded medical research. Now, one thing stands in its way: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). POGO is concerned that OMB will weaken or block this proposal, and in July, we sent a letter urging OMB to leave the rule intact. For this podcast, POGO Staff Scientist Ned Feder and POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian discuss why this proposal is so important. After we recorded this podcast, Nature News reported that the proposal has been dropped. Things aren't completely final just yet--but if the NIH's disclosure proposal does wind up on the cutting room floor, it would be a significant blow to transparency and taxpayer interests.

Despite containing some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, the structures housing the majority of U.S. spent nuclear fuel--our nuclear graveyards so to speak--are designed to withstand little more than a bad thunderstorm. In this podcast, POGO staffers talk with Bob Alvarez, a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), about why this is a problem, and whether or not a disaster like the one at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could happen in the U.S. Alvarez is the author of a new report on storage of spent nuclear fuel that was released by IPS with support from POGO.

A recent law review article poses a question that POGO and others have been asking: Have the top federal contractors become "too big to debar"? The article, written by South Texas College of Law professor Drury Stevenson and third-year student Nicholas Wagoner, looks at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and how it is being enforced against federal contractors caught bribing foreign government officials. For this podcast, POGO staffers Bryan Rahija and Neil Gordon speak with Wagoner and Professor Stevenson to find out how this lack of strong enforcement hurts taxpayers' interests.

Allegations that the government of Kazakhstan may have set up a slush fund to influence members of Congress are serious enough to warrant a federal investigation POGO earlier this month in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The influence-peddling claim originated in a lawsuit filed in federal court by a relative of Rahkat Aliyev, the ex-son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Attorneys for the relative entered a letter into the court file purportedly written to Nazarbayev by the Kazakh ambassador to the U.S., in which the ambassador describes efforts to influence members of a congressional caucus created by the Embassy by financing them through a special foreign currency account. The defendants in the case have strongly contested the letter as a forgery, including filing statements by Kazakh government officials and an analysis by a forensic document examiner. However, there is circumstantial evidence that gives considerable credence to some of the letter’s underlying claims. POGO’s investigation has found campaign contributions from employees of firms hired by the Kazakhstan Embassy. Additionally, documents filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) and news reports show that the government of Kazakhstan has used lobbying firms to establish two separate congressional caucuses--The Friends of Kazakhstan and the Central Asia Caucus--dedicated to supporting its interests.

POGO staffers discuss the issue of the revolving door and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Our new report identifies over 200 former SEC employees who left the Commission to go work for the industry they once oversaw, raising questions about the integrity of the agency's ability to be an effective watchdog.

On April 1, a five-foot piece of the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines 737 Classic airplane ripped off in mid-flight, forcing the plane to an emergency landing in Arizona. Despite the date of the incident, this was no joke. In late April, the nation’s crash detectives, the National Transportation Safety Board, said they found evidence of manufacturing defects. Experts told the New York Times that the board’s findings suggest the 737’s "aluminum skin had not been properly bound together, leading to premature damage from fatigue." This week's podcast is a phone conversation between POGO staffers and a former Boeing employee and her attorney, who claim that Boeing bent the rules and allowed very similar manufacturing defects on a newer version of the 737, the 737 Next Generation. In 2005, they filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Boeing defrauded the military by supplying defective planes. They claim that Boeing has also put the flying public at risk.

In March 2011, AllGov reported that DARPA, the Pentagon's premier research arm, had awarded a contract to a company founded by the agency's director. Wired's Spencer Ackerman joined POGO staffers to discuss how it all went down.

POGO first learned about Lieutenant Colonel Michael Holmes in an explosive article written by journalist Michael Hastings for Rolling Stone magazine. Lt. Colonel Holmes is the leader of an "information operations" team in the military. When Holmes was ordered to use his skills on Members of Congress, he checked with a JAG attorney on whether that order was legal. The JAG attorney said the order was illegal, and Holmes pushed back against the order and that order was rescinded. Afterwards he was subjected to what he calls a retaliatory investigation, and when he took his case to the Department of Defense Inspector General, his voice seemed to fall on deaf ears. In this podcast, POGO's Nick Schwellenbach and Bryan Rahija interview Holmes about his story.