Senate Staff, Not Senators, Decided to Close Pentagon Budget Debate

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May 23, 2015            Editor's Choice Senate Staff, Not Senators, Decided to Close Pentagon Budget Debate The votes to keep debate of the Pentagon budget behind closed doors were cast by staffers and not the actual senators who sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Allowing staff to vote on the key decision whether to open or close the markup of a bill that determines how to spend over half a trillion dollars is not only a violation of the Senate rules, but a breach of the public trust. Read more on POGO's Blog. Email Shows How Credit Suisse Works the Revolving Door Former Department of Labor lawyer Melanie Nussdorf could not say thank you enough to her former agency after getting a favorable response on behalf of her client, Credit Suisse, so she wrote it 600 times in an e-mail. Nussdorf was worried that Credit Suisse would have to tell all its clients that their retirement accounts would be overseen by a company that had just admitted to helping Americans evade U.S. taxes. The Department of Labor told her that wouldn't be necessary. Read more on POGO's Blog. The Pentagon Conned Washington..AgainPOGO's Mandy Smithberger, of the Straus Military Reform Project, joined Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in explaining how Congress' Pentagon spending budgetary shenanigans are likely to postpone a series of reforms that nearly everyone in Washington knows are long overdue. Years of bloated budgets have insulated the Pentagon from the need to make smart strategic choices, and have allowed policymakers to avoid a needed debate about whether our use of force in the last two decades has made us any safer. Read more at War Is Boring. Tweets of the Week Let's See Action: 8 contracting transparency proposals for the 3rd National Action Plan http://t.co/iIFfexaAO1 via @POGOBlog — Neil Gordon (@NEGordon) May 21, 2015 The trifecta of terrible. Throw in the fact that DoD tried to sneak in #FOIA exemptions and it's basically anarchy. https://t.co/11EwSnphH4 — Liz Hempowicz (@lizzy_loo_hoo) May 19, 2015 War=waste. This unused and unneeded $36 million headquarters in Afghanistan makes that clear. https://t.co/dpNzOcQuKE pic.twitter.com/suLBAPFGEG — Mark Thompson (@MarkThompson_DC) May 20, 2015

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