The next time your credit card company calls you with a question about a charge on your card, be glad that the bank is looking out for its own interests as well as yours.  Financial companies constantly upgrade systems against identity theft to protect their bottom line.  But executive branch agencies that have your SSN, home address, telephone number, and other personal information have much lower standards, an article in the September 2008 issue of Consumer Reports shows.  Citizens give the government their personal data every day when they apply for mortgages, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, agricultural programs, veteran’s benefits — you name it.  Still, to this day there is no U.S. government-wide policy on protecting citizens’ personal data, and individual agencies often do little to protect your good name.  Consumer Reports quotes one expert who points out that "government agencies are among the worst offenders in weeding out data breaches because they have no financial incentive to look for them."  The incentive of protecting citizens from crime should be enough.  -NH

You may have thought this stuff (rooting out non-existent voter fraud) went out of fashion when Karl Rove left the White House.  Not in Rove’s adopted home state, apparently.  Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News reports that Texas’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, a Republican, has devoted $1.4 million to rooting out voter fraud in the Lone Star State, and since 2006 he has "prosecuted 26 cases – all against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics."  In each case, the defendant was accused of mailing legal ballots for legal voters who voted legally.  The illegal part was taking the sealed ballots to the mailbox for these mostly elderly voters.  According to Texas law, it’s illegal for private citizens to assist voters in this way.  I don’t pay taxes in the State of Texas, but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel bad for the people who do.  Understanding Government doesn’t take partisan positions.  But $1.4 million to prosecute people who dropped letters in the mailbox? 

Ned Hodgman

The Pentagon lacks the resources to police all its resources, concludes the Pentagon’s inspector general. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi J. Dreazen reports that defense spending has nearly doubled from 2000 to 2007—from about $300 billion to $600 billion. Yet the number of officers who oversee contracts rewarded by the Pentagon to private contractors hasn’t increased at all.

This means, in theory, that an individual auditor is responsible for about $2 billion. In reality, the Pentagon can’t keep track. Only half of the $316 billion spent on weapons in Iraq last year was sufficiently audited. Read Drezen here. MB

The New York Times’ James Glanz goes through a gruesome Pentagon audit that finds payments to private contractors in Iraq going toward…well, we have no idea what they’re going toward. In a sample of 802 war-related Dept. of Defense contracts worth $8.2 billion, 95 percent don’t have proper legal documents. About 15 percent of the contracts lack even minimum documentation such as receipts, invoices, and the names of contract recipients.

In many instances money is simply transferred over to private companies, or countries in the coalition of the willing, with no language in the contract explaining what the money is going toward. The news here is not that the Pentagon can’t audit $8.2 billion. It’s that the Pentagon can’t audit 95 percent of a representative $8.2 billion sample. How much total Pentagon money has vanished into the Iraqi ether is anybody’s guess.  Read Glanz here.  MB

The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus gets a jump on summer beach reading, going through the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 560-page report on recommended Pentagon spending. President Bush gave the committee a lot to consider when he proposed a record $515 billion budget for the Pentagon in fiscal year 2009.

The committee’s revisions include $400,000 bonuses for psychologists who stay at the Pentagon for three years. Also, believing that predatory lenders have especially targeted military personnel, the Pentagon is proposing financial literacy classes will now be taught at schools on military bases.   The budget also proposes giving the secretary of defense a home on a military base in the Washington area instead of installing expensive security gear in the secretary’s existing house.

The committee’s changes don’t appear to cut military waste. But they do take into account the problems of overwhelmed Pentagon employees and overstressed soldiers and Marines.  Read Pincus here.  MB

The U.S. is spending anywhere from $120 to $150 billion a month on the Iraq War, reports the New York Times’ John Broder. The fiscal waste of war has been debated at length already, but what would that money actually get spent on if the war ended? Broder mentions a universal health care system and public works programs that would move the money out of the Pentagon and into perhaps the Department of Health and Human Services.

Also, the amount of money spent by the Pentagon on the war is deceptive—it’s not included in final budget figures because it’s “emergency funding” that supplements the Pentagon budget.  Read Broder here.  MB

The Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu provide an in-depth look at the ideology that governs the Department of Transportation’s top political leadership. Namely, Mary Peters, the secretary of transportation and Tyler Duvall, the assistant secretary for transportation policy, think that the free-market – not, for example, a federal gas tax – is the better path to good roads.  In practical terms, this has meant actually lobbying against federal funding for the agency, experimenting with congestion pricing in metropolitan areas and tolls, tolls, tolls.  Read Layton and Hsu here.  MB

As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve usually tries to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates or giving loans to banks. In 1932, however, the federal government gave the Federal Reserve the authority to loan money to people, partnerships or corporations in “unusual and exigent circumstances.”  The current economic state may qualify, reports the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel. The Fed – criticized for what some see as a laconic response to the mortgage crisis and subsequent recession – is considering the aforementioned loans along with other “unconventional policy options” like buying mortgage-backed securities directly.  Read Wessel here.

That’s apparently what President Bush thinks, judging from the budget he submitted to Congress. The budget calls for a 3.4 percent increase for members of the military—and a 2.9 percent increase for other federal employees. The Washington Post’s Stephen Barr chronicles Congress’s reaction. Democrats and Republicans are both upset that Bush has flouted the “parity pay” rule where all federal employees, regardless of agency, receive a uniform raise. Senator Joseph Lieberman, chair of the Governmental Affairs committee, has called for Transportation Security Administration employees to receive a pay increase along with other federal employees, but has not addressed the proposed gap between military and other federal government employees.  Read Barr here.

The Coalition Support Funds, a U.S. aid package designed to support Pakistan’s efforts to control the dangerous areas bordering Afghanistan, are under renewed attention by U.S. government, military officials, and Congress, according to the Washington Post’s Robin Wright.  The funds, sent at $80 million per month since 2002, are supposed to fund military operations but tranches have continued even extended truce periods.  Congress is questioning how much of this cash is actually being used for military operations, but one expert noted that "the Pakistani military would not be out on the border if not for the Coalition Support Funds."  Read Wright here.