A Stimulus Cyber Fight
As the political battle over the Obama administration's stimulus plan escalates, Earl Devaney, the veteran inspector general charged with monitoring spending, is moving to establish his independence. Since becoming chair of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board, Devaney has taken down a video of President Barack Obama from recovery.gov, the official Web site set up to track stimulus dollars. He's also mandated that the names of cabinet members not be mentioned—only their departments. "I'm trying to keep myself and the board out of the politics of this thing," he says.
As a result, the White House recently created the dueling whitehouse.gov/recovery, described as a Web site that will "tell the story of the nation's road to recovery." It's complete with a presidential video, photos of Vice President Joe Biden (who oversees the recovery effort), and a "recovery blog" on which administration officials post boosterish stories about "exciting" recovery successes. "As the Vice President says, 'It's going to be a busy summer!'" the site declares. "We'll be revving up the recovery engine getting more dollars out the door."
Biden spokesman James Carney insists that there are no extra costs to the White House effort because whitehouse.gov/recovery is really only a page on the general White House Web site. "From a message point of view, we feel we need to tell our story about the good the Recovery Act is doing," he says.
Questions about recovery Web operations intensified last week with the disclosure that a new $18 million contract had been awarded to a private firm, Smartronics, to overhaul recovery.gov. That followed criticism that the site was providing only sketchy data on where awards were going.
Devaney concedes that recovery.gov is "certainly not what the [Stimulus] Act envisioned." But he says the real test will come in October—the deadline for agencies to report stimulus spending—when he expects that users will be able to type in their ZIP codes and see exactly how money is being spent in their neighborhoods, down to the last subcontractor. At that point, he says, "there will be a million citizen IGs" who will help him monitor "if some local mayor has steered a contract to his brother-in-law." But he's not waiting: he recently gave Biden's office a list of stimulus projects with a "high risk" for fraud and has made "30 to 35" referrals about questionable awards to department inspectors general.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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