No End to Earmarks
The latest military bill in the House included over 1,000 of the spending provisions.
Last spring President Obama and House leaders pledged to crack down on "earmarking," the practice by which lawmakers slip pet projects into spending bills that often benefit those who just happen to contribute to their campaigns. But on July 30, it was business as usual when the House approved a $636 billion military spending bill stuffed with about 1,100 earmarks worth more than $2.7 billion. "The swamp has not been drained, to put it mildly," says GOP Rep. Jeff Flake, who offered repeated amendments to strike selected earmarks, all of which failed. Among his targets: at least 70 earmarks worth more than $500 million for former clients of defunct lobbying firm PMA Group (closely tied to powerful Defense Appropriations chair Rep. John Murtha), which the FBI raided last year. The bill also included $80 million for an antimissile defense project that Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to kill but is being built, in part, by Northrop Grumman in Murtha's district. (A Murtha spokesman didn't respond to requests for comment.)
It's not just the Murthas who play the earmark game. Consider Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a south Florida Democrat generally known as a reformer. Wasserman Schultz, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, slipped into the bill a $4.5 million earmark for a high-tech radio project that the Pentagon didn't ask for and which, according to a report by congressional auditors, has been plagued by "significant" performance problems. The beneficiary: defense contractor General Dynamics. GD's PAC, which had never given to Wasserman Schultz in the past, kicked in $19,000 to her political committees in the past two years—including $5,000 this year while the Appropriations panel deliberated the bill. Jonathan Beeton, a spokesman for the representative, says the campaign donations "did not play a factor" in the earmark request, but noted that GD opened an office in her district last year. "We were happy to hear what we can do to make them successful and they said they had this program," Beeton says, though he concedes the radios won't be manufactured in her district. A GD spokesman says its radios aren't the cause of the problem the auditors flagged and says of the donations, "General Dynamics supports members who support U.S. troops."
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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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