Government Oversight Lessons Learned - Danielle Brian, POGO

Our guest for this podcast is Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). POGO is a nonpartisan independent government watchdog whose investigations have chronicled lessons learned, missed and lost across huge government programs addressing the cold war, two Gulf wars, 911, the war in Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID 19 pandemic.

Danielle joins us today to discuss the kinds of pitfalls to expect with climate change spending associated with the pending infrastructure bills, and how we might avoid them. Examples of effective and ineffective oversight in the CARES Act, oil and gas royalties and other contexts are discussed.

Transcript

Greg Williams: 0:02

So, today we're joined by Daniel Bryan and Dena razor. Two people that I've worked with over the years and have known for most of my professional career, and met them both at a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest group that studies government waste, fraud and abuse, called the project on government oversight. During that, during most of time, Danielle has been executive director there, and she's grown the organization far beyond its original dimensions and, and scope. And Dina since then has gone on to be writer and a journalist and to work with a retired government official on what are called key tam cases where a private citizen sues on behalf of the government to recover money and other resources that from that were defrauded from the government. So why don't I hand it to Dina and you can say a little bit more about why we've gotten together today.

Dina Rasor: 1:05

Okay. Yes, my name is Dana razor. And I actually founded the project on government oversight. 40, over 40 years ago, around 14 years ago, and I was the director and ended up hiring Danielle and Greg. And so in the early years, and then when I left the organization after 10 years, Daniel Bryan took it over. And she's been doing a lot longer than I, I had. And what we're going to talk about, what Greg and I are doing right now is to is starting this organization called Climate money watchdog. And the reason we're doing it is not that we're anti climate at all. In fact, what we want to do is we want to make sure that this money is spent well and right, because as soon as it's not, it becomes a political football, on the pros and cons of whoever wants to spend the money and not spend the money. They use these things as an as a result. And so we are about ready to get a tremendous amount of money going into climate issues. It's sort of an unprecedented amount of money, and the environmental movement, and everyone has not dealt with these large amounts of money all at once. And so what and we're, we're going to be talking today to Danielle, who has had a great experience looking at other big tranches of money, what works, what doesn't, what do we need to do first? Before you know it before, how can we front load the system so that we aren't chasing the the lost and fraudulent money? And all the things that go with that? So and that. On that note, I'd like to introduce Daniel Bryan. Daniel, I'm glad you're here.

Danielle Brian: 2:53

I'm excited to be here. One more disclaimer is you remained you know, on pogos board and, and are therefore also still my boss.

Dina Rasor: 3:04

Never thought of it that way. But yes, I'm I'm treasurer and on the board of saga for pretty much. Pretty much 2530 years, I can't remember decades. Anyway, one of the one of the first things that I would like to talk to Danielle about is the this is going to be an enormous amount of money tranche shoved in to the federal government bureaucracy as it stands now. This is going to be above and beyond the usual procurement and amounts of money, the appropriations and so we're we're kind of we're one of the things we're worried about is will the bureaucracy be able to handle it? Will the will the procurement officers be able to handle it handle this extra? And will the oversight be able to handle this X ray is a huge undertaking. And if if both bills pass, they'll probably be around 3 trillion to 3.5 trillion. And that's over 10 years. So that's between 300 billion to 350 billion more money pushed in to what I have always found after working on my qui tam cases forever, a creaky government procurement system where they just don't protect themselves as much as they can. Can. So on that note, Danielle, why don't we want to really talk about what you've seen in the past? What worked, what didn't work and how important it is to get language into legislation now, before all of this passes.

Danielle Brian: 4:43

So I think that when we when we look back over the last 20 years, these big giant of, of funding have typically in fact maybe only happened in response to either a natural disaster You're like Katrina, or an economic disaster, like, you know, 2008 when the stock market crashed, and, and most recently with the public health and economic disaster of COVID. And so this is not really, in my mind, that new an idea, a huge amount of money coming in, that's being spread across a bunch of different federal agencies, quickly. We've seen this happen before. And so the way I look at it, it's not that different. It's just that we keep not learning from past mistakes, or even sometimes we haven't learned from when things went well. So what I mean by that is, in the early Obama administration, they, the you know, the huge money, the Ara was being, what three quarters of a trillion dollars was being spent all at once. And they deliberately set up this oversight mechanism of inspectors general to be able to, and they were very public about it, and they created a website where they're going to track the money. And they, they made sure that they could track the money as far as possible from when the monies are appropriated from Congress all the way as far as they could, to the you know, the road that was being built in Cook County, Illinois. And,

Greg Williams: 6:24

Daniel, before you go too far, I know, three of us know what the Ara was, and roughly one in compass. But if you could say a couple of sentences about what the letters stand for, and

Danielle Brian: 6:36

hopefully someone Google what it stands for, I don't remember American American. There was another bar in there, though, right?

Greg Williams: 6:43

Recovery and Reinvestment, I believe, Oh, here we go.

Danielle Brian: 6:46

Thank you. And it was an effort to restart the economy after the the housing crisis, right, and the Wall Street crash. And so it was a big surge of funds. It was early in the Obama administration. And, and so, so they started by making sure very publicly and all the states and counties that were recipients of these funds knew these funds are going to be watched, and you need to report back when you receive these funds, how you're using these, how they're using them. And as a result, for the most part, I think the general public and sort of really even at the time, there was a bipartisan recognition that there wasn't a lot of fraud that happened, even though it was a huge amount of money that was spent. And I think that it was a combination of things, mostly because they were very publicly acknowledging that it needed to be watched. And they were making sure that there was as much transparency who was receiving the money as possible, we seem to have totally forgotten that lesson. We meaning the government, I guess, in this case, they forgot. And, and so even though, when the COVID relief, the Cares Act, which was the first big tranche of money that was coming to in response to the public health crisis of COVID, they had, again, great language in the legislation that was going to require very similar kinds of reporting, and oversight of those funds. But the Trump administration just failed to execute those, those provisions. And we continue to this day not to have real information about who received the COVID relief funds. Of course, all of you, if you're watching the news, have started to hear or started to hear fairly quickly after the PPP loans, which were part of the COVID Relief spending. Were going to the wrong people. Sometimes it was like Harvard University and the LA Lakers because there was money available. That's something that I guess the bottom line is when there's money available, there's people waiting to grab it as quickly as possible. And it's not necessarily those who are best who are most in need, or most deserving of those funds. And so while and sort of what Greg, you were starting to talk about, one of the problems was that was after the fact they were starting to catch people who shouldn't have received those funds. A much smarter approach is to make sure that the wrong people aren't getting it in the first place, which is complicated when this is urgent, you know, need to get it out as quickly as possible. But it's not impossible, because what they could have been doing is implement the requirements of the Cares Act that said, Okay, if you're receiving these funds, you need to report back to us, get them quickly keep people on your payroll or start, you know, create jobs you didn't have before, but report back to us, the government what we're doing with it, and what you're doing with it, and that that hasn't happened.

Greg Williams: 9:47

Yet. One of the things that I remember from our work together was it was there was all this defense spending that was driven by the Cold War, which was always billed as a very urgent issue and so money had to be you know, shipped Out the door as quickly as possible. And time and time again, it led to acquisitions of things that, you know, took years, sometimes decades that to actually make work, you know, we spend so much time and effort getting a submarine out of the ways that we'd launched it without the ability to fire torpedoes. And you know, as urgent as climate change is, it's not going to do us any good to dump a whole bunch of money into ventures that don't actually bear fruit or that overwhelm the procurement systems or that, you know, build factories that can't be staffed. All of this stuff has to take place, in an order and at a pace where it, it can all grow together, and trying to skip steps, just as often what will slow things down in the end, as it does speed them up?

Danielle Brian: 10:50

So skipping steps is a great example, in the PPP loans, because that's something people have seen now happening, right. And that's pretty people are pretty conversant with seeing how many in many cases the wrong people got them. The Congress said, You need to be prioritizing, they said this to the SBA, the Small Business Administration, prioritize veteran owned businesses, women owned businesses and minority owned businesses to be at the front of the line to receive these funds. However, the small business administration did not tell the banks that so the banks went to their favorite, you know, their biggest and favorite customers, because they already had relationships with them. And those, that's why you ended up with these huge some cases, private equity firms. In one of our investigations, we found a Chinese owned private equity firm getting, you know, PPP loans, but all of us in our neighborhoods saw small businesses that were closing their doors, because they didn't get access to those funds. That's an example of a skip skip step.

Greg Williams: 11:50

Yeah, I can speak to that very directly, I was executive director at a very small nonprofit organization. And we had excellent service from our bank, but our bank had different organizations, staff to deal with different kinds of customers, and the ones that had the capacity and that had working relationships with customers that could quickly process documentation like this. Were with the big commercial customers. Right. And so our bank, fortunately, you could see that and was able to refer us to another bank that that focused more directly on small nonprofits, and we were able to get the loan. But you know, it was it was terrifying to see the the available funds dwindling, right. And the days going by, and, you know, our application not getting processed, and, you know, hearing about these high flying organizations getting these loans? Well, you know, we were at the point of potentially laying off all our staff.

Dina Rasor: 12:55

And I'd like to add to that it's, you know, what, one, I've spent most of my career, chasing the money once it's been defraud too much is turned into fraud and lost and everything else. And what I find is that, one, that bureaucracies, government bureaucracies are often loath to go after the bigger companies that do this, because they have lobbyists. But also the one of the big problems is, when you have a bunch of money like this, you're gonna have very pure people with good intentions. And, you know, environmentalists will say yes, yes, again, we're gonna have climate oriented people and all this kind of stuff. But I find that when there's a lot of money like that, because a lot of deception. And so there's good people trying to do the right thing. And then there's a lot of sharks in the water. If and when they smell that blood, it's like a feeding frenzy. And so we have to, you usually get less than 10 cents on the dollar when you chase the money, even with lawsuits like we do. And so what we need, what we need to do, is to front load this with the same kind of thing. And I'm really surprised that one of the things that Danielle has mentioned, is that that, right? There has been language ever since the Obama administration that you insert into these big tranches of money and you don't see that at all, in any of the climate money that we know. So the Katy porters and the Elizabeth Warren's the people that you know, whose job in this career is to make sure that the thieving doesn't start or or at least is kept down to a reasonable level need need to be aware of this and the environmental movement needs to be aware that this is this is their job. I have you know, I've worked on a few environmental things but one of the reasons Greg and I are starting this because we have a I love working on environmental issues. I think it's one of the most important things in our time. But the reason we're doing looking at this now is that we have experience in chasing this stuff for years, and what will happen? And so has Danielle. So my guess my next question to Danielle is, what would you what would you think? Let's let's, what would you think about putting them putting the legislative language needed to go ahead and, and try to prevent this and not just go not just put your money in oversight and chase the chase horse after it's already?

Danielle Brian: 15:41

Yeah, I mean, that's the the nice thing is this isn't magic, or all that complicated because we've we have been, we, the government has done this, the Congress has done this, as I mentioned, the language in the Cares Act for COVID, relief spending was actually quite good. It's the failure of execution. So we both have to make sure that the language is there. And then we have to make sure that the agencies are following up and implementing what the law requires. And the simplest one right now, the most important one, maybe not the simplest, but the most important one is to make sure that whoever is receiving these funds, because remember, sometimes it's contracts. But a lot of the times it's grants or loan guarantees, and you have these all these different kinds of financing. structures that are part of this big package of funding, making sure that the recipients of these funds are required to report back to the government so we can be finding out who are they and how is it used? That is the way I think that is the clearest way to have transparency. In fact, now. I mean, in early Obama, the Internet was nowhere near as as advanced as it is now in terms of being able to map where has it gone? How many jobs have been created? Or what is you know, what is being accomplished because of the money being spent? And that will build confidence, both in Congress, but in the general public that these funds were well spent? And, and it won't be that hard to do? We just need to make sure that it's done.

Dina Rasor: 17:16

Yeah, okay. And then then then the next thing, I'm concerned about that, that we've gotten down this far, because the you know, these things are going to be passed pretty soon. But I also think that a lot of it has to also do with the tone of the people on top. People are at the top, because you're saying that the COVID The COVID tranche of money, had good stuff, but the White House White House at that time with that President was not interested in that kind of oversight. And but what maybe, Danielle, you could talk a little bit about how how Biden, you know, his his chief of staff, Ron Klain may have learned something from their first their first thing with Obama, and then turned around and really put good finally put good oversight in the American Recovery Act of Ara. So why don't you tell that story?

Danielle Brian: 18:24

Well, what I what I know, and I actually don't remember the years, so you all have to tell me it because you mentioned the Solyndra case. When When did that happen?

Dina Rasor: 18:35

Well, 2009 to 2010.

Danielle Brian: 18:39

And so what was happening there, as you described, has really, I think, created a big problem for the renewable energy advocates and other climate spending advocates, because that's pointed to as like, you know, look how that money was, was did not go to the intended purpose. But it was another example that Biden was responsible for that I was mentioning earlier, was this Obama, American. Never gonna get a or investment. Thank you, Greg. Vika was actually tasked with being responsible for it. And and at that time, Ron was actually Biden's chief of staff as the vice president. And so this council of IGS, whose job it was to monitor all the information coming in from the recipients of those funds. were reporting regularly back to Biden, and I think they saw that this was there's great benefit to that because at the end of the day, there wasn't there were not big scandals of of funds that should have gone to other use. I mean, it essentially was seen as a successful emergency funding of, of infrastructure actually in construction in many cases. So it's, it's a really good example for them to harken back to you. My worry is they haven't. You know, they're there many months into this administration now where he's president, and they haven't seemed to be concerned, as you know, we've been trying to get his his teams of people at the Office of Management and Budget who are responsible for sending out the guidance to the agencies on collecting data. And they don't seem to be terribly worried about fixing the mistakes of the Trump administration in the in the collection of information about COVID really spending. So I'm worried that the people who are there now are not prioritizing how important tracking being transparent and tracking the funding is meant all

Dina Rasor: 20:37

the things that we're concerned with the environmental organizations, and the people that are pushing this, they're all well meaning and, you know, you know, they're things are really happening, but they ought to be the people that are pushing the White House and Congress put this stuff in now

Greg Williams: 20:57

may be a good time to, to elaborate a little bit of a on on two things, one, how to loan guarantees work, and why are they useful tool for the government, and what happened with Solyndra? A loan guarantee basically means that if if somebody else gives a loan, usually a bank, and the person received or the entity receiving the loan is unable to pay it back, instead of the bank being stuck with with that loss, the government will then pay the bank back. And that's a that's a tool that the government can use to encourage banks to give loans in areas that that have higher risk than the bank will typically tolerate. It's a way of putting a thumb on the scales of how capital is distributed in a capitalist economy. And the great thing about loan guarantees is that most of the time, it doesn't cost the government anything because the loan is paid back. But what's really important is that when the bank knows that it's not bearing the risk of the loan, they, you know, it can be much less concerned about the risk involved. And that means that the government has to be concerned about the risk. And whether it's the guarantor or the bank, whoever is assessing the risk, usually does that by asking the loan recipient to describe how they're going to use the money and how they're going to be able to pay it back involves pro formas and business plans and, and things like that. In the cylinder case, collectively, the the the executive branch of the federal government said, Hey, we really want more investment in, in solar energy. And here's a company that's, that's looking for loans, they want to build a great big factory and make lots of solar panels and make them available a lot less expensively. What could possibly be wrong with that, in an effort to make that happen, and get that factory built as quickly as possible, they said, you know, we're not going to take all this time reading all these performers and business plans and, and financial data, we're just going to give it a cursory review. And, and, and guarantee the loan. So nobody did anything illegal, as far as we can tell, nobody did anything with with ill intent. But the government as the loan guarantor skipped the step of assessing what the risk was. And it turns out that this company didn't have a business plan that would make effective use of the funds. They didn't sell a lot of solar panels, they went out of business in a few months. And instead of just guaranteeing the loan and not actually having to pay for it, the federal government had to pay the full amount of the loan. And so about a half a billion dollars, yeah, yeah, not an insubstantial amount. And so our hope is that some of the people most directly involved in that, in the decision to fast track that loan guarantee will learn from that. And we'll take a more deliberate, careful approach to all of the money going out the door with with these infrastructure bills.

Dina Rasor: 24:22

It's like somebody trying to buy a business and looking at the business saying, Oh, this is really cool. I really liked this technology. I really liked the people but they don't. Almost all businesses do when they acquire another company, they do a due diligence to find out where are the skeletons or other liabilities? What are you know, what are these people capable of doing what they're saying? And so the idea of setting on half a billion dollar loan out there without due diligence is kind of mind boggling. And yet it was one of the few big scandals of you know, scandals or losses of that The American Recovery Act. And I think that sobered them up. So Biden and his chief of staff and everybody else in the OMB and everybody really righted the ship on that. But I'm seeing us go into another larger hurricane Gale, without battening down the hatches to, you know, not to completely get swamped on it, because once it goes out the door, it's good, it's much harder to track.

Danielle Brian: 25:27

And actually, even the technology, the the databases that were set up in that era to track the funds, they closed down, they don't exist anymore, they thought about restarting them, but didn't invest in restarting them during the end of the Trump administration. So they don't currently have the tracking mechanisms in place to be tracking these funds properly. And, and, and actually what you're talking about with the loan guarantees, Greg is similar to what has been decided in this administration to pursue a lot of loan forgiveness for these PPP loans, without even requiring people to give any information on how they use the funds, they just have forgiven the loans. And the government is just crazy. This kind of crazy, because I get the urgency in getting money out. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't also require once the money is out and being spent, I mean, all of these entities have to report for their taxes, how the money's being spent, you're not actually even create asking them to create new data. It has data they need to have as business owners, but just reporting it back. So that it's it's clear, other than to the IRS is not what's currently in play.

Greg Williams: 26:39

Yeah. And again, as a PPP recipient, myself, I remember having some comfort in knowing upfront, here's the data you need to collect. Here's who's going to ask for it. You know, sort of collecting data like that, after the fact is an enormous pain in the neck, you know, is setting it up to be collected routinely on a week by week payroll by payroll basis. That's very easy.

Danielle Brian: 27:06

This was only quarterly The question was to only do it quarterly. And they but they never did it. That was what the Congress had required. But it was.

Dina Rasor: 27:13

And you know, this is not as sexy of a thing to talk about when you talk about climate change and the desperation that people feel. And we're going to have all these new technologies and breakthroughs and charging stations and electric cars, and you know, all these things. Movement is very excited about but every time that you don't do the due diligence, beginning, or you don't pursue an obvious if you don't have enough people are enough well to do the oversight. Every time that happens, and that gets public, that kills the momentum, kills a bit by bit by 1000, cuts the momentum of the goal, the climate goal. In other words, people who don't believe in the climate goal, wait until there's some scandal and use it as a cudgel to beat up the goal. Right. And one of the things is, is what's really important, and I had a lawyer told me one time, when they were dealing with a rogue lawyer, who was one of their in the same area, they were, he said, we have to police ourselves, because everybody people like doing if we don't police ourselves, the bad guys who get through and do this stuff are going to be become the poster child of movement. And so that it's just so important. And so the next topic, I would like, I just

Danielle Brian: 28:42

want to add one point to the point we're making the DNA because I think it's also it's not it's an additional danger, that I think people think, well, you know, fraud and waste, so it's wasted money or or, you know, but there it's not a victimless crime in the sense that there were, what that means is money, went somewhere and didn't go somewhere else. And so what are those opportunities that were missed, that those businesses didn't get invested in or, you know, whatever, is the the real, potential successful technology wasn't invested in, it didn't move forward, because it went somewhere where it should have gone. So it's, you know, it's, it's more obvious when you're talking about disaster relief, where money goes one place and doesn't go where it's really needed. But this is true when it comes to investing in technologies like this is too,

Greg Williams: 29:32

right. Yeah. The other thing that I would add is that as sort of exciting as it is to think in terms of this as being a bunch of criminals or unscrupulous people, misdirecting all of this money. There's a lot of money to be to be wasted and lost just in inefficiency. A colleague of mine gave me a fantastic piece of advice which is do not ascribe to conspiracy that which can easily be explained through incompetence. You know, I never find any use to love talking about Gucci shod salespeople. But I know when I was at the project, I saw a lot more money wasted just on sheer inefficiency.

Dina Rasor: 30:20

certainly true. And that's why they call it fraud. And it's Yep. And problem with waste is, it's really hard to go after the money through government channels on waste, because the people will say we did our best efforts, your efforts were lousy.

Greg Williams: 30:41

Oftentimes, it's lost. I mean, we paid our dues, studying overpriced spare parts. And a lot of the times, it was repeated tool setup charges, you know, so if somebody makes 10 batches of five wrenches, instead of making, you know, one batch of 50 wrenches, you know, the cost of setting up that assembly line 10 times cannot be recovered, people really did set up those tools. In many cases, 10 times, there's nobody you can recover that from that's just gone. They always have

Dina Rasor: 31:15

a clause in the contracts. Unfortunately, government contracts, sometimes they put in the clause best efforts. And that's like, saying somebody who's really bad at math, and you hire them to take your math exam, and they got an D or an F. And I said, Well, that was my best effort. It's that kind of thing. Okay. I think the next thing I'd like to talk about is, once is the oversight, not just front loading in the beginning with databases and people in the securement. Community, realizing that there's going to be oversight, but then there will be a need for the current oversight mechanisms in the federal government, like the Inspector General's office, and stuff to monitor this audited and then actually investigate where there is there is fraud. And I want to talk to Danielle on who's been working on this with a lot of IGS being acting IGs and replace, but all the problems and the the holes in the IG system right now, that would worry us about not being able to count on it to handle this amount of money.

Danielle Brian: 32:30

Well, the first thing is, as, as I think you pointed out the amounts of money that we're talking about, in some cases, dwarf that traditional funds that those agencies are already contracting, and working with so so that we believe strongly that you need to have a commensurate surge in funding for the oversight mechanisms to be able to oversee the additional funds. That means the IGs need to have, you know, a surge of funds to manage more funds that that they're overseeing. It means more investigators, more auditors. So there's that which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't happen. And right now, that's not, as I understand it in the plan for the instrument infrastructure bills. So that's another thing that needs to be added to it. Then, and it's across a lot of agencies, right. I mean, I think you've been looking at, at the plans, you're talking about Department of Transportation, Department of Education. Obviously there's always DoD is always there. NASA, there's Department of Energy, there's so many different agencies, all of them have different IT shops and all of them that if they're handling big, new surges of funds need to have a plus up. But the the structures of the IGs themselves the inspectors general offices, which I should explain, Greg would like me to explain, I can tell it from his eyes. Post Watergate, one of the big good government reforms was the passage or the enhancement of the Inspectors General Act, which created these independent offices at there's 74 of them now in each of the agencies in the in the executive branch, whose job it is to ferret out waste and fraud and inefficiencies, Greg, and, and they report not only to the head of their agency, but also to the Congress. So it's, it's this brilliant structure, which if it worked perfectly, would mean essentially, my organization wouldn't need to exist. It doesn't work perfectly, though. And one of the things Dena hinted at is part of the problem is, and this has been going on for decades now presidents don't really have an incentive to appoint inspectors general because they're the people often who are raising problems that have happened in their administration. So as a result, what you have is these vacancies at the head of these inspector general shops and they're run by acting inspectors general, who historically have not felt empowered. They have not been confirmed by the Senate and They tend to not tackle issues that are politically sensitive or might make the administration look bad in part, because sometimes they're essentially, you know, hoping to get that appointment and trying to curry favor with the President. So they get the nomination. So we have across the, I don't know, as of today, typically we have about 12 of those. Mostly the big agencies are run by acting's right now, I know, DOD still continues to have acting. And that's been true for over eight years, I believe it's the State Department, AI D. Transportation is an interesting one where that was one of the inspectors general who was fired, you may remember that Trump went through like a firing spree of IGS, where he fired for IGS. And in each case, it has its own set of sort of crises created around the firing, but in the case of the Department of Transportation, which I think is of particular concern for the infrastructure bill. He he nominated somebody and and then Mitch McConnell push to have this person confirmed at a time where Elaine Chao, who was Trump's Secretary of Transportation, and also Mitch McConnell's wife, was being investigated by the Inspector General for improperly funneling some transportation contracts to West Virginia, I'm sorry, to Kentucky, to Kentucky, so that it is fired by by Trump and McConnell pushes through the person who's currently the big truck transportation. So I'm, I'm worried about sort of what what does that portend, but that person was so desirable to the person who had a very personal interest in making sure the investigation didn't continue.

Dina Rasor: 36:58

And that's really, because I did sort of a back of the envelope just looking at just the infrastructure bill, not but bipartisan bill, not the other one, because it's still in flux. But just the infrastructure drove when I counted up, stuff that I thought would go, the Department of Transportation would have, you know, get the money or have a part of the money. You know, in some, it appears and of course, there's gonna be a lot of overlap has things that are already spending money on and all this kind of, there's lots of nuances to it. But just looking at it from a from a big crew point of view, the department transportation, as they wrap up, it won't happen right away. But as they will be, they will be given the equivalent of twice their budget. And think about that, and maybe not at first as they ramp up, but it's like a dam, that money is still going to be there. And as they ramp up and get more and more and more. And so what I want to ask is, is the is the government procurement corps? Ready?

Danielle Brian: 38:02

You know, you're really making a good point in that. If, if this is about current government contracts going out? I don't think the procurement corps can handle it. But my understanding is this is similar to the COVID relief, this many different types of funding, a lot of it's, I think, funding that's going to go straight out to localities and to end grants, right. So it's not just the procurement corps, it's all of those that are managing grants, which frankly, I think it's even more worrisome than procurement corps. Because one of the things we learned from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction, who's one of the more aggressive inspectors general, is that when you look at grants and how they're evaluated, they're evaluated weighted only by whether the money's been spent, not how it's been spent, and what it so in a lot of ways, contracting is in a much better situation, you need to demonstrate that something was accomplished with the contract either a service or or a good, but with with, with Grant, it's just has the money been spent, not whether it accomplished anything. And I think that's a big part of the infrastructure spending.

Dina Rasor: 39:14

And one of the things with the department transportation, with a really big grants are going to be, you know, construction, and manufacturing. And when you think that, for example, in the in the bipartisan bill, there is they're going to make, keep forgetting it's I think it's 55,000 or 50,000 charging stations for electric cars across the country. And that's going to be they're going to be near the highways and everything else. So that's that may end up being an actual federal government, with the state government making it and each one of those states but when you get to actually manufacturing things, or construction things, you get big companies and big money and big pile As you know, construction has just a layer of fraud about it. And so I am very concerned that that department transportation and other places like that they get a lot of those kinds of contracts where the Department of Energy will probably get more, you know, con, putting out Contracts and Grants for research, research and advanced clean energy and all that kind of stuff. But when you when you actually and then we found this through in the Pentagon, when you start bending metal, or you start construction or manufacturing anything, that's when you have to rely on some really fairly big companies. And some of them may never have to do that. Then I wanted to talk about the other problem that I have. When I've talked to environmentalists and I've thought about it concern me and that is that people worrying about the the Daniel Anna, and I have quite a bit of experience with big oil. Okay. Not a favorable experience. But the fact is that when they decide to get the big oil decides that a big fossil fuel decide they want to be involved in something, they will try to remake themselves, they call it greenwashing, you know, maybe remake themselves, or else they can set up shell companies. So you don't even know it's big oil. But there's a real fear that there is no way there's going to be this much money without a lot of a lot of the big fossil fuel lobbyists trying to get it into their companies. And the problem with that is that they're going to try to turn it back into sometimes they they back technology that uses their existing infrastructure, but there's not really a good, clean energy. You know, we did talking about hydrogen and some other things like that. So that that problem too is going to is there's going to be a lot of need for congressional oversight. General Accountability, Government Accountability Office, they change the name, and IGs and everything else to make sure that the people who are doing this aren't trying to, you know, either sabotage or just make a lot of money and may not have the stuff to do it. So Daniel, maybe you should talk a little bit about how vicious beard oil can be when they want something done. Oh,

Danielle Brian: 42:30

well, I mean, I think before I speak to that, I did want to make a point because unfortunately, we at Pogo have had to continue to maintain and update our database of risky federal contractors, because and our biggest audience for that database are the government contractors, because I mean, contracting officers rather, because it turns out, the government really doesn't do a good job of tracking across the different agencies. If a contractor has environmental lawsuits, labor, lawsuits, any of these kinds of violations of rules or regulations. They're not necessarily talking to each other about it. And when you're talking about industries, like oil and gas industry, and obviously, the Department of Transportation is really familiar with them. But let's just say that SBA may not be and and they're not looking at what the whole history of that particular company might be. So that's why we continue to maintain this database for the contracting officers so they can learn about their the history of what the company has done, because the government doesn't keep track of it, which seems crazy to me, every once in a while. I wonder why is it that we have to do things that obviously the government should be doing? But anyway, yes, what you're talking about Dina is a history that we had when we were exposing a fraud that the oil and gas industry was perpetrating when drilling for oil and gas on public lands and lying about the value of that oil and what they have to pay in royalties back to the federal government was a fraction of what actually they owed. And they fought back hard with us. And it took years and years and years. Ultimately, we won. And the federal government received half a billion dollars in lawsuit recoveries from the companies and the laws have changed and the rules have changed so they can't get away with that fraud again. But there's no doubt that that's a an industry that bites. Well, it's kind

Dina Rasor: 44:37

of like it's kind of like But Big Tobacco did to Jeffrey wagon. In other words, with Pogo, they pursued us for 15 years in including trying to find us in contempt of Congress. I mean, they just me Daniel had day to day combat with these people and we actually won, but we're a small nonprofit, and but our board of directors kept them moving down with the ship, there's no way we're gonna get into Exxon and they weren't. They were vicious and what they what they do with those small organizations, their oversight over inflation, so they'd like to try to bankrupt you. And so, you know, that is a cautionary tale, also, for the environmental industry that big oil and big fossil fuel are not going to go quietly into that good night. They are not. And no doubt about that oversight. oversight of that is also there's, luckily, there's a lot of environmental organizations just made to go after fossil fuel. So that's good, but we can't count. The federal government should also be concerned about that. Okay, and then we'll move on,

Greg Williams: 45:47

I just wanted to make a quick plug for the Government Accountability Office. You know, there, there are a number of different forms of oversight that the federal government has access to, but I think the GAO is a particularly interesting one, because its job is simply to to find answers to questions posed by members of Congress. And so they're not restricted to investigating violations of law or regulation. And so they can investigate things like well, is blue hydrogen really effective, for example. So we're going to be potentially spending billions of dollars on on various kinds of new or emerging or unproven technology. And as individual constituents, we have the capability to ask our legislators for answers to important questions. And when they get those answers, we have access to them. You know, they're, you know, especially on the right end of the spectrum, there's a lot of talk about getting your news, you know, not pre chewed, so to speak. Well, you can go right to gao.gov. And see all of the reports that Congress asks for, and many of them are fascinating, especially if you read beyond the executive summary.

Dina Rasor: 47:07

Yeah, and there's also the Congressional Research Service, which used to not be public, but Podo, and others got it to be public. So now you can see, you know, there's always going to be tinge of politics and everything, the all the people that try to be independent, they get a lot of pressure. And so there's, you know, it makes them a little concern, but you can see, the congressional members of Congress will ask the Congressional Research thing is, you know, is blue hydrogen as carbon neutral as green hydrogen? It's not, but they're trying to pretend it is. And they will do this big sort of research project and make it up to send back to the members of Congress. And they also put it on your site. So you can see that. So in other words, everybody can see that, and know what kind of advice the members of Congress are given because sometimes they get this stuff. Congress member of Congress was like, I'm not going to pursue that because my buddy is that are my larger font, largest funder is this, this and this, I really think that kind of thing sobers them up. And that's why they didn't want it to become public. Now, you can go and say, Why, why did you let this go? When the Congressional Research showed you that you were about ready to run into a brick wall?

Danielle Brian: 48:25

You know, you're both making me realize the tragedy of losing an office that used to exist called the Office of Technology Assessment, that its purpose was to inform the Congress, in part because members of Congress typically do not have a science background and do not bring or technology and do not bring on to their staff. And that's even more true than it was then, you know, people who have scientific backgrounds, so how, how are they supposed to assess it? Perfectly, honestly. So I got it sirens coming behind me. Alright. Perfectly. Honestly, CRS and GAO aren't all that qualified to tackle some of these high tech questions, either, which is why we do think we need to be bringing back this Office of Technology Assessment, which is at least filled by people who are, you know, have advanced degrees in science and math, so they can actually speak to you know, I don't know anything about blue or green hydrogen. But I think there's probably the very rare person in Congress who knows the answer to that either. This was part of sort of the lobotomizing of the Congress that Newt Gingrich conducted when there were a lot of these offices that were set up to help inform congressional staff and and they got rid of them it was in the 1990s and I think we should get him back. Yeah.

Dina Rasor: 49:48

To make a point about people are saying, oh my god, you want to get this bureaucracy figure this bureaucracy over this receipt, you know, add more this add more that more money, that you've really got to stand And I just read, I cannot remember the agency but you know, you get they, they beefed up their investigative staff and oversight. And they got for every dollar they spent, they say four. And so people have to understand this is not money you're throwing away, this is actually money, you're investing, and you got a better chance than the stock market to make money. Because

Danielle Brian: 50:25

the IGs and the GAO, at least the IGs, will say that, that they on average Can I think the way they say that is they have identified ways of funds being put to better use one in seven. So in other words, for every dollar spent on an ING, there's $7, of identified savings or funds that could be put to better use.

Greg Williams: 50:50

Many of us are familiar with the IRS example, you know, the more IRS Auditors you hire, the more audits you conduct, and the more taxes you recover. And when you sort of squash them down, what you wind up getting is just audits of small taxpayers, you know, essentially, right, yeah.

Dina Rasor: 51:10

Right. Small and small companies, small companies also use government agencies, when they're being pushed to do cases, they don't really talk about how much they save is, how many cases did you close? Any, if you're just just if you're smart, you look, and you see that this small company, and you audit the small company and find something because they're not gonna have a lobbyist. Lobbyists team in Lobby team in Washington, where you're gonna get a call from the member of Congress or somebody else, you know, picking up their thing.

Danielle Brian: 51:44

One, before you move on from the inspectors general, I do want to say, and it's sort of heartbreaking, we were expecting as we speak right now that the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee was supposed to be having a markup of two bills that would give more protections to inspectors general, and that the last minute they pulled it, so we're worried about whether that is a very bad sign for our ability to successfully sort of strengthen these offices. But that's sort of

Dina Rasor: 52:14

the problem with trying to put in an oversight. It's not sexy, it doesn't get a whole lot of passion. But it is probably as important to the goal of your project as the actual money itself. And because, you know, like I said, you haven't keep having scandal after scandal, you hurt the adult. And so that's, you know, that's that's one of the reasons Greg and I are starting this because we see that I spent three months trying to find out who's doing this and the environmental movement, didn't see anything.

Danielle Brian: 52:47

Yeah, absolutely in their interest, those who were advocates for more spending in the climate space, this protecting the the money, so it goes to the right places is absolutely in their interest.

Dina Rasor: 53:01

And it's important to know that a lot of the environmental service very disappointed that it's been scaled back, and that they're going to have to do five years of funding instead of 10. Well, if they want after five years to get that funding renewed, because, you know, if you still have a Congress that wants to keep going climate change, and you know, it comes up for renewal, if you got a bunch of scandals, it's not going to get renewed, your they're gonna say, Oh, this happened that happened. This happened, you got to show that it was effective, and there was a lot of fraud and waste. That's true. Okay, well, one of the things that I wanted to ask you to talk about the the role of interim government sources and whistleblowers to this process and good government organizations, and are is are the good government organizations, because I don't think there's one an environmental government organization, there is

Danielle Brian: 53:54

the public employees for environmental responsibility right here. That's right, I forgot. Terrific. Yeah. And so their mission is to work with those who are inside government whistleblowers at the agencies that are dealing with environmental matters. So I suspect that they would be a go to organization for people who are aware of wrongdoing. I mean, the bigger question you're asking is, yes, the only way that journalists or even frankly, usually Congress, or IGS often find out about a problem is because of those internal sources. People use the word whistleblower in different ways. So some people think that a person who files a lawsuit is really the only person who's a whistleblower, but from my experience, anyone who is you know, risking their own job to contact and report wrongdoing is a type of a whistleblower. And those are essential for ensuring that that a problem is disclosed and stopped

Dina Rasor: 54:56

in the terminal. This is something that's been one of the reasons As I started, Pogo is internal people, when they become public whistleblowers, as you saw the woman who was public whistleblower and Facebook the other day, they just go through an enormous amount of being slapped around. And so they make the person the issue, not the fraud problem. And so what we, when we were doing Pogo, we found it was much more effective to have these internal sore, and they're usually out of the organization. So therefore, their knowledge about what's going on, dies, you know, they can't get any more documents. But if you are in an organization, and you're smart and careful, and I've spent a good portion of my career, teaching people to be smart, careful, instead of stupid or fixing that there's the bad mistakes they make. They're so earnest Is that is that person is inside. And they see what's going on. They can get documents out. And it got so ridiculous when we were doing when I was doing the Pentagon, is that I was going down to briefed Congress about a certain issue on DOD. And they had a meeting, a top level meeting in the DoD on how they're going to counter what I say. So they wrote up counters, and gave them to some at that time Republican staff members. So when I, when they said, here's what they're going to ask you, and here's the answers. And so when I got up there, immediately, this, this guy, staffer gets up and asks this question, I said, glad you asked that question, because I knew you were going to ask that question. And therefore, here's and from inside the Pentagon, and here's the answer. And it made the Lockheed lobbyists start to scream at me, which was I thought, victory, I got them mad. It's just so important, because Sunsoo Art of War, you know, breed this distrust among the enemy, in the sense that these people who are trying to cover up the stuff, they don't know who to trust after that. And so that's got a deterrent effect to so it's internal sources, internal underground sources in, in each agency, and CO has been doing that, you know, for 40 years. Yeah,

Danielle Brian: 57:17

this is our 40th year. And, of course, as you've been talking about all along, there's the other side, which are the recipients of the funds, whistleblowers inside the contractors or the the various entities, it could be a state agency that's, you know, receiving federal highway funds across the whole supply chain of funds, people raise concerns, and that's the way we're going to know about it.

Greg Williams: 57:41

Yeah. And let's not sugarcoat it, you know, they, they're lucky if they're slapped around.

Dina Rasor: 57:47

Yeah, they want it.

Greg Williams: 57:50

Yeah, just to be clear, the very first informant I worked with, didn't just lose his job. He lost his career. You lost his home, and he lost his marriage. Yeah. And then it wasn't long after that, that I worked with, with somebody who wasn't even working on defense programs. And he was beaten to within an inch of his life, by his colleagues. Yeah, even their large sums of money involved. Really nasty stuff happens

Dina Rasor: 58:19

in a whistleblower comes to you, if they come to you, and they're not public yet. I always say, let's try to keep away from critical way for you to be in there and not caught. Because you're more valuable to us. And then you don't have to spend all your time being blackballed. And your life being disrupted, you know, in public whistleblowing is, is, sometimes you have to do it, because we're the only people that know and they're going to be caught anyway, by tracing back on the documents. But when, when in doubt, you know, this can be in little plug for us, the Climate Watch climate, money watchdog is when we get established and this these laws are passed, we want to be one of the places where people come to us so we can put the information out. Because, you know, it's got to be done in a very, very careful way. Okay, well, Daniela says some final thoughts here. And one of the things that I asked everybody, and I'm gonna, I usually I say, if you're king of the king of the world for a day, but I don't want to say queen for a day because that's actually got a legal context. A criminal telling all, but if you are Emperess for a day on this, what's your list of priorities and what we have to do? We have to do to prevent these, these efforts from getting discredited and canceled.

Danielle Brian: 59:47

I think that we start with getting as you mentioned, Katey Porter and Elizabeth Warren are definitely the two right names that immediately come to mind as those who already have a history of working in this space. So I need to make sure that the provisions are in whatever bills finally pass that require additional funding for the oversight offices like the IGs. Additional reporting from the recipients. And and I think you made such a good point before that I've forgotten what the other part of it was, that was so essential to make sure that people are feeling oh, I know what it was. And we have to pass some of these provisions that will help protect these oversight offices. So right now, the IGs are, are really a weakened structure. The what happened in the Trump administration didn't just impact those particular offices. But all the current IGS saw what happened to the IGs, who were fired, frankly, for doing their jobs well, and so they're human beings, who understandably, are going to be much less likely to be aggressive in pursuing waste, fraud and abuse, because they can get fired, with like, without any protections. And so, from our perspective, a really important step is going to be to protect those offices and pass that legislation, then we need to make sure that the agencies are fulfilling the requirements that the Congress spells out in the legislation, because that's really where things failed when it came to COVID relief.

Dina Rasor: 1:01:26

And Congress has to give them those tools, where you're saying, now we you know, and your your radar is better than mine on this, because we're working every day, but that kind of language is not showing up in these bills. So does not give the bureaucracy, the instructions and the guidance, hire more, go after more, do more,

Danielle Brian: 1:01:49

prioritize certain types of businesses. Look, yes, all of that. So,

Dina Rasor: 1:01:56

you know, so they

Danielle Brian: 1:01:58

don't have to start from square one. We've learned from past emergency trenches of funding going out, we've seen what works and what doesn't work. So it is not starting from square one. It's just a case of making sure that it happens. Yeah, because

Dina Rasor: 1:02:13

the bureaucracy without the permission of Congress to cover their butts, they're going to be loath to try to do this, because they won't do it. They won't do it unless Congress changes and changes. And the Republicans who, you know, many of them are conscientious objectors to climate change. They say they're running the oversight committees, they're gonna pull those people up and and beat the heck out of them in public?

Danielle Brian: 1:02:39

Well, I don't know. I mean, I think the bottom line is you can't expect any of the federal agencies to lean in on anything if they're not made to do it. And so the Congress needs to make them do it, and then hold them accountable for

Greg Williams: 1:02:49

it. Yeah, I think another way of describing that is that civil servants are very, especially United States, federal civil servants are very aware of what authorities they do and do not have. And they're passionate about following these guidelines, you know, not so much about, you have to tell them to be smart. Otherwise, there'll be stupid, they're given a very strict set of of guidelines with which to discharge their duties. And if you don't include in those guidelines, things like financial traceability. They will be very good about not spending effort on that.

Danielle Brian: 1:03:30

But it's not just that, Greg, you're exactly right. But it's because otherwise the industry will push back and say you don't have you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do this because the rights don't require it.

Greg Williams: 1:03:41

Yeah, show me the authority. You have to ask for that data.

Dina Rasor: 1:03:44

Yeah. And and somebody who has done had my hands on the patient on several really big breach and False Claims Act cases. We're working with working with whistleblowers and stuff like that, what happens is that is that they just don't really want to, they don't really want want to take the risk. And when when they when they don't have the feel they have the authority, they don't do it. And when they don't do it, then it becomes hard to prove fraud. It becomes hard to prove fraud because they don't really have a thing in there saying this is fraud and you own waste, and you are to look at runways. With qui tam, it's all fraud. And there's chaotic, auditing, chaotic this. So I think sometimes it's on purpose because you can't get you can't get a contractor for fraud and the federal government the federal government's books are a disaster. That's true.

Danielle Brian: 1:04:43

fun conversation. Yes.

Dina Rasor: 1:04:47

Thanks, Danielle and Greg, for making keeping me on track to. This is the first of hopefully many podcasts. And if you want to contact Pogo, isn't it Have give once you give your

Danielle Brian: 1:05:01

website pogo.org

Dina Rasor: 1:05:05

If they want to send you an email it's on there

Danielle Brian: 1:05:07

yes yes it is

Dina Rasor: 1:05:09

okay all right well thank you very much and