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“Are nuclear weapons contractors’ millions in campaign contributions buying favors?

on June 12th, 2012 at 8:00 am

By R. Jeffrey Smith — Center for Public Integrity

Employees of private companies that produce the main pieces of the U.S. nuclear arsenal have invested more than $18 million in the election campaigns of lawmakers that oversee related federal spending, and the companies also employ more than 95 former members of Congress or Capitol Hill staff to lobby for government funding, according to a new report.


Contri­bu­tions by top 10 nuclear weapons contractors to key members of Congress
Company Tech­nologies Developed 2012 Total
Lockheed Martin bombers and warhead components $535,000 $2,764,949
Honeywell Inter­na­tional warhead compo­nents $464,582 $2,199,431
Northrop Grumman bombers and warhead components $464,000 $2,568,748
Boeing Co bombers $336,750 $2,272,551
General Dynamics submarines $293,850 $2,183,461
General Electric bomber engines $231,450 $2,097,720
United Tech­nologies bomber engines $158,000 $1,065,350
Fluor Corp warhead compo­nents $103,150 $652,149
Bechtel Group submarines and warhead components $98,500 $769,550
Babcock & Wilcox warhead compo­nents $92,000 $449,749

Total contri­bu­tions” is the total given to current members of the key committees over their political careers.

Source: The Center for Inter­na­tional Policy


Employees of private companies that produce the main pieces of the U.S. nuclear arsenal have invested more than $18 million in the election campaigns of lawmakers that oversee related federal spending, and the companies also employ more than 95 former members of Congress or Capitol Hill staff to lobby for government funding, according to a new report.

The Center for Inter­na­tional Policy, a nonprofit group that supports the “demil­i­ta­rization” of U.S. foreign policy, released the report on Wednesday to high­light what it described as the heavy influence of campaign dona­tions and pork barrel politics on a part of the defense budget not usually asso­ciated with large profits or contractor power: nuclear arms.

As Congress delib­erated this spring on nuclear weapons-related projects, including funding for the devel­opment of more modern submarines and bombers, the top 14 contractors gave nearly $3 million to the 2012 reelection campaigns of lawmakers whose support they needed for these and other projects, the report disclosed.

Half of that sum went to members of the six key committees or subcom­mittees that must approve all spending for nuclear arms — the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the Energy and Water or Defense appro­pri­a­tions subcom­mittees, according to data the Center compiled from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. The rest went to lawmakers who are active on nuclear weapons issues because they have related factories or labo­ra­tories in their states or districts.

Members of the House Armed Services Committee this year have sought to erect legislative road­blocks to further reduc­tions in nuclear arms, and also demanded more spending for related facilities than the Obama admin­is­tration sought, including $100 million in unre­quested funds for a new plant that will make plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, and $374 million for a new ballistic missile-firing submarine. The House has approved those requests, but the Senate has not held a similar vote on the 2013 defense bill.

Although lawmakers say their votes are not influ­enced by the campaign dona­tions they receive, and donors routinely say their contri­bu­tions are meant to ensure access — not buy votes, the Center’s report said that the $18 million given by the contractors to key lawmakers over the course of their political careers makes it hard for the recip­ients to ignore what the companies want.

Any effort to downsize the nation’s nuclear force is likely to be met with fierce oppo­sition from the indi­viduals and insti­tu­tions that benefit from the nuclear status quo, including corpo­ra­tions involved in designing and building nuclear delivery vehicles; companies that operate nuclear warhead-related facil­ities; and members of Congress with nuclear weapons-related facil­ities or deploy­ments,” said the report by William Hartung, who directs the Center for Inter­na­tional Policy’s Arms and Security Project.

Other groups have docu­mented that there is a substantial financial stake in nuclear weapons poli­cy­making: At present, the U.S. government spends roughly $31 billion a year on its arsenal, according to a tally released on Tuesday by the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research and policy analysis group in Wash­ington. It has also proposed to spend at least $120 billion on new warhead-carrying submarines, bombers, and missiles over the next several decades.

Ensuring steady access to such funding is vital for some of the companies whose employees made large campaign dona­tions cited in the study — such as Lockheed or Northrop Grumman — because they draw at least 80 percent of their revenue from federal contracts. Of the 137 lobbyists hired by the top contractors, 57 are former members of Congress, 39 are former congres­sional staff, 16 are former defense offi­cials and 8 are former Energy Department offi­cials, the study said.

Although many firms work on multiple weapons and so have various reasons to curry congres­sional favor, some of the best-financed lawmakers are prominent advo­cates of sustaining and modern­izing the nuclear arsenal, according to the study. They have promoted that cause through formal legislative caucuses that promote ship­building, submarines, and long-range strategic bombers, as well as an informal alliance of members from states where nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles are based, the report states.

These include the Ship­building Caucus, the Submarine Caucus, and the Long-Range Strike Caucus. The contractor-supported coun­ter­parts of these groups include the Submarine Indus­trial Base Council, which claims a membership of 5,000 companies; the 60,000-member Navy League; and the 100,000-member Air Force Association.

Of the top twenty Senate recip­ients of nuclear weapons contractor dona­tions, seven are presently members of the members of the Armed Services subcom­mittee on strategic forces. They have collected a total of $272,816 for their 2012 campaigns, and a total of $2.4 million since their first election. On the House side, six of the top twenty recip­ients are members of the Armed Services strategic forces subcom­mittee. They have collected $558,532 for their 2012 campaigns, and $2.2 million overall.

The top single Senate recipient is Diane Fein­stein (D-Cal.), who chairs the Intel­li­gence Committee and the appro­pri­a­tions subcom­mittee that handles the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons budget; she collected $74,500 in this election cycle and $421,747 over her 20-year career, according to the report. Those figures represent only one percent of her total campaign receipts, for the current cycle and over her career.

Feinstein’s spokesman Brian Weiss did not respond to a request for comment. The report noted that she has ques­tioned the high cost of several new facil­ities that the Energy Department sought to build for warhead production or processing.

House Armed Services Committee chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Cal.) is the top House recipient of funding from nuclear weapons contractors, collecting $257,750 so far in this election cycle and $809,150 over his 19-year congres­sional career.The funds represent nearly a fifth of all the campaign dona­tions he has collected in this cycle, and the lifetime tally is nine percent of his lifetime campaign funding, according to data on the Center for Responsive Politics website.

McKeon’s spokesman Alissa McCurley told the Center for Public Integrity in April that “funding from special interests does not always mean some­thing unethical is afoot. Chairman McKeon receives input from senior military leaders as part of routine Congres­sional over­sight. Those views, along with those of Committee profes­sional staff members, are what sets his annual prior­ities” on arms control and nuclear arms.

Capitol Hill records make clear that McKeon’s support for industry posi­tions nonetheless increased as he became a more senior committee member and its dona­tions to him spiked. Defense firms of various cate­gories donated between seven and thirty-two times more to McKeon after he became chairman than they did beforehand, according to a November 2011 study of key House committee chairman by Citizens for Respon­si­bility and Ethics in Wash­ington (CREW), a nonprofit group.

The CREW study further found that from 2007–2008, McKeon’s votes were aligned with defense firms about a quarter of the time, but “since January 2011, Rep. McKeon has voted on average 100 percent in agreement with the indus­tries regu­lated by the Armed Services Committee.” That alignment was higher than the average for House Repub­licans. McCurley did not respond to an e-mail and phone call requesting comment.

Defense industry funding of the committee’s senior Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) simi­larly rose substan­tially when he moved to that position in 2010. But Smith’s voting support for industry-backed policies has fluc­tuated, going from 75 percent in 2007–2008 to 33 percent from 2009–2010 and then returning to 75 percent since Jan. 2011, according to the CREW study.

Some of the top campaign recip­ients have parochial reasons for supporting nuclear weapons contractors: Smith’s district includes a substantial Boeing presence while McKeon’s district includes Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed factories, as well as a major Air Force base. Fein­stein has a substantial portion of the aero­space industry in her state as well as one of the three labo­ra­tories where nuclear weapons are designed.

But CREW said the sudden influx of contri­bu­tions given to key members once they became chairman or second-in-rank raised overall ques­tions “about how beholden [they] are to the indus­tries they oversee, and whether they are inde­pendent enough to put public interest ahead of special interest.”


Data Editor David Donald contributed to this article.

Center for Public Integrity

The Center for Public Integrity was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis. We are one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpar­tisan, nonprofit inves­tigative news orga­ni­za­tions. Our mission: to reveal abuses of power, corruption and dere­liction of duty by powerful public and private insti­tu­tions in order to cause them to operate with honesty, integrity, account­ability and to put the public interest first.

iWatch News is the Center’s online publi­cation dedi­cated to inves­tigative and account­ability reporting. It provides original and exclusive daily stories as well as in-depth investigations.

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(Quelle: GalesburgPlanet.com)


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