Join tele-press conference, sign petition to demand hearing on substandard military helmets

The image above shows a helmet and the amount of kevlar that was left out due to Sioux Manufacturing's substandard production.

Tomorrow, Thursday, February 28th, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), will join VoteVets.org and two whistleblowers to discuss the need for a congressional investigation into a $74 million Department of Defense contract awarded to a North Dakota manufacturing company, Sioux Manufacturing Company, which has been outfitting our nation's troops with substandard Kevlar helmets.

New tape recordings of employees discussing the production of the substandard Kevlar for helmets will be publicly played and posted for the first time during the TELE-PRESS Conference, tomorrow at 10:30 am. The call in number is 866-211-5938 (no passcode required).

The public is invited. For further conference details, please go here.

Also, VoteVets.org has a petition drive on its website-- Petition to Demand Hearings on Substandard Helmet Procurement, where you can show your support.

Hundreds of servicemen and womens' lives lost due to mismanaged procurement of armored vehicles

POGO has just made publicly available for the first time an internal study--conducted by Marine Corps science adviser Franz Gayl--showing that the Marine Corps "grossly mismanaged" Marines' requests for armored vehicles, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of U.S. servicemen and women.

The study points to unacceptably long delays in the procurement of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs), which are much less susceptible to the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) being used against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. POGO is calling for congressional hearings to investigate the rapid acquisition system at the Defense Department, which is clearly failing to respond to urgent requests from American soldiers in battle.

To learn more about the study, be sure to check out POGO's press alert and blog post.

U.S. Department of Defense contracts with faulty helmet manufacturer for more helmets!

CREW posts on its blog that a sub-standard military helmet manufacturer is nevertheless being contracted for yet more helmets by the U.S. Department of Defense!

6 Feb 2008 // Today, in light of evidence that a company has been outfitting our nation's troops with substandard Kevlar helmets, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees requesting an investigation into a Department of Defense $74 million contract awarded to Sioux Manufacturing.

The New York Times reported that Sioux Manufacturing, which makes Kevlar helmets, has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including helmets used by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Department of Defense, aware of both the problem with Sioux's helmets and the company's efforts to cover it up, awarded another contract to Sioux a mere 12 days before the lawsuit was settled.

It has astounded me for years the level of incompetence and, frankly, immorality this administration has subjected its own troops, and veterans, to in the face of two ongoing wars.

Egregious "emergency" spending corrupts the federal budget process

Taxpayers for Common Sense' Weekly Wastebasket newsletter features an article on the federal budget process undergone each fiscal year in Washington. Much of the "emergency" spending in the GWOT isn't actually for emergencies, as urgent as they might seem. This extraordinary budgetary procedure is being used far too often, and causes large inaccuracies in the final budget deficit numbers.

Of the nearly $700 billion Congress has approved for GWOT activities--including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--since 2001, 90 percent have come from “off budget” supplemental emergency spending bills. This is viewed by the Pentagon as free money. Annual war costs have more than doubled in recent years, helped in large measure by a 2006 Pentagon directive that allowed supplemental requests to include anything related to GWOT and equipment lost in combat to be replaced by not-yet-ready-for-primetime weapons still in development. These fiscal feeding frenzies also have a tendency to pick up pork as they roll through Congress – producing war spending with side orders of whiz-bang gadgetry, sugar beet subsidies and ewe lamb replacement.

We have long argued that emergency spending bills should meet the government’s own definition of emergency: sudden, temporary, unforeseen and urgent. After several years, war funding isn’t sudden, temporary or unforeseen, even if it is urgent. But supplementals are attractive because they are not subject to the same caps as other sources of discretionary spending. This means DoD can pile emergency funding on top of their nearly $500 billion regular budget, allowing unnecessary programs and weapons to snowball. Worse, the omission of war costs also allows the White House to produce rosier deficit projections by ignoring a whole column of expenses.

No “emergency” – especially one that is six years old with no end in sight – should allow a government to evade budgeting for the future. The President and the Defense Department aren’t fooling anyone by conducting this war off the balance sheet. They owe it to every American citizen to come clean.