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Podcasts
POGO staffers periodically get together to discuss the latest developments in POGO issues. POGO staffers are occasionally joined by guests from other organizations, including: Steven Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists; Amy Bennett, OpentheGovernment.org; and Winslow Wheeler, Center for Defense Information.
Click below to find out more information and download each podcast. We also record presentations made at our Congressional Oversight Training Series.
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Podcast: Discussing the Bad Business Report, September 15, 2011
Podcast: Get to Know an Agency: A Refresher Course on the Office of Special Counsel and Whistleblowers, August 17, 2011 On this week's podcast, Adam Miles, from the Office of Special Council, gives an overview of how the OSC works with federal whistleblowers. Miles was a speaker at the July meeting of POGO's Congressional Oversight Training Series. The series is put on by POGO to train congressional staffers on the art of congressional oversight.
Podcast: Conflict Zone: Increasing Transparency of NIH-Funded Researchers' Financial Conflicts of Interest, August 2, 2011 In May 2010, leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a rule that would require NIH-funded researchers to publicly disclose their financial arrangements with drug and medical device companies.
This proposal would bring a much needed dose of transparency to federally funded medical research. Now, one thing stands in its way: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). POGO is concerned that OMB will weaken or block this proposal, and in July, we sent a letter urging OMB to leave the rule intact.
For this podcast, POGO Staff Scientist Ned Feder and POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian discuss why this proposal is so important. After we recorded this podcast, Nature News reported that the proposal has been dropped. Things aren't completely final just yet--but if the NIH's disclosure proposal does wind up on the cutting room floor, it would be a significant blow to transparency and taxpayer interests.
Podcast: Graveyard Shift: Why We Need to Change the Way We Store Spent Nuclear Fuel, July 19, 2011 Despite containing some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, the structures housing the majority of U.S. spent nuclear fuel--our nuclear graveyards so to speak--are designed to withstand little more than a bad thunderstorm. In this podcast, POGO staffers talk with Bob Alvarez, a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), about why this is a problem, and whether or not a disaster like the one at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could happen in the U.S. Alvarez is the author of a new report on storage of spent nuclear fuel that was released by IPS with support from POGO.
Podcast: Too Big to Debar? Contractors and the Government's Enforcement of Anti-Bribery Laws, July 6, 2011 Is the government too reluctant to crack down on contractors that bribe foreign officials? A recent law review article by Professor Drury Stevenson and Nicholas Wagoner, both of the South Texas College of Law, suggests that when it comes to enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the biggest government contractors might just be too big to debar.
As we noted in our April coverage of the law review article, government enforcement agencies "have yet to impose a company-wide suspension or debarment on a contractor that violates the FCPA. Instead, the government continues to award them (or reward them?) billions of dollars in contracts, thus nullifying the deterrent effect of the FCPA."
For this POGO podcast, POGO staffers got on the horn with the article's authors to find out how this light approach to enforcement ultimately harms taxpayer interests.
Podcast: Is Kazakhstan Funding Members of Congress?, June 27, 2011 POGO staffers recently sat down to chat about our June letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, which called for an investigation into potentially unlawful foreign funding of Members of Congress.
As we wrote a few weeks back, this story "has all the twists of a Hollywood blockbuster: shadowy international figures, a plot to overthrow an oil-rich Central Asian country, an attempted assassination, allegations of kidnapping and murder, and a battle in an American courtroom for control of billions of dollars in seized assets."
Podcast: They Say They Want a Revolution: More Than 200 Former SEC Employees Passed through Revolving Door to Work for the Industry They Oversaw, May 23, 2011 POGO staffers discuss POGO's latest report and accompanying database examining the issue of the revolving door and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Podcast: Crash Course?, May 9, 2011 On April 1, a five-foot piece of the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines
737 Classic airplane ripped off in mid-flight, forcing the plane to an
emergency landing in Arizona. Despite the date of the incident, this was
no joke. In late April, the nation’s crash detectives, the National
Transportation Safety Board, said they found evidence of manufacturing
defects. Experts told The New York Times that the board’s
findings suggest the 737’s "aluminum skin had not been properly bound
together, leading to premature damage from fatigue." This week's podcast is a phone conversation between POGO staffers and
a former Boeing employee and her attorney, who claim that Boeing bent
the rules and allowed very similar manufacturing defects on a newer
version of the 737, the 737 Next Generation. In 2005, they filed a
lawsuit in federal court alleging that Boeing defrauded the military by
supplying defective planes. They claim that Boeing has also put the
flying public at risk.
Podcast: Family Matters, April 26, 2011 In March 2011, AllGov reported that DARPA, the Pentagon's premier research arm, had awarded a contract to a company founded by the agency's director. Wired's Spencer Ackerman joined POGO staffers to discuss how it all went down.
Podcast: Tales of a Broken System: Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes Tells His Story, March 18, 2011 POGO first learned about Lieutenant Colonel Michael Holmes in an explosive article written by journalist Michael Hastings for Rolling Stone magazine. Lt. Colonel Holmes is the leader of an "information operations" team in the military. When Holmes was ordered to use his skills on Members of Congress--he checked with a JAG attorney on whether that order was legal. The JAG attorney said the order was illegal, and Holmes pushed back against the order--and that order was rescinded. Afterwards he was subjected to what he calls a retaliatory investigation, and when he took his case to the Department of Defense Inspector General, his voice seemed to fall on deaf ears. In this podcast, POGO's Nick Schwellenbach and Bryan Rahija interview Holmes about his story.
Podcast: How Bad Performance Can Be Good for Business in Government Contracting, March 7, 2011 POGO's Scott Amey dishes out a post-mortem on a recent Commission on Wartime Contracting hearing--at which he testified--on contractor accountability.
Podcast: Now It's "Personal": The Case of Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., January 27, 2011 POGO staffers Keith Rutter, Scott Amey, and Bryan Rahija sit down to discuss a Supreme Court case that could expand the definition of corporate "personhood."
Podcast: POGO Discusses the Latest WikiLeaks Disclosures, December 6, 2010 POGO staffers sit down to discuss something that relates to so many aspects of our work—the latest WikiLeaks disclosures.
Podcast: War Zone Watchdogs Part 1: A Letter Regarding the State Department Inspector General, November 29, 2010 POGO recently called for the removal of two war zone watchdogs--the Department of State's Inspector General (IG) and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. In part 1 of 2, POGO staffers discuss our recent letter to the President raising questions about the independence of the State Department's IG.
Podcast: War Zone Watchdogs Part 2: No Cigar for SIGAR?, November 29, 2010 POGO recently called for the removal of two war zone watchdogs--the Department of State's Inspector General and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). In part 2 of 2, POGO staffers discuss a recent hearing in which Members of Congress questioned the effectiveness of the SIGAR.
Podcast: Private Security Contracting in Afghanistan, November 4, 2010 POGO staffers discuss a recent report issued by the State Department Office of the Inspector General, which evaluated the performance of the private security contractor responsible for guarding the U. S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. The report confirmed many of the findings of POGO's 2009 investigation into "Lord of the Flies" environment that had taken hold of the embassy's private security guard force.
Podcast: A Father's Attempt to Warn the Military about U.S. Servicemen Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport, October 12, 2010 This June, the Army charged several U.S. soldiers with murdering three Afghans for sport in three separate episodes. Christopher Winfield, the father of Specialist Adam Winfield--one of the accused soldiers--recently told POGO his own story of how he tried to warn the Army about the killings.
Podcast: Downblending and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex in Plain English, September 17, 2010 How the U.S. can create jobs, increase security, save money, and generate as much as $23 billion for the Treasury. POGO's Ingrid Drake and Peter Stockton sit down to explain POGO's latest report.
Special Announcement Within, September 10, 2010 What do you want to know about POGO or the world of government oversight? Send your questions to info@pogo.org and we'll answer the top ten questions.
Podcast: On the Hunt for Savings at the Pentagon, August 13, 2010 Winslow Wheeler, director of the Center for Defense Information, joins POGO for a discussion of the new Pentagon savings initiatives proposed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Podcast: Countdown to Zero...Oversight of the Nuclear Complex, July 27, 2010 POGOnauts, including POGO Senior Investigator Peter Stockton, review a new film about the nuclear weapons complex, Countdown to Zero, and discuss the recent trend towards less and less oversight of our nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.
Podcast: Examining Reforms to the Minerals Management Service (MMS), Interior's Oil and Gas Regulator, July 9, 2010
Podcast: Fun with Inherently Governmental Functions, June 24, 2010
