Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

For years, the late Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) published an annual report on government waste, appropriately titled "The Wastebook." Coburn and his staff catalogued billions of dollars in dubious spending, ranging from the ridiculous (like a $1 million grant to study romance novels) to the outrageous (like $65 million in hurricane relief that was spent on tourism advertisements). Last year ... the Government Accountability Office released a report revealing that 17 out of 24 federal agencies are utilizing less than 25 percent of their office space. Not one of the agencies used even half the office space it occupied, topping out at 49 percent. Federal agencies spend about $2 billion every year to operate and maintain these buildings, plus an additional $5 billion per year to lease office buildings. By selling underutilized properties and consolidating operations, the federal government could generate hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in revenue, in addition to reducing the expense of maintaining property and buildings that are barely being used. Between 2010 and 2023, the federal government saved an estimated $600 billion simply by implementing GAO recommendations, some of which are as simple and common-sense as improved documentation and monitoring to prevent overpayments. Another promising way of reducing federal spending would be to cut redundancy. Multiple federal agencies are concurrently working on the same issues – in some cases, literally dozens of federal agencies are all working independently on the same problem.

Note: GAO estimates that the federal government Federal Government loses an estimated $233 billion to $521 billion annually to fraud and waste. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government waste.

"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?" This quote from one of [Hilary Clinton's] campaign rallies has an unusual durability. The Democratic Party's answer to Bernie Sanders's propagation of economic justice and economic issues was to smear him as somebody who ignored the plight of what they love to call – their new term – "marginalized groups," which is people of color, women, trans people, all matters dealing with sexuality. [Hilary Clinton's] victory over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary reshaped center-left politics for a decade and established identity politics as a standard tool in the Democratic Party belt. For basically a decade ... you couldn't even criticize [identity politics] without being smeared as a racist, a sexist, whatever term would work to instantly discredit any criticism while shutting down any critical thought of what that criticism represented. There's a huge rise in the number of black elected officials, mayors, congressmen, etc. [They] no longer have any reason to cater to working-class blacks because workers are politically disorganized. The political officials end up captured by the same corporate forces as the white politicians – but they get to have the corner on race talk. To deal with the quality of life and life chances of the vast majority of racial minorities, you have to go beyond disparities and look at the actual availability of social goods, not the current distribution of different races. Identity politics promotes strategies and policies that primarily address the interests of elites rather than the vast majority of working Americans. As long as the American political system is run on money, the basic direction of both parties is going to be set by big money. The way out is not by confining ourselves to increasing representation and combating discrimination, but rather by addressing the quality of the jobs and the availability of basic goods.

Note: Watch an excellent interview of journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon discussing how journalism has shifted from being a working class trade that held the powerful accountable to an elite industry that serves the upper class. She articulates that mainstream news has abandoned and divided the working class by creating a culture war around identity and race. Elites shaping the news industry benefit from this political polarization, which hides the tragic reality of income inequality that affect all races across political lines.

October 4th, 2018, was a busy news day. The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board – FASAB – that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, "SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES" permits government agencies to "modify" public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered. To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who's been studying discrepancies in defense expenditures for years, the new ruling ... was a shock. "From this point forward," he says, "the federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden." I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports. I couldn't find one. This new accounting guideline really does mean what it appears to mean. Late last year ... we saw an incident in which two employees of the National Reconnaissance Office and the NSA were arrested for procurement fraud in Colorado in a case involving a classified signals intelligence program. In that instance, the site turned out to be owned by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

President Donald Trump has ordered the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The executive order ... also aims to declassify the remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The order is among a flurry of executive actions Trump has quickly taken the first week of his second term. Speaking to reporters, Trump said, "everything will be revealed." Trump had promised during his reelection campaign to make public the last batches of still-classified documents surrounding President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Trump has nominated Kennedy's nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be the health secretary in his new administration. Kennedy's father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination. The younger Kennedy has said he isn't convinced that a lone gunman was solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President Kennedy, in 1963. The order directs the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days to release the remaining John F. Kennedy records, and within 45 days for the other two cases. It was not clear when the records would actually be released. Most researchers agree that roughly 3,000 records have not yet been released, either in whole or in part, and many of those originated with the CIA.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the dark truths behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on political assassinations.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., will lead a new task force focused on the declassification of federal secrets – including records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other documents in the public interest. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., appointed Luna to chair the "Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets." Comer and Luna sent letters to the State Department, Department of Energy and the CIA for documents relating to the origins of COVID-19; the National Security Agency and CIA for records relating to JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations; the Department of Defense and the CIA for 9/11 files; and to the Justice Department for documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein. The creation of the task force comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling the director of national intelligence ... to present a plan for the full and complete release of all JFK assassination records within 15 days. He also ordered that officials immediately review the records relating to RFK and MLK assassinations and present a plan for their full and complete release within 45 days. "We have spent years seeking information on the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Reverend King, and other government secrets without success," Luna told Fox News Digital. "It is time to give Americans the answers they deserve."

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigations covering the dark truths behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Drugs were the elephant in the room during the failed U.S. war in Afghanistan. Because opium was such a large part of the poor and war-torn country's economy, the fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan republic often looked more like a turf war between rival narco gangs, with the U.S. military protecting some opium fields and bombing others. Afghan farmers were happy to take USAID's help while continuing to grow opium. For example, opium cultivation increased by 119 percent in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped expand the irrigation systems there. A USAID-funded charity in Kenya allegedly covered up rampant sex abuse of children, and USAID funded a second charity in the Central African Republic a month after a major sex abuse scandal broke. The Children of God Relief Institute, which ran an orphanage for Kenyan children affected by AIDS and similar projects, received high praise from the U.S. government. From 2013 onward, USAID gave the institute $29.3 million. In 2021, a whistleblower told USAID that the charity was harboring a dark secret. USAID's inspector general soon determined that Children of God Relief Institute officials "knew or should have known of multiple incidents" of child sex abuse "but failed to take effective remedial measures to address the abuse." In some cases, the victims were forced to apologize for provoking their own abuse, The Washington Post reports.

Note: Watch our latest video on government waste, where we take a thoughtful look at the current political landscape and explore powerful solutions that have the potential to tackle wasteful spending and restore financial freedom. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

The Donald Trump administration has started sending flights of undocumented migrants in the United States to Guantanamo Bay. The US has ... previously used a Guantanamo Bay camp to detain certain migrants, but Trump's use is different, immigration experts have said. On January 29, Trump signed a memo directing the departments of defence and homeland security to expand the Migrant Operations Centre at Guantanamo Bay to "provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States". Historically, the US has used Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants stopped at sea. Now, Trump is sending people who were detained on US soil. Trump says he plans to detain 30,000 people. That many people haven't been detained at Guantanamo Bay since the 1990s. Migrants at Guantanamo Bay lack "access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water," the [International Refugee Assistance Project] said in [a] report. Migrants don't have access to unmonitored calls with lawyers and can't candidly speak about poor conditions at the naval base. "The US government intentionally uses Guantanamo in hopes of avoiding oversight and the public eye, which makes the facility ripe for abuse," [interim senior policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project Hannah] Flamm said.

Note: Explore our comprehensive news database on the dark history of Guantanamo Bay. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

Logan Sowell's suicide in July 2021 is one of at least seven in the past five years involving the Marine Corps' stable of drill instructors, according to military casualty reports obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In 2023, three occurred at Parris Island within less than three months. A study completed by the Marine Corps in 2019 found that during the previous decade, 29 drill instructors either ended their lives or openly acknowledged they had contemplated doing so – an aberration the study's authors characterized as startlingly high compared with the occurrence of suicidal ideation among Marines who had never held that job. Rates of addiction and divorce among drill instructors also were higher, researchers found. Critics and relatives of those who died accuse the Marine Corps of fostering an environment that contributed to their deaths. They describe routine 90-hour-plus workweeks, sleep deprivation and an always-on culture that frequently caused the job's requisite intensity to seep into their personal lives, igniting disputes with loved ones. Others detailed bouts of depression or alcohol dependency. The Marine Corps lacks adequate services for those who are struggling and need help, and tacitly condones a culture that stigmatizes those who seek it. "We put a drastic expectation on them to act perfect," said a Marine officer who has supervised dozens of drill instructors. This top-down pressure ... "causes this stress that trickles into their home life."

Note: Read about the tragic suicides and traumas of military drone operators. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and mental health.

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there. But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory. There is no new intelligence behind the agency's shift, officials said. John Ratcliffe, the new director of the C.I.A., has long favored the lab leak hypothesis. He has said it is a critical piece of intelligence that needs to be understood and that it has consequences for U.S.-Chinese relations. The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency "on the sidelines" of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Even in the absence of hard intelligence, the lab leak hypothesis has been gaining ground inside spy agencies. But some analysts question the wisdom of shifting a position in absence of new information. Five agencies, including the National Intelligence Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed that natural exposure most likely caused the epidemic. But they said that they had only low-confidence in their assessment. Until now, two agencies, the F.B.I. and Department of Energy, thought a lab leak was more likely. But their theories are different.

Note: For years, the lab leak hypothesis was labeled as "racist," " thoroughly debunked," and "something out of a comic book." If intelligence agencies are just now admitting the lab leak is ‘more likely,' does that mean they were ignoring or covering up evidence–or just waiting for the political winds to shift? Watch our Mindful News Brief on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19.

Dr. Anthony Fauci writes in his new "tell-all" that those who argue the COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, potentially due to experiments funded by US grants, are promoting a "conspiracy theory" – contradicting his own recent testimony before Congress. NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak told members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last month that US taxpayers did fund gain-of-function research on bat SARS viruses at the WIV. Manhattan-based EcoHealth has denied that its work met the controlling definition for that research – or that the experiments could have led to the pandemic. Earlier this week, two scientific experts testified before another Senate committee that evidence points to the experiments at the Wuhan lab as the most likely cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. NIH, which oversees NIAID, awarded more than $500,000 to EcoHealth between 2014 and 2020 that was funneled toward risky viral research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The research resulted in a modified virus that was 10,000 times more infectious in lungs, 1 million times more infectious in brains and three times more lethal in humanized lab mice, [Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard] Ebright testified earlier this week, based on NIH disclosures of the experiment. Another EcoHealth proposal, which was never funded, is seen as a potential way in which the virus could have been created.

Note: Read how the NIH bypassed the oversight process, allowing controversial gain-of-function experiments to proceed unchecked. Watch our Mindful News Brief on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID and corruption in biotech.

A former CIA operative has revealed the agency pursues people with a certain mental disorder as it makes them the best agents. John Kiriakou, who had a 14-year career as a CIA officer, said ... 'A CIA psychiatrist told me one time that the CIA looks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies–not sociopaths because sociopaths have no consciences,' said Kiriakou, speaking to The Real News Network. A 'sociopath' is someone who lacks empathy, disregards the feelings of others and may manipulate or harm people without remorse, often for their own personal gain. 'Sociopaths are impossible to control,' said Kiriakou. 'They slip through the cracks because they have no conscience and they pass the polygraph very easily because they don't feel guilty. The CIA has admitted that spies have pathological personality features that help them with their espionage efforts, such as a sense of entitlement or a desire for power and control. While employed by the CIA, Kiriakou was involved in critical counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He was involved in the capture of terrorist Abu Zubaydah. However, he refused to be trained in so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques.' Kiriakou has claimed that he never authorized or engaged in these techniques. After leaving the CIA, he appeared on ABC News where he said the CIA waterboarded detainees and labeled the action as torture. The interview led to Kiriakou being arrested in 2012 and charged with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for allegedly illegally disclosing the identity of a covert officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Note: Learn more about the rise of the CIA and the dark realities of modern American torture practices in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

On an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" released Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg painted a picture of Biden administration officials berating Facebook staff during requests to remove certain content from the social media platform. "Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse," Zuckerberg told ... Joe Rogan. "It just got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not gonna, we're not gonna take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.'" In a letter last year to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House "repeatedly pressured" Facebook to remove "certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire." Zuckerberg said Facebook, which is owned by Meta, acquiesced at times, while suggesting that different decisions would be made going forward. On Rogan's show, Zuckerberg said the administration had asked Facebook to remove from its platform a meme that showed actor Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV screen advertising a class action lawsuit for people who once took the Covid vaccine."They're like, 'No, you have to take that down,'" Zuckerberg said, adding, "We said, 'No, we're not gonna. We're not gonna take down things that are, that are true.'" Zuckerberg ... also announced that his platforms – Facebook and Instagram – would relax rules related to political content.

Note: Read a former senior NPR editor's nuanced take on how challenging official narratives became so politicized that "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that should have been guiding our work." Opportunities for award winning journalism were lost on controversial issues like COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.

The Environmental Protection Agency said last week that it needed more time to study the health impacts of paraquat, a powerful herbicide that has drawn scrutiny for its possible links to Parkinson's disease, a move that would allow it to remain on the market. Several advocacy groups had sued the EPA over an interim registration decision it issued in 2021 ... on the grounds that it was not protective enough. In a statement, the EPA said additional data was necessary to resolve uncertainty around the risks of inhaling the herbicide. For as long as David Jilbert could remember, he wanted to be a farmer. For five years, Jilbert personally mixed, loaded and sprayed paraquat to control weeds in his vineyard. Then he began having difficulty tying his shoes and buttoning his shirts. He started to walk with a slow, shuffling gait around the winery. He was soon diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a degenerative neurological disorder that affects motor functions and causes cognitive impairment, despite having no family history or genetic predisposition to the disease. He and his doctors blame paraquat. Jilbert is among the nearly 6,000 Americans who have filed lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron, which distributed paraquat products in the United States until 1986. The suits allege that the companies failed to warn consumers about paraquat's substantial health risks. Paraquat ... is among the most widely used pesticides in the United States.

Note: Read our latest Substack article on how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporate cartels fueling America's health crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and toxic chemicals.

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S., this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations. The 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons ... has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power. [One] Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. The post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest. The violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. The government in Kiev [deployed] neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms. In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it.

Note: More than 1 million people on both sides have been either killed or injured. This article was written by Jeffrey Sachs, world-renowned economist and public policy analyst. This isn't about defending Russia, but highlighting how US foreign policy has exploited Ukraine for strategic interests–fueling ongoing conflict rather than promoting peace. Azov Battalian is a neo-nazi group tied to credible human rights violations, a group that the CIA directly supported with weapons and military training leading up to the 2014 Maidan coup.

Children on top of rubble… playing with ammunition casings. A close look reveals where they come from -- printed on the side: USA... DOD for the Department of Defence. Hala Rharrit was an American diplomat who ... worked on human rights and counterterrorism. Part of her job was to monitor Arab press and social media to document how America's role in the war was perceived in the Middle East. Daily reports Rharrit sent to senior leadership in Washington [contained] gruesome images: Hala Rharrit: "I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of ... mostly children. And that's the devastation. It's been overwhelmingly children ... I would show images of children that were starved to death. I was basically berated, 'Don't put that image in there. We don't wanna see it.'" Three months into the war ... she was told her reports were no longer needed. The U.S. has sent $18 billion in American military assistance to Israel since the war began, largely in the form of taxpayer-funded weapons. Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel's fixed-wing fleet - comes from America. Andrew Miller was the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs. He ... has since become the highest ranking Biden administration official to go public with his concerns about the U.S. role in the war. The State Department issued a report saying it is "reasonable to assess" that Israel may have used American weapons in violation of international law. Hala Rharrit: "Protests began erupting in the Arab world ... with people burning American flags. We worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world."

Note: A new study shows that death feels imminent for 96% of children in Gaza. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Pentagon's top research arm, wants to find out if red blood cells could be modified in novel ways to protect troops. The DARPA program, called the Red Blood Cell Factory, is looking for researchers to study the insertion of "biologically active components" or "cargoes" in red blood cells. The hope is that modified cells would enhance certain biological systems, "thus allowing recipients, such as warfighters, to operate more effectively in dangerous or extreme environments." Red blood cells could act like a truck, carrying "cargo" or special protections, to all parts of the body, since they already circulate oxygen everywhere, [said] Christopher Bettinger, a professor of biomedical engineering overseeing the program. "What if we could add in additional cargo ... inside of that disc," Bettinger said, referring to the shape of red blood cells, "that could then confer these interesting benefits?" The research could impact the way troops battle diseases that reproduce in red blood cells, such as malaria, Bettinger hypothesized. "Imagine an alternative world where we have a warfighter that has a red blood cell that's accessorized with a compound that can sort of defeat malaria," Bettinger said. In 2019, the Army released a report called "Cyborg Soldier 2050," which laid out a vision of the future where troops would benefit from neural and optical enhancements, though the report acknowledged ethical and legal concerns.

Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. Learn more about biotech dangers.

In a landmark verdict cheered by human rights defenders around the world, a federal jury in Virginia found a U.S. military contractor liable for the torture of three prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s. The jury ordered CACI Premier Technology to pay each of the three Iraqi plaintiffs $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages, for a total of $42 million. It is the first time that a civilian contractor has been found legally responsible for abusing Abu Ghraib detainees. The lawsuit against CACI–filed in 2008 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Suhail Al Shimari, Asa'ad Al Zuba'e, and Salah Al-Ejaili–alleged that company officials conspired with U.S. military personnel in subjecting the plaintiffs to torture and other crimes. Dozens of Abu Ghraib detainees died in U.S. custody, some of them as a result of being tortured to death. Abu Ghraib prisoners endured torture ranging from rape and being attacked with dogs to being forced to eat pork and renounce Islam. A separate U.S. Army report concluded that most Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent, with the Red Cross estimating that between 70-90% of inmates there were wrongfully detained. These include women who were held as bargaining chips to induce suspected militants to surrender. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the prison's commanding officer, was demoted. No other high-ranking military officer faced accountability for the abuse.

Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.

Last year, the US Commission on National Defense Strategy published its final report, creating intense buzz in Washington. "The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945," the report warned. To meet the challenge, "the US government needs to harness all elements of national power," starting with a 5% boost to the Pentagon budget, currently at $886 billion. Congress created the bipartisan commission as "an independent body." Yet some of the members of the commission are connected to think tanks and the defence contractors that fund them: from Boeing to General Electric, Northrop Grumman to Lockheed Martin. If taxpayers go along with the military buildup advocated by the report, these and other firms stand to profit handsomely. The Atlantic Council recently published its own nuclear report, which called for boosting funding for missile-defense technologies. The Atlantic Council has received at least $10 million from major Pentagon contractors that manufacture nuclear weapons and missile-defense systems. There are so many reports paid for by vested interests, commissions on which they sit, and governments getting their piece, it's hard to keep track. Consider Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official who founded the Center for New American Security and sits on its board. CNAS published a report in September titled "Integration for Innovation" as part of its "defense technology task force." Executives from RTX (which contributed at least $450,000 to CNAS), Lockheed Martin ($600,000), Palantir ($175,000), Leidos ($300,000), and Booz Allen ($250,000) all directly contributed as members of the task force, even as they benefit from every single proposal in it.

Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don't know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world. The 1985 aircraft carrier scandal continued this pattern of failure to keep track of valuable materiel. After a group of smugglers was caught stealing F-14 parts to sell to Iran, the Pentagon ran an audit on the spare parts stored on aircraft carriers. Auditors found the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts between 1984 and 1985. Not to worry! It turns out only about $7 million in parts had been stolen by the gunrunners, and the remaining $387 million were misidentified or misplaced. Perhaps the most infamous cases of waste occurred in Afghanistan, where the United States spent 20 years trying to prop up a friendly Afghan government only to have Taliban rebels sweep the capital in a lightning-quick August 2021 offensive. Although the U.S. military extracted all of its own gear, it left $7.12 billion of American-provided equipment with the doomed Afghan army; it soon fell into the Taliban's hands. Images of Taliban fighters riding around with captured vehicles became a symbol of American failure.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail. US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a "narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity". Hernández was until very recently a good chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a vital ally in the so-called "war on drugs" and flung money at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing leader came to power five years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d'Ă©tat against Manuel Zelaya. The fabricated pretext for the coup ... was that Zelaya was scheming to remain president of Honduras in violation of the constitutional one-term limit. Later this limit was quickly dispensed with in order to enable the continued reign of Hernández. Post-election protests triggered a characteristically lethal response from Honduran security forces, which didn't stop the US from continuing to fund those very same forces. The CIA's narco-operations have spanned the globe from Pakistan to Laos to Venezuela, while many an international narco-politician has – like Hernández – found at least fleeting favour with the US government.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.