A Pentagon internal think tank, whose leadership is under scrutiny due to its leader’s connections to a key figure in the Russia collusion investigation, could have its yearly budget slashed in half and be under tighter restrictions in next year’s military defense budget.
Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley announced Thursday he introduced an amendment last week to the National Defense Authorization Act that would reduce the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment’s annual budget from $20 million to $10 million.
Net assessments include top secret details of long-term American military capabilities, as well as those of adversaries. The ONA’s spending by its director, James Baker, was questioned in 2016 when Defense Department whistleblower Adam Lovinger pointed out that divergent projects not related to the annual net assessment were being funded through the ONA.
As a result, the money went toward politically connected ONA contractors such as FBI informant Stefan Halper.
Lovinger, appointed by former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, warned ONA leadership about the employment of Halper. And by Jan. 5, 2017, two weeks before President Trump took office, Flynn asked for the “sub sources” of Christopher Steele’s dossier, which alleged unseemly ties between the incoming commander in chief and Russia.
“Stefan Halper secretly recorded Trump campaign officials during Crossfire Hurricane. Halper also received over $1 million [in] taxpayer money from the Office of Net Assessment for several research projects,” Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said on the floor Wednesday. “But the inspector general found some problems with that contract. The Office of Net Assessment didn’t require Halper to submit evidence that he actually talked to the people he cited in his work which included Russian intelligence officers.”
He also noted that Halper did not give sufficient documentation that all of his work was done in compliance with the law and that the ONA did not maintain documentation to comply with federal contracting requirements, as well as Office of Management and Budget guidelines.
Halper was not the only ONA contractor under Baker’s direction that the inspector general found was not complying with federal law, Grassley stated.
Grassley’s amendment would also mandate the secretary of defense to create a comprehensive plan to ensure that the ONA performs an annual net assessment and complies at the same time with every dollar they receive from federal contracting requirements.
“This swamp needs to be drained,” he said. “This would take it back to the reason why [the ONA] was first created decades ago.”
According to Grassley, the amendment would also require the Department of Defense’s inspector general to study and report on the ONA’s contracting failures and determine if the net assessment could be done for less than $10 million. He noted his amendment includes a mandate for the Government Accountability Office to perform an audit of the effectiveness of the comprehensiveness plan.
“Right now, it’s pretty clear the Office of Net Assessment lacks leadership and discipline, and it’s also pretty clear it has wasted tens of millions of dollars over the years. Congress must take a stand,” he said.
