What's Happening in National Security

Step Outside the MOX

The Project On Government Oversight and Taxpayers for Common Sense are encouraged by reports of waning support for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MOX) at the Savannah River Site...

Defense Savings Strengthen Our Economic Security

February 6, 2013 Dear Member of Congress, On behalf of the undersigned organizations and...

TCS Testifies before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Ryan Alexander testified before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee...

Defense Authorization Bill: More Money, Less Savings

The Senate today passed the final version of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which, though late, will still beat the...

TCS Cited in Bipartisan Congressional Letter on Defense Savings

A group of eleven Democratic and eleven Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to President Obama and...

TCS Supports Extending Whistleblower Protections

November 28, 2012 An Open Letter to the Senate in Support of More Protections for Taxpayer Dollars Dear Senator: We the undersigned...

Preserve NNSA Cost Controls in Defense Authorization Bill

Taxpayers for Common Sense sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees today asking members to protect cost-controlling language for nuclear weapons in the Fiscal Year 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). ...

The Department of Everything

We love to remind people that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is the world’s largest bureaucracy, employing more than the world’s...

DOD Acquisition Reforms: Spending Money is Hard!

“It turns out acquisition reform is hard,” said Undersecretary of Defense Frank Kendall at yesterday’s rollout of the Defense...

President Ms. Ryan Alexander Sliding Past Sequestration Statement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 1, 2012 CONTACTS: Steve Ellis 202-546-8500 x126 or steve@taxpayer.net Taxpayers for Common Sense...

TCS Statement on Amendment to Freeze Pentagon Budget

The following is a written statement by Ms. Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense on the adoption of the Frank-Mulvaney...

Support Amendments to Cut Waste in Defense Spending Bill

  July 18, 2012 Dear Representative:  Taxpayers for Common Sense Action, a...

Defense Authorization Antics Begin

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the largest policy bill directing the nation’s annual spending, accounting for some $650...

House Backdoor Earmarks $150 million for Parochial Boondoggle

This morning the House voted down an amendment that would have stripped the $150 million added to the National Defense Authorization Act for the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC). ...

Stop $150 million for troubled uranium project in NDAA

$150 million for the United States Enrichment Corporation's (USEC) Piketon, Ohio enrichment facility has been added to the National...

TCS Analysis of the FY13 Presidential Budget Request

Last Updated: February 19, 2012 The FY2013 Presidential Budget Request was released this morning (2/13/2012). TCS staff will be posting...

Plenty of Money Moving Around Defense Authorization Bill

Followers of the annual National Defense Authorization Act will recall the kerfuffle that occurred earlier this year after lawmakers in...

TCS National Security Spending Update: Spending Big on Services

The Senate Armed Services Committee released the report for the FY2012 National Defense Authorization Act on Friday, and though it will...

TCS and Panelists Brief Hill Staff on DoD and Deficit Reduction: Options for Significant Defense Savings

Today, Taxpayers for Common Sense senior defense policy analyst Laura Peterson introduced a panel discussion for Capitol Hill staff on...

Budget Gimmicks in FY11 Defense Bill

Washington is abuzz with talk of the deficit-reduction plan President Obama announced Wednesday, mostly along the lines of “wait, what...

Updates & Budgetary Gimmicks in the Final Continuing Resolution Unveiled by House Appropriations

The House Appropriations Committee released the final Continuing Resolution (CR) funding the federal government for the rest of the 2011...

TCS Statement on the JSF Alternate Engine Cancellation

Statement by TCS President Ms. Ryan Alexander on the announcement the Defense Department issued a stop-work order on the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine program....

TCS Mentioned on Capitol Hill (February)

Taxpayers for Common Sense was mentioned numerous times on Capitol Hill this February.  CSPAN video provided below: February 7,...

Ongoing Analysis of Debate Over FY11 Continuing Resolution

The House of Representatives is debating a Continuing Resolution to fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2011 (through...

Letter to Congress: Where to Start Cutting to Trim the Deficit

Today Taxpayers for Common Sense delivered to leadership in both the House and Senate a report on how Congress can quickly cut nearly...

UPDATE: Gates Shifts Defense Dollars

Defense Secretary Robert Gates today gave what was billed as one of the longest speeches in his current job, defining the battlefield for...

TCS President Ryan Alexander Statement on the Defense Cuts Announced by Sec. Robert Gates

Please find below a statement from Ms. Ryan Alexander, President of Taxpayers for Common Sense on the defense cuts announced today by...

President Pumps up Nuke Budget Again

The White House released a plan yesterday to pump up their investment in the United States’ nuclear weapons complex by another $4.1...

Reforms Proposed by National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Co-Chairs Unveiled Today

The Co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform gave their proposals to fellow Commission members today....

As the Armed Services Committee Turns

Now that the final ballots have come in, it’s time to assess the impact the midterms will have on the Congressional committees that...

GAO Report Slams DHS Management of SBInet Contractor

  The Department of Homeland Security did not effectively manage or oversee the prime contractor on its over-budget, behind-schedule...

VA Senators Author Amendment to Stop JFCOM Closure

Democratic Virginia Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner said today they will introduce an amendment to the FY2012 defense authorization...

Earmark Lobbyist Pleads Guilty; Lobby Shop’s Earmarks Detailed

September 24, 2010 (Update) Former high-powered PMA lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti has pleaded guilty to an illegal contribution scheme in...

UPDATE: Senate adds $2.6 billion in earmarks to defense spending bill

(September 16)  In passing its edition of the FY2011 defense spending bill today, the Senate Appropriations Committee didn’t add much to...

Gates Mandates Affordability in Defense Spending

 Defense Secretary Robert Gates yesterday unveiled details of his effort to overhaul procurement processes, just ahead of Senate markups...

New Report Urges Comprehensive Security Spending

A bipartisan group of national security experts including Taxpayers for Common Sense today released a report calling for a budget that...

TCS on Gates Defense Reforms: One Small Step Forward

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new belt-tightening initiatives at the Department of Defense are a positive step forward. But much more...

Faulty Virtual Fence Could Cost Taxpayers $8 Billion

A recent hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee on SBInet, Boeing’s borderland “virtual fence” that has failed to function...

U.S. Deficit Double-Edged Sword for Defense Budget Cuts

TCS National Security Analyst Laura Peterson published the following commentary as a guest writer on Budget Insight, the blog of the...

New Report Urges Pentagon Role in Deficit Reduction

Today, the Sustainable Defense Task Force held a press conference at the Capitol Visitors Center releasing a report identifying roughly $1 trillion in Pentagon budget savings over the next ten years. ...

TCS President Ryan Alexander Op-Ed: Why two jets are not better than one (Politico)

 Today, President Ryan Alexander issued an Op-Ed to Politico.com regarding the recent $485 million alternate engine addition by the House...

DOD Audit Still Nowhere in Sight

The Defense Department yesterday turned over to Congress an update on its attempts to pass an audit. Though Congress mandated audits back...

UPDATED: TCS Statement on the IMPROVE Acquisition Act

(April 28) The full House of Represenatives today passed the IMPROVE Act with only a couple hours of debate and few amendments. The bill...

TCS Supports New OMB Contracting Guidance

The White House took an important step this week toward rolling back one of the most pernicious pieces of contracting law on the federal...

Gates: Defense Cuts Saved Taxpayers $330 Billion

Eliminating wasteful defense programs like the F-22 Raptor last year saved taxpayers $330 billion, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said...

TCS Statement on SBInet’s Funding Freeze

Below is a comment from TCS President Ms. Ryan Alexander on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s announcement that she will...

Ongoing TCS Analysis of the FY2011 Budget Proposal

(February 23, 2010) Border Security Still Not Paying its Dues Funding for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s Secure Border Initiative...

Troop Surge Dollars Must be Watched

Since President Obama announced a 30,000 troop buildup for Afghanistan Tuesday, everyone is asking the inevitable question: How much is...

Dollars Fly Overseas to Military Bases

The annual military construction spending bill is not generally a big deal for Congress, which treats it as an opportunity to fund gyms...

Make the Contractor Performance Database Available to the Public

After years of debate, taxpayers are close to finally getting a federal contractor misconduct database that should stop their money from...

Watchdogs to Defense Secretary Gates: Tell Congress Earmarks Cannot be Tolerated

Government watchdogs yesterday sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urging him to make it unmistakably clear to Congress...

Senators Deliver Earmark Cash for Campaign Contributors

Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) has cross-referenced earmarks sought and obtained by Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee members...

Inouye, Cochran Benefit from Earmark Recipients

Taxpayers for Common Sense has mapped the connections between earmarks and campaign contributions for the chairman and ranking member of...

House Opportunity to Shoot Down Funding for Defense Contractor Raided by FBI

There are several amendments on the House Defense spending bill that is on the floor this morning. In addition to the important earmark...

House Defense Appropriators Rake in Earmarks for Campaign Contributors

Taxpayers for Common Sense analyzed the FY2010 Defense Appropriations spending bill that recently passed the House Appropriations...

TCS Statement on the Senate’s F-22 Cut

The following is a statement by Taxpayers for Common Sense President Ryan Alexander on the 58-40 Senate vote to eliminate additional...

Hearing on Alaska Native Corporations Probes Wasteful Spending

A July 16 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight on federal procurement...

UPDATE: Senate Strips F-22s From Defense Authorization Bill

(July 21) The Senate today took a small step for Pentagon reform and a giant step for fiscal sanity when it voted 58-40 to approve the...

House Defense Appropriations Committee Members Rake in Nearly $1 million from Potential Earmark Beneficiaries

A Taxpayers for Common Sense analysis found that the House lawmakers who write the annual defense spending bill asked for billions of...

House Appropriators Reject Weapons Cuts

The House Defense Appropriations Subcommitte today set the tone for the upcoming debate over Congresses’ biggest spending bill. Following...

TCS Holds Congressional Briefing on Defense Spending

Taxpayers for Common Sense sponsored a briefing for House of Representatives members and staffers Wednesday, July 15, titled Defense...

TCS and NTU to House: Don’t Fund F-22

Today, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National Taxpayers Union sent a joint letter to all members of the House of Representatives...

Oversight and Government Reform Hearing on the V-22 Osprey

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing Tuesday on the future of the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft with a...

Obama Waves Veto Pen at Wasteful Fighter Jet

President Obama came out swinging yesterday, issuing the first veto threat of his presidency to tackle a congressional sacred cow...

Nuclear Weapons: Transformation or Business As Usual?

Two Senate hearings on nuclear weapons this week showed that the Obama administration’s charge toward a smaller—and hopefully...

Letter to Congress: Don’t Overload the Supplemental

Keep C-17s and earmarks out of the 2009 war spending bill.   Download a pdf of TCS's joint letter to Congress     June 2,...

Fight Over Weapons Cuts is About to Get Ugly

At Monday’s unveiling of major weapons cuts in the 2010 defense budget, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped members of Congress...

National Security Spending in the 2010 Budget

Though the topline numbers in the Obama administration’s national security budget for 2010 may not make headlines, there’s a lot of...

National Geographic To Air Government-Funded Homeland Security Special

A friend of Taxpayers for Common Sense in Maine just alerted us to something very interesting. Tonight, National Geographic is going to...

Stimulus Adds to Stratospheric Satellite Costs

Despite energetic lobbying by the defense industry (and some lawmakers) the $825 billion stimulus bill now emerging from committee...

Stimulus Not Needed for Department of Defense

Of all the industries in line for a handout in this financially frightening time, the defense industry would seem to bring up the rear....

New Reports Document Wasteful War Spending

Just in time for a new war funding request to hit Capitol Hill, a trio of recently released documents recall just how badly the Pentagon...

The Non-Oversight Cannon

Last week we told you about a congressman’s efforts to feed the already overstuffed Army modernization program called Future Combat...

Gates: New Nukes Are Good For You and Cheaper Too

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates fired a preemptive strike against potential cuts to the U.S. nuclear weapons program this week by...

President Approves $5 Billion in Defense Earmarks

The President today signed the 2009 Defense Authorization bill. While the levels of earmarks are down significantly from previous years,...

Treasury Releases Interim Oversight Policies

The Treasury Department today released interim policies on hiring contractors to manage the bailout and to handle potential conflicts of...

Senate Turns Against Earmark Reform

Tonight, the Senate passed the $612.5 billion Fiscal Year 2009 defense authorization bill. Virtually all the amendments to the...

TCS Action Letter to the Senate on Defense Authorization Bill

The following is a letter from Taxpayers for Common Sense Action prior to upcoming Senate vote on the Defense Authorization Bill for...

DHS Needs to Slow Down, Rethink Fencing Future

The Department of Homeland Security blames its doubled cost estimates for the border fence on pricey fuel, labor and materials. But it’s...

White House Targets Contract Reform

The White House has targeted several contracting reform initiatives in the Senate defense authorization bill as veto-worthy, though its...

GAO: Border Costs Climbing the Fence

Federal watchdogs confirmed our suspicions today when they revealed that the cost of building a 600+ mile fence along our southern border...

CBO: $85 Billion for Iraq Contractors

The Congressional Budget Office today released a report providing some of the most comprehensive estimates we’ve seen to date on the...

Missile Defense Finds Funds in Milcon Earmarks

This week we finished databasing earmarks in the Fiscal Year 2009 Senate bill that funds military construction and veterans’ affairs,...

Bad Contracts Hurting Good People

Our men and women in the military face enough problems without dealing with faulty wiring, contaminated water and corroded ammunition. So...

Should Duke Cunningham be Pardoned?

Former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA), currently in the middle of an 8-year prison sentence for taking $2.4 million in bribes from...

Los Alamos’ Insecurity Complex

Though two of the nation’s largest nuclear labs are no doubt sad to see their patron Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) depart Congress, the...

Marines Advertising on Hummers

Anyone who has a TV knows the military spends tons of money for recruiting prospective troops into the services. Recently, while watching...

End of a Nuclear Era

Nuclear weapons labs and the Senator who loves them closed a chapter yesterday when the Senate cut funding for a controversial program to...

GAO Finds Funny Fence Numbers at DHS

At last, the Department of Homeland Security has given us some idea of what its border fence is going to cost—and it looks like a...

GAO Sides with Boeing in Tanker Contract Dispute

The Hill is reporting that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has sided with Boeing in a dispute between aerospace giants over a...

Pouring Concrete on the Border

As Congress continues to threaten to withhold funds from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for failing to provide cost estimates...

Defense Earmarks

What a week! So we are slogging through the defense spending bill. From our counting of the earmark disclosure tables at the end of the...

The Nine Lives of the C-17

Now that the first drafts of the defense spending bills are rolling in, the tea leaves are beginning to curl into place to reveal which...

Fencing in the Dark

Members of Congress are finally waking up to the fact that a billion-dollar behemoth is about to rise from America’s southwestern border....

TCS Testimony: Fiscal Implications of Border Security Strategies

Testimony of Laura Peterson, Senior Policy Analyst for Taxpayers for Common Sense before the House Subcommittee on National Parks,...

More Money, More Problems

Can earmarks be too much of a good thing? Some high-level Defense Department officials think so. TCS commented this week on a recent DoD...

Dude, Who’s Watching My Contract?

The first question that demands answering after reading last week’s story about the 22-year-old who sold the Army $300 million worth of...

Boeing’s Fence Operation

While the Pentagon is investigating why Boeing spent its own money to keep the operations line for its C-17 aircraft open, the company...

Future Cash Combat

11:30 a.m. -- The Army’s Future Combat Systems, a sprawling modernization program that encompasses several phased deployments of weapons...

Missile Defense

11:20 a.m. -- The administration’s request included $9 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, the organization within the Defense...

TCS Statement on C-130J Bid Protest

Washington, D.C. - Prepared statement by Keith Ashdown,Vice President of Taxpayers for Common Sense on the Government Accountability...

Homeland Security: A Boon for Businesses

On June 6, 2002, President George W. Bush unveiled his plan for a new Cabinet-level agency with a staff of 170,000 and a budget of $37...

Federal Distress

When it comes to shipping supplies, the Department of Defense is no Federal Express. DOD loses track of sixty percent of the $5 billion...

Engineering Boondoggles

While Washington is wringing its hands about the automatic across-the-board budget cuts known as...