Broken Government. That is what the report is called. It is an indictment of the way Government was run and failed during the Bush Era.
The amount of money wasted and stolen or lost during the past 8 years probably could bring down our deficit to almost half of what it is now.
Along with an article I read last night in American Prospect about how Bush broke the government it makes me certain that Bush came into office with the intent of dismantling our government.
No bid contracts and privatization was the mantra and my guess, what Bush's intentions were for the whole government.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/
http://www.prospect.org/...
Yesterday I saw a gentleman from the Center for Public Integrity who was talking about the report. He also cited congress and the media for the abject failures of the last 8 years.
We all know the republican congress failed to do any oversight and gave everything to Bush. The democrats are just as responsible for failing to follow up or do enough hearings or enforce any penalties to the people who were found responsible.
My guess about the media is that they got lazy and fell into a infotainment mindset that focused solely on fluff and gossip and sensationalism during the OJ trial and never went back to serious news.
At the time of the OJ trial there simply was not that much going on to investigate. But, as the Bush years got under way the media failed to reverse course and stayed in the shallow and fuffy mindset. Don't rock the boat and you get access for the good gossip. Go along to get along.
I firmly believe this is why the rapid downfall of the traditional media is happening. The public simply got fed up with fluff and lack of investigative or public information and turned to the internet for it. They had no interest in Hollywood Reporter style cotton candy type of news that the 'hard news' set abandoned.
Public Integrity decided to do a report on the government during the Bush years and this is what they found:
The Center for Public Integrity’s Broken Government project makes clear what an imposing assignment that will be by cataloging what hasn’t worked. In a comprehensive assessment of systematic failures over the past eight years, the Center found more than 125 examples of government breakdown. The failures occurred in areas as diverse as education, energy, the environment, justice and security, the military and veterans’ affairs, health care, transportation, financial management, consumer and worker safety, and more. While some of the failures are, by now, depressingly familiar, many are less well-known but equally distressing.
In the report, they quote the damning assessment by Thomas Mann:
"I think we’ll look back on this period as one of the most destructive periods in American public life . . . both in terms of policy and process," Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, told the Center. "The broken government is not limited to one end of Pennsylvania Avenue; it involves the executive and legislative branches, which both contributed to embracing policies and actions that have come back to haunt us."
The report asks and answers the question "how did we get here":
How did we get here? The answers go back decades. Since the Ronald Reagan years, substantial portions of the Republican Party have believed that the federal government operates inefficiently, and is more often part of the problem than part of the solution.
But, republicans are not the only guilty party in this failure:
That thinking was adopted by some Democrats as well. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected in 1992 promising to "reinvent government," eliminate excessive regulation, and cut the size of government. Clinton’s "Putting People First" plan called for a 25 percent reduction in the White House staff and elimination of 100,000 jobs in the bureaucracy, and the 42nd president largely delivered. Amid outsourcing, government shrinkage, and deregulation, Clinton declared, "The era of big government is over."
They go on to how Bush took up this mantra and took it to overkill. I think he also took this mantra and decided that government needed to be dismantled and privatized completely and well as doing away with regulations altogether. Rove's obsession with the era of the 1890s, the gilded age, helped to push Bush far beyond what the original thinking by conservatives like Reagan was. And it devastated our country.
Add to it the abuse of Cheney's obsession with Presidential Powers. According to Robert Dallek:
"In my judgment, there’s a clear connection between the Bush administration’s governing philosophy and the abuse of power we have seen in the last eight years," presidential historian Robert Dallek told the Center. "The Bush-Cheney assumption has been that the post-Watergate reforms weakened the presidency and a president’s ability to deal with foreign dangers. Much of what they have done has been an attempt to right this so-called imbalance. The result has been a resurgence of the imperial presidency."
The Center has a front page telling about the report and you can download the full report. It also has 40 failures of the Bush Administration:
Forty ways in which the federal government failed to perform under the administration of George W. Bush, 2001-2008:
• 45 million Americans without health care
• 60 percent of EPA scientists report political interference with their work
• 1,273 whistleblower complaints filed from 2002-2008; 1,256 were dismissed
• 190,000 U.S.-supplied weapons missing in Iraq
• $212.3 million in overcharges by Halliburton for Iraq oil reconstruction work
• $455 billion deficit for fiscal year 2008; estimated to reach up to $1 trillion in 2009
• $9.91 billion for government secrecy in 2007 — a record
• 809 government laptops with sensitive information lost by FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
• 30 million pounds of beef recalled in 2007
• $300 billion over budget for Department of Defense weapons acquisitions
• Less than 3 percent of U.S. electricity needs met by alternative energy
• 2,145 troops killed and 21,000 injured in Iraq from March 2003 through November 1, 2008, by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and other explosives — many while awaiting body armor. Additionally, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the conflict
• 34.8 percent of oil used in America imported during Nixon administration; 42.2 percent during first Gulf War; 59.9 percent in 2006
• $100 million for failed FBI computer network
• $100 billion in federal tax revenues lost annually to corporations using off-shore tax shelters
• 163 million airline passengers delayed 320 million hours; cost to U.S. economy: more than $41 billion in 2007
• $60 billion stolen in Medicare fraud each year
• 2.5 million toxic toys recalled in summer of 2007
• $12.5 billion for defective National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System
• $4 billion to upgrade National Security Agency computers that often crash, have trouble talking to each other, and lose key intelligence
• 60,000 flights made by 46 Southwest Airline jets in violation of FAA safety directives due to lax FAA enforcement
• 12.8 percent job turnover at Department of Homeland Security in 2006 — double that of any other cabinet-level agency
• 730,000 backlogged patent applications
• 148,000 troops not enough to secure Iraq, enabling insurgency to take root
• $1 billion, six-year "Reading First" program called ineffective by Department of Education Inspector General
• 20,000 U.S. deaths annually from lack of pollution controls on diesel vehicles and power plants
• 60,000 newborns a year at risk for neurological problems due to mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants
• Two-thirds fewer clean ups of EPA Superfund toxic waste sites during 2001-2006 than in previous six years
• 935 demonstrably false statements in lead-up to Iraq war by President Bush and seven members of his administration
• At least $500 million for FEMA trailers contaminated by formaldehyde occupied by thousands displaced after Hurricane Katrina
• 558 detainees at Guantanamo detention facility reduced to 255 after court-ordered case reviews
• 26 percent of corporations holding at least $250 million in assets audited in 2006; percent audited in 1990: more than 70 percent. IRS audit staff slashed by 30 percent
• $431.5 billion spent on Medicare in 2007, double amount in 2001
• 47 dead in mining accidents in 2006 blamed on lax oversight
• $9 billion in federal oil and gas royalties mismanaged by agency linked to drug-and-sex scandal
• 275 largest U.S. corporations pay, on average, about 17 percent in taxes in 2007, half the standard corporate tax rate
• $45 trillion in credit-default swaps, without federal oversight, in 2007
• 760,800 disability claims backlogged, awaiting hearings at Social Security Administration as of October 2008
• 806,000 Veterans Affairs disability claims in 2006, up 39 percent since 2000; backlog reached 400,000 claims by February 2007
• 2,640 days Osama bin Laden at large since September 11, 2001 (as of December 10, 2008)