[117837] in Cypherpunks
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Sun Sep 12 16:20:25 1999
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 21:50:53 +0200 (CEST)
Message-Id: <199909121950.VAA13334@mail.replay.com>
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE
September 1, 1999
THE CAPITOL HILL MONEY LAUNDRY
Remember these letters: ADSS and MRIS. They are about to cause a scandal
that promises to shake the Federal Government to its foundations.
Every dime the Feds spend must be authorized by Congress. All such
authorizations originate in the Appropriations Committee of the House, which
has 13 sub-committees. Any and all requests for government expenditures,
from president, senator, congressman, or agency, must be submitted to and
routed through one of these sub-committees. The appropriations process is
long and tortuous, wending its way through the committees, the mark-ups,
votes and amendments on the House floor, compromises and approvals by the
Senate Appropriations Committee, votes with further amendments on the Senate
floor, on and on to final passage and the president's desk for signature or
veto.
The accounting program used by Appropriations to deal with this maze is a
system of "flat files" - separate item-by-item entries with no relation to
each other - written 20 years ago. Nothing is connected to anything else
(that is, it's a non-relational database), and... it's not Y2K compliant.
Suppose a Congressman wants to follow the progress of one of his spending
items through the maze. Can't be done. Suppose a Senator wants to see how
changing the funding in one part of a bill affects funding in other parts.
Nope, no code for that either. Repeated demands from House and Senate
Members that Appropriations accounting be able to do things like this,
coupled with the system's obsolescence and the necessity of making it Y2K
compliant, are forcing the committee to replace the old flat file system. A
private software contractor has been hired, Anteon Corp. in Fairfax,
Virginia, to provide an Appropriation Decision Support System (ADSS) and a
Members Request Information System (MRIS). The purpose of these computer
programs is to provide a full tracking system for all monies in the entire
Federal Budget through all stages in the appropriations process.
The Anteon programmers writing the ADSS/MRIS programs have run up against an
interesting problem: the folks who have hired them don't want the programs
to do what they are designed to do. These folks are called "staffers," and
they are the ones who actually control Capitol Hill. Every Congressman and
Senator has his or her own staff of people. Beyond them, each committee has
its own staff, who don't work for any particular member but for the
committee itself. Many of these committee staffers have been there for years
and the members feel they can't do without them, so these old pros
manipulate the members and the entire legislative process according to their
whims.
So it is with Appropriations Committee staff. The key issue for them is not
accounting responsibility, but their ability to play and fudge the numbers
any way they want. Their non-negotiable demand is that ADSS/MRIS give them
"full flexibility of data," as one staffer, Jay Sivulich, puts it. He, and
his fellow staffers Dale Oak, Ken Marx, Tim Buck, and Bob Harris, want to be
able to enter or change any number "manually," without reference to any
specific account or appropriation, and to have that new number not change
any other number. The Anteon programmers endlessly explain that this is
precisely what a computer accounting program with a relational database
won't do.
"They want tracking software without any tracking," one programmer told me.
"They want to hide numbers, not make it easier to find and trace them.
Suppose a Congressman wants $5 million for some project of his. His request
now is entered into the accounting system as a flat file, not attached to
any particular account. There is no way to trace where the money came from,
where it went, did it get to the project, how it was spent - and the
staffers are almost hysterically resisting any accounting 'straitjacket'
that does this tracking."
Or take this example. The Anteon programmers tried to follow, as an
exercise, $5 million in the DOD (Defense) budget that DOD wanted transferred
to DOT (Transportation) to implement a defense-related program. There is a
DOD accounting file showing the $5 million was transferred - but in the DOT
budget and account files, it's not there. The money never arrived, no one
knows where it is, and there is no way to track it down and find out with
the current software. When made aware of $5 million of taxpayers' money
vanishing into an accounting black hole, the Appropriations staffers
shrugged their shoulders. Not only did they care less about it, not only did
they show no interest in getting accounting tracking software that would
prevent such things, they insist the new software allow them to hide and
shift money around any way they want. In other words, what the
Appropriations Staffers call "full flexibility," a prosecutor would call
"embezzlement." If these guys were working for a private company instead of
the government, they wouldn't be running the show, they'd be in jail.
But are they stealing? Are they stashing stolen fortunes in secret Swiss
bank accounts? No. They're not in it for the money. They're in it for the
power, for the egomaniacal high of controlling trillions of dollars. They
get a thrill out of manipulating budget requests from Senators and
Congressmen, of shafting requests from those they dislike. It should come as
no surprise that the ones they dislike the most are conservative
Republicans. And here we come to the real scandal. The Appropriations
staffers have a bottomless contempt for their bosses. "We're all Democrats
here," admits Ken Marx. "The Republicans could fire us all, replace us with
Republican staffers and do things differently. But they don't have the
balls." So the true scandal is, in the almost five years that Republicans
have controlled Congress, they haven't changed the corrupt appropriations
system one bit.
It's pretty ironic that the rallying cry of the international investment
community (the Electronic Herd as it's become known) is "transparency," that
the acknowledged cause of the Asian economic meltdown was the lack of
transparency on the part of Asian banks and governments - and that right
under our noses, the Federal Budget of the United States is constructed with
no transparency at all. I'd like to suggest we put an end to this. You can
help expose the "full flexibility" scam of the Appropriations staffers by
sending this article to your local media outlets and everyone you know, and
by calling the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Bill Young (R-FL)
at 202-225-5961, and tell him you want full transparency for the entire
appropriations process. Tell him you want his committee staffers to stop
demanding "full flexibility," to order them to implement the ADSS/MRIS
tracking software providing full transparency, not full flexibility, and to
fire any staffer that tries to stand in the way
If we do this, we will have done more to prevent Washington from playing
games with our money than most anything you can imagine. That's worth a few
faxes and phone calls, isn't it?
