F-35 still struggling

F-35 Test Fleet Struggling with Low Readiness Rates The 23 aircraft in the test fleet achieved an abysmal “fully mission capable” rate of 8.7 percent in June 2019 according to a chart obtained by POGO. Read More

The Supreme Court in 2019: Review and Preview While there is a notion that the “conservative wing” and “liberal wing” of the Supreme Court vote along party lines, the increase in unique voting line-ups this term shows this is not always the case. Read More

The Dangers of Chronic Federal Vacancies While it may be unusual for a sitting president to admit publicly that they prefer acting over Senate-confirmed officers, presidential manipulation of the Vacancies Act is not uncommon. Read More

Historically High Pentagon Spending Creates a Hollow Force The problems with the F-35, the Ford, and most other marquee Pentagon programs result directly from lapses in discipline when money is not perceived as an obstacle. Read More

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$5,000 Match for First-Time Donors A donor was so compelled by POGO’s dedication to making a more effective government for everyone that the family has promised to match up to $5,000 for any first-time gifts. This is an amazing time to give a gift because it will go twice as far. Donate Now!

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WATCH: This Week at POGO

In our latest episode of "This Week at POGO," POGO's Social Media Manager Janel Forsythe discusses the Vacancies Act, the F-35 operational test fleet, and more. Watch the video

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POGO in the News

The Washington Post Former defense secretary Jim Mattis rejoins General Dynamics board Mattis is the latest influential military official to join a major defense contractor, part of the “revolving door” between business and government that has long concerned government ethics experts. A report released late last year by the Project on Government Oversight found that defense contractors had hired at least 50 high-level government officials since Trump became president, among more than 600 such instances in the past decade.

NBC News Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America's police The company has since pitched Rekognition to other police departments, including a more aggressive use of the technology — identifying people captured on video in real time — in Orlando, Florida, according to the documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. A different cache of documents uncovered by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight showed that Amazon had also tried to sell Rekognition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The National Interest Just 2 Out of 23 U.S. F-35 Test Planes Are Fully Operational An expert with the Washington, D.C. Project on Government Oversight described the test force’s readiness rate “abysmal” in a recent report on their website. The low mission-capable rate underscores ongoing problems with the F-35’s design, testing and production and could weigh on the Pentagon’s efforts to accelerate F-35 production and boost the readiness of the frontline fleet. “A fully mission-capable aircraft can perform all of its assigned missions, a particularly important readiness measure for multi-mission programs such as the F-35,” POGO’s Dan Grazier explained in the report. “The June [2019] rate was actually an improvement over the previous month, when the fleet managed a rate of just 4.7 percent. Since the beginning of operational testing in December 2018, the fleet has had an average fully mission capable rate of just 11 percent.” From the report: Aircraft mission-capability statuses can be degraded for reasons including a lack of spare parts or a failure in a mission system like the radar or electronic warfare instruments. According to sources within the F-35 program, a frequently failing component is the Distributed Aperture System. This system provides the pilot warnings of incoming missiles and generates the imagery for the $400,000 helmet that the pilot wears. The F-35 can still fly with problems like this, and, using the data links between aircraft, some of the information from a functioning system on another F-35 can fill in a blind spot in a degraded one. But this only works up to a point, and to fully test the program’s capabilities, all systems must function properly.

The Daily Beast Post-9/11 Intel Center Now Going After Domestic Terror For civil liberties advocates, any moves that deepen coordination between the intelligence community and law enforcement are cause for concern, to say the least. Jake Laperruque of the Project on Government Oversight said the changes could blur “that line between international, foreign-focused surveillance and domestic policing with these hyped-up superpowers that they were never intended to have, even under the broad regime that Congress authorized after 9/11.”

Federal News Network Deadline passes for agencies to tell OMB what federal advisory committees to cut Yesterday was the deadline for federal agencies to send the Office of Management and Budget a list of the federal advisory committees they’re proposing to do away with – the mandate to reduce committees came in an executive order President Trump signed earlier this year. Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, says the actions are a step backward. He joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss.

TomDispatch .com Tomgram: Harris, Stimpson, and Freeman, The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam This is hardly the first time that these companies have extolled their ability to create jobs while cutting them. As Ben Freeman previously documented for the Project On Government Oversight, these very same firms cut almost 10% of their workforce in the six years before the BCA came into effect, even as taxpayer dollars heading their way annually jumped by nearly 25% from $91 billion to $113 billion. [...] In fact, since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight’s Mandy Smithberger found, “at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors.”

Government Executive Senate Passes Bipartisan Bill to Strengthen Transition Team Ethics Requirements Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst for the Project on Government Oversight, told Government Executive, “POGO is particularly pleased with the requirement for a public ethics plan.” Even though “transition team members are not federal employees,” he said, “their close work with federal agencies, their access to non-public information and their role in structuring a new administration demand that clear ethical standards be set and maintained.”

MarketWatch Tax-cheat whistleblowers raking in record reward money under expanding legal protections Even if tipsters do get awards, it’s still a relatively small portion compared to their work, advocates said. “It might be a lot of money but it’s still a small percentage of the giant amount of money that would not have been collected at all by the government had that person not come forward,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog group.”

Medium Pentagon Freeze $10 Billion Surveillance Contract Over Amazon Concerns “Contracts should be awarded fairly based on merit,” said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, speaking to The Intercept. “The Procurement Integrity Act seeks to ensure that job offers and other financial conflicts of interest don’t influence that process.”

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