Thus far in the current campaign cycle, tea partier Akin has received $91,500 from defense-related interest groups while serving on the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on the Budget and the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, according to data from the Federal Election Commission. That figure puts him in second among members of Congress in amount received from defense interests during this election cycle, after House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) and nearly $40,000 more than President Obama.

Meanwhile, Akin has started a ‘task force’ to increase federal contracts for defense companies based in Missouri, held numerous defense industry breakfasts and said that defense is a “vital, Constitutional responsibility of the federal government” while questioning the financial viability of Medicare.

Akin is currently campaigning for the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill, whose pet issue since being elected in 2006 has been defense contract oversight and promoting transparency in government affairs. McCaskill currently serves as the chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight.

“The atti­tude in the mil­i­tary has been, too many times, ‘I want what I want, when I want it,’” McCaskill told the Kansas Monitor, promising to increase oversight of contracted military spending.

Their race will likely be an interesting microcosm of the role of special interests in elections, as McCaskill and Akin hold opposing positions on many social and fiscal issues, and most of their funding sources are similarly polarized.

Akin, the former Army combat engineer whose Missouri district is home to Boeing Defense, Space and Security, has made no secret of these ties. Of the top ten organizations that have donated to Akin in the past two years, three are defense companies.

After convening the St. Louis Defense Industry Task Force, which would “increase the profile of the importance of the defense industry” in Missouri, he boasted in a press release that he “will call on greater coordination and support between state, federal and local officials in actively supporting the strength of defense manufacturing in the St. Louis region.”

He has also held numerous defense industry fundraising events, eighteen in the past year, and has toured defense companies to show his support for their manufacturing base in Missouri.

Along with large contributions from different corporate interests, Akin is ideologically conservative. He has supported proposals to teach intelligent design in public schools, display the Ten Commandments on public property and retain references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Steve Terrell has the story:

In an affidavit filed in Chapman’s case, Deputy U.S. Marshal Dave Loyer wrote, “Since her state employment ended in February 2011, I learned from the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions that Defendant Chapman applied for unemployment benefits in February 2011, and has been receiving unemployment benefits weekly since March of 2011.”

After resigning as the facilities manager for the Corrections Department in May 2010, Chapman went to work for the state Indian Affairs Department, where she earned $63,124, a spokesman for Gov. Susana Martinez said after Chapman was indicted in April. She was fired from that post Feb. 23.

Normally, unemployment benefits don’t apply if you are fired for misconduct, or resign. The state’s unemployment compensation pays about $745,000 per day (down from $1 million) in benefits, and faces problems with solvency because of high unemployment. Shoring up the fund is on the agenda in the special session. But Chapman is one egregious example of someone who shouldn’t be drawing benefits.

As for the rest of us, we can celebrate what with any luck is the death of campaign-finance reform and the revival of more robust political competition. Thirty-five years after it began in the wake of Watergate, the liberal crusade to limit campaign spending has proven once again to be a hopeless failure.

In the spirit of charity (or the fact that many campaign finance laws are still on the books and don’t look to be in any danger of being struck down by the courts), however, the Journal is willing to offer the reform community something of a grand bargain that entails striking down all campaign finance limits and the Federal Election Commission in exchange for full disclosure:

These columns have long supported disclosing political contributions as part of a larger deregulation that allowed any American to give as much as he wants to any candidate. This is the Virginia model and it works well, as it did at the national level for decades before the goo-goos got into the act. Lately, however, as we’ve watched Democrats and liberals attack Target Corp. and other businesses for donating to independent groups, we wonder if even disclosure is wise. But as the price for a wholesale repeal of all campaign-finance limits and putting the Federal Election Commission out of business, we’re willing to compromise.

So how about it, goo-goos? Your standard bearer on Capitol Hill looks like a goner, and the Supreme Court has rightly gutted your schemes to limit political money as a violation of the First Amendment. John McCain is still around, but we doubt any Republicans will be foolish enough to follow him again down this primrose path. Accept the fact that money can’t be purged from politics, and we’ll even give you something in return for admitting reality.

It’s a nice offer, sort of, but it ignores two realities. The first is that the Supreme Court just yesterday rejected an appeal from the conservative group SpeechNow.org, which sought to limit the scope of what it had to disclose to the FEC about its donors and activities. The decision was consistent with other opinions offered by the Roberts court — including Citizens United — which indicate that full and prompt disclosure is both constitutional and desirable, so it seems strange that Democrats would feel the need to trade anything for the cause.

The second, sadder reality is that while the Journal still appears to (tepidly) endorse the concept of disclosure, recent Senate votes on the DISCLOSE Act indicate that every single Senate Republican has abandoned it. Several GOP Senators, of course, have indicated that their objections to the bill lay not in disclosure but in its smaller provisions — like the one limiting the speech of large government contractors — which they say provide an unfair advantage to unions in election contests.

It’s for this reason that the reform community is getting increasingly vocal about Democrats trying to pass a stripped-down, disclosure-only bill during the lame duck session. In doing so, they either can get their desired disclosure (without trading anything) or force Republicans in the Senate to cast a vote on whether they still think transparency is a good idea after all.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu hopes to make contracting more fair, and to help local businesses. (Flickr, dsb nola)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

Two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ mayor, Mitch Landrieu (D), just three months into his tenure, made a major announcement. A hundred recovery projects, from libraries to fire stations to parks, were ready to go after years of red tape and implementation scandals.

[Environment1] “I can say this with certainty: that these 100 projects are a priority in somebody’s mind in the city, that they are 100 percent funded, that they are part of the city’s long-term master plan and will be built, or are in the process of being built,” Landrieu told The Times-Picayune. “Some of them are further along than others. But you can take these to the bank.”

In a city that has long suffered from halting and ineffective efforts to contract municipal recovery funds, the news came as a welcome relief. It stoked hopes that Landrieu’s administration would offer a clean break from Mayor Ray Nagin’s (D) fraught eight-year tenure. “I think this city is ready to soar,” declared City Council President Arnie Fielkow.

But as the mayor gets ready to cut ribbons and break ground, a number of local labor and anti-discrimination groups are voicing worries that the new projects will not benefit the city’s local businesses. Their concerns center around the city’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program, intended to make good-faith efforts to help local, women, and minority-owned firms secure city contracts. Wary due to rampant cronyism and corruption in the past, leaving local companies adrift, the NAACP and other groups are seizing on Landrieu’s announcement. For them, turning around the DBE will be the litmus test for success.

Even before Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans, activists and businesses charged that the city had an opaque and cronyism-ridden system for awarding building and contracting deals — a major hurdle for local firms. The Bureau of Governmental Research, a private, independent research organization released a major report entitled “Contracting with Confidence” to call attention to the matter and make recommendations in March.

“An $81 million energy efficiency contract saddled the city with two decades of excessive payments and resulted in the convictions of an administration official, political supporters, and contractors who skimmed money from the deal,” the report said in its lengthy summary of recent examples of political patronage. “A contract for home monitoring of municipal offenders went to a politically connected firm that possessed no experience providing the service and that scored lowest on the city’s evaluation of proposals. The public paid 60 percent more to install and manage electronic parking meters than it would have had the city contracted with the firm that scored highest in the city’s own evaluation. A post-Katrina car removal contract went to the most expensive of 14 bidders through an evaluation process that did not account for the cost of services. The list goes on.”

Former Mayor Ray Nagin was implicated in the political patronage system as well after revelations that his family vacationed in Hawaii and Jamaica due to the largess of Mark St. Pierre, who held numerous city technology contracts. Later, St. Pierre was indicted, along with Greg Meffert, Nagin’s chief techonology officer, on 63 federal counts of bribery, money laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.

In the wake of the hurricane, when federal recovery money began pouring in and outside firms often secured work for complicated projects, rather than local businesses, the city’s opaque methods and history of corruption ginned up anger and outrage from an underemployed citizenry. Particularly troubling in the eyes of local business owners, particularly black business owners, was the persistent sense that the city was allowing the money to be funneled to out-of-state contractors who made little effort to hire local businesses.

“We’re dealing with local contractors on a daily basis and they’re not getting the work,” argues Barry Kaufman, secretary treasurer of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “There are more out-of-state contractors in here than holes in cheese. Local contractors are being low bidded by out-of-state contractors. It’s a shame how [Nagin] let that happen.”

When, in February 2009, the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance that required Nagin’s closed-door review panels to meet in public, the mayor vetoed the bill and later issued an order that scrapped the evaluation panels altogether. That process, or the lack thereof, remained in place until Landrieu assumed office in May and made contracts reform a signature priority of his administration.

In addition to restoring transparency and expertise to city contracting, Landrieu’s administration also tried reaching out to disillusioned local groups. The mayor set up a “provisional certification program,” which allowed businesses certified as “disadvantaged” by state and other agencies to compete for city contracts alongside City Hall’s previous designees. He also created an Office of Supplier Diversity, tasked with enforcing city ordinances and implementing programs like DBE.

These new programs and agencies, however, have yet to perform up to expectations. A report on DBE released by the city’s Office of the Inspector General in early August made a number of damning observations about its effectiveness, including, “(1) that the personnel responsible for implementing this program did not have a clear understanding of the applicable legal standards; (2) that the certification procedure implemented did not have written rules or comply with open meeting laws; and, (3) that the responsible office lacks sufficient staff and funding to carry out its intended functions.”

The Inspector General’s observations, the report noted, reflected more on the failings of the DBE program over the years than any of Landrieu’s specific efforts, but they also highlighted that, thus far, progress has been substandard. Groups like the NAACP seized upon the report, voicing fears that the administration is faltering on its promise to help New Orleans-based and minority-owned businesses secure contracts on new recovery projects.

“We have requested documentation from the city on previous contracts, but our focus right now is not what has happened in the past but on the one hundred projects just announced by Landrieu,” explains local NAACP chapter president Danatus King. “That’s a billion dollars worth of projects that the mayor publicized in the media last week. No matter what happened in the past, we want to make sure the law is enforced with respect to that.”

In order to keep tabs on all the contracts, King and other leaders have demanded that the city gather records for all its contracts — and all the required documentation contractors are required to submit for them — in publicly accessible folders that volunteers can access and use to monitor for compliance. “If the city doesn’t have the manpower to do it,” King explains, “we’re asking for citizens to get involved.”

Neither the city nor activists possess data on whether New Orleans is complying with an ordinance requiring that half of public spending go to locally owned companies and 35 percent to “socially and economically disadvantaged businesses.” It is not even clear which businesses qualify as “socially and economically disadvantaged.” While the ordinances originally included race- and gender-based criteria, the Supreme Court has since declared such rules to be unconstitutional. As a result, the city has tinkered with its certification process over the years but has yet to come up with firm criteria.

And while the DBE participation goals are “aspirational” in nature, the paperwork required to demonstrate a good faith effort in achieving them is not. Despite this fact, the Inspector General’s office noted that the current panel that approves companies for the city’s DBE program holds monthly meetings that are not advertised and are not open to the public — nor is there an adequate avenue of appeal if a business’s application is rejected. Moreover, the city’s Office of Supplier Diversity currently has only one employee, who has no time sufficiently monitor or enforce compliance on the part of contractors with the DBE program’s participation goals.

The mayor’s office announced earlier this year that it would undertake a “disparity study” to begin putting numbers on the debate. (The office declined to speak to TWI about the issue.) In the meantime, businesses, unions and activists remain unconvinced.  “I can tell you at the Langston Hughes school right over by the race track,” notes Kaufman, of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “This contractor from Biloxi, Miss., built that school. You’re telling me, with all the local contractors in New Orleans, we can’t build a school?”

“I think there’s one person in the office [of Supplier Diversity], but that’s no excuse,” he notes. “I think they’ve been doing this for years and years, and I think it’s business as usual. I hope it changes. We’re going to give Landrieu an opportunity to prove us wrong.”

Answer of the day: why, what a stupid question.

Adm. Dussault, I know your mandate doesn’t have to do with State Department contracts, but you might want to spare some time. These guys are operating in U.S. military battlespace, after all.

Task Force 2010 was conceived by Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen and is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault. (St. Petersburg Times/ZUMA Press, navy.mil)

It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to get a handle on one of the thorniest aspects of the way the U.S. military fights its wars: its relationship with the small army of contractors it hires for support.

[Security1] The brainchild of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the new task force in Afghanistan, known as Task Force 2010, will “follow the money,” as Petraeus testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday, to ensure that billions of dollars’ worth of Pentagon contracts dispersed to U.S., Afghan and foreign companies don’t end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries or otherwise subvert U.S. strategy.

Task Force 2010 is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault, a longtime Navy logistics officer who served as senior contracting overseer when Petraeus commanded the U.S. war in Iraq. Dussault arrived in Kabul last week after meeting the week before with John Brummet, the head of audits for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, for a briefing on “forensic audits,” something Brummet described as a “data-mining effort to look at financial transaction data” for “various anomalies” indicating waste, fraud or abuse.

While it’s too new to have a specific agenda delineated yet, U.S. officials who would not speak for attribution described Task Force 2010 as focusing on the intersection of contractor money and political power in southern Afghanistan, and giving senior military officers a greater amount of visibility into murky networks of subcontractors using taxpayer dollars than they currently have. Among its areas of focus are the private security companies outside of the U.S. military command’s operational control whose independent activities have sometimes proven problematic for the U.S. in Afghanistan. The task force has established an Armed Contractor Oversight Division to help advise Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, on how to deal with the companies.

“It’s not just about illegal activity for this task force,” said a U.S. military officer familiar with Task Force 2010′s work. “There’s also perfectly legal activity undercutting what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. Whether it’s prime [contractors] or subs, getting down to power brokers and money lords, it’s absolutely undercutting what we’re trying to do.”

Expect to hear the term “power broker” a lot with regard to Task Force 2010. It’s a politically neutral euphemism for one of the most complex problems that the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, and particularly in southern Afghanistan: how U.S. contract money entrenches local political dynasties, some of which raise or hire independent security forces and can have transactional relationships with the Taliban. Some use their contract money to consolidate their hold on power by providing jobs, thereby emerging as potential obstacles to the overarching U.S. strategy of expanding the Afghan government’s reach, capability and relevance, which McChrystal considers pivotal for securing U.S. interests in the country.

The most important of those power brokers is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and the brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai is widely believed to be a “facilitator” of the opium trade in the south — and a recipient of CIA money. A May 28 report from the Institute for the Study of War co-authored by Kimberly Kagan, an adviser last year to McChrystal, warned that an impending consolidation of private security companies under Ahmed Wali Karzai’s control “compete[s] with state security forces and interfere[s] with a government monopoly on the use of force,” and also undercuts the development of the Afghan National Army and Police. But in a Washington appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month, Hamid Karzai said that the U.S. understood his brother is simply a political fact of life in Kandahar.

U.S. military officials said that Task Force 2010 did not yet have any agenda for what contracts it will study, only an ethic for investigative diligence. It will be “following subcontracting networks wherever they lead, provide that information to the battlespace owner and Gen. McChrystal, and they make a decision about what to do,” said the military officer. In keeping with its early focus on southern Afghanistan, the officer said that the task force will seek to “make as many improvements as possible by the September/October time frame,” aligned with McChrystal’s plan to provide a “rising tide” of security for Kandahar ahead of July 2011, when the U.S. will gradually begin to transition security responsibilities for Afghan control.

Task Force 2010 will synthesize information “already collected” on private security contractor networks in Afghanistan, the officer said, and will “absolutely be linked in to the intelligence community,” but it is “not an intelligence gathering agency.” The task force will have civilian members, including from the FBI, and contributors from international agencies as well. It it unclear if the CIA will contribute any personnel to the task force.

The task force will seek to collaborate with the Afghan government and international bodies. But the U.S. military officer said that it did not have a mandate to reduce corruption within the Afghan government. “We want to improve contracting on our side of things, so when Gen. McChrystal approaches the Afghan government [on corruption] it’s from a position of credibility,” the officer said. “No one here is saying ‘stamp out corruption.’ We’d love to, but corruption was here before the international community arrived [in Afghanistan], and unfortunately, it’ll be here afterward.”

Southern Afghanistan and private security contractors won’t be the only focus of the new task force. It will also seek to understand the murky network of contractors that aid with the training and equipping of the Afghan National Security Forces, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s post-2011 strategy for securing the country. Earlier this year, a Senate investigation discovered that a shell company established by Blackwater, one of the most infamous private security contractors, diverted hundreds of rifles for its guards’ personal use that were intended for the Afghan police, and other contractors opened fire on Afghan civilians on a Kabul road.

“Any effort that neglected to look at the training effort would miss big part of the puzzle,” the officer said, so Task Force 2010 will “absolutely” examine contractor contributions to the U.S. and NATO training command.

But Task Force 2010′s most immediate task will be to trace the influence of U.S. contract money to help McChrystal execute his strategy, something politically perilous if it threatens the Afghan “power brokers” with whom the U.S. has worked in the south.

“Who knows what we’ll find?” said the military officer. “We see our job as providing information to decision-makers on how we do contracting. Absolutely, there could be large political implications to what we find — there may or may not be.”

“I think we’ve gone too far,” McChrystal said at France’s IHEDN military institute. “I actually think we would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved.”

Alternatives could include increasing the number of troops “if necessary,” or “using a greater number of Afghan contractors, or Afghans to help with the mission,” he said.

McChrystal said the use of contractors was founded upon “good intentions,” such as to limit military commitments or to save money for governments.

“I think it doesn’t save money,” he said. “We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that I think is greater than it ought to be.”

It doesn’t appear as if McChrystal distinguished between security contractors — what people tend to mean when they talk about the nefarious influence of contract personnel in war zones — and contractors for, say, food and laundry and development advice and logistics (who also have been involved in a lot of waste, fraud and abuse). Nathan Hodge at Danger Room is skeptical that anything will actually change as a result, since the alternative is to increase the size and function of the military significantly, and that’s loaded with political peril.

That said, one point McChrystal didn’t apparently make is that security contractors in Afghanistan aren’t obligated by law to follow the commander’s guidance for waging the war, something crucial in a battle for a local population’s political allegiances, since that population will distinguish between Americans and non-Americans, not U.S. troops and U.S. contractors. With the military prepared to award a new contract for assistance in training Afghan police, that’s a subject where McChrystal’s words could go a long way.

Today, Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres offer a solution. Writing in The Washington Post, the campaign finance reformers propose a new statute to keep the financing restrictions in place for any companies doing business with the federal government (i.e., most of the country’s biggest corporations). Using the drug lobby as an illustration, they explain:

Federal contractors already are not allowed to “directly or indirectly . . . make any contribution of money or other things of value” to “any political party, committee, or candidate.” This provision arguably bars Big Pharma from launching a media campaign in favor of a candidate who supports its special deals, thereby “indirectly providing” the candidate something “of value.” But it doesn’t cover the case in which contractors threaten to spend millions to oppose senators and representatives who refuse their excessive demands.

There is a need, then, for a new statutory initiative: The same anti-corruption rationale may prohibit contractors from spending millions in favor of candidates requires a statutory prohibition on a negative advertising blitz.

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine, for example, the drug industry going after Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who’s been pushing a proposal to empower states to negotiate pharmaceutical prices for their lowest-income seniors. (The prohibition on those negotiations has been a cash cow for the drug companies.)

Ackerman and Ayres predict that their proposal would withstand the scrutiny of even the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

The Roberts court is skeptical — to put it mildly — of campaign finance restrictions. But it is still highly unlikely that the justices would strike down a law targeting federal contractors. All nine recognize that Congress may restrict free speech when there is a significant risk of corruption. That risk is obvious when corporate speakers are simultaneously doing business with the government.

Of course, with just 10 months to go before November’s midterms, Congress would have to act quickly — not something it’s exactly known for.

Recall that ArmorGroup’s predecessor on the so-called static security contract, MZM, was fired for exhibiting nearly the same lassitude that ArmorGroup promptly exhibited. Whistleblowers subsequently alleged that the exact same Gurkha guards whose lack of English proficiency helped cost MZM its contract were hired by ArmorGroup in order to avoid paying higher wages to guards who could clearly communicate with U.S. officials at the embassy. So before anyone goes about cheering ArmorGroup’s departure, it’s important to determine that the State Department will take concrete steps to ensure these problems won’t recur with whatever company gets the contract next.

This was never about ArmorGroup. It’s about the State Department’s lax oversight of its security contracts.

Given the nuance of the debate, Republicans argue that Franken should make it clear that GOP senators don’t support assault or rape — especially since the amendment deals only with civil claims, making it possible for alleged rapists to be prosecuted criminally.

“I think it would be helpful for Sen. Franken to come forward and say, ‘I’m not suggesting that anybody who votes for my amendment is indifferent to crimes against women or anybody else,’” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who voted against the amendment. “What’s going on politically with the amendment Sen. Franken can’t control, but I think it would be helpful for him personally to just let the rest of us know that’s the views of others — not him.”

I imagine this will happen around the same time Republicans apologize for distorting Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) 2003 and 2004 war votes as being “against the troops.” Or when Republicans make it clear that, say, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) was not voting to support prostitution when she voted against a ban on ACORN funding, etc., etc. This is how politics works.