Pentagon Strategy Office Is Denounced as Politicized “Slush Fund”
Whistleblower was investigated for a family bar mitzvah in Israel
The Pentagon’s strategy office, the Office of Net Assessment, hasn’t produced a net assessment in 15 years and instead is wasting millions of dollars and breaking government rules by hiring politically connected and compromised government contractors.
And those who dare blow the whistle on that or other similar problems risk having their careers and reputations destroyed by “deep state” operatives.
Those are the two scandals at the heart of a new book, “The Insider Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within,” by Adam Lovinger, who worked for a dozen years at the Pentagon and the White House.
Elements of the story have become public, though without much notice, over the past few years. In February 7, 2022 remarks in the Senate, Senator Grassley, Republican of Iowa, declared, “The Office of Net Assessment is a failure.”
“It appears that the Office of Net Assessment gets to keep operating like a Pentagon slush fund for irrelevant and political research projects,” Grassley said. “Whatever they’re actually doing, it’s not in compliance with federal regulations, policy and law. This is a complete embarrassment and a slap in the face to the American taxpayer.”
Grassley called it “blatant waste, fraud, abuse and gross mismanagement.”
A January 25, 2022, audit of the office by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General found “lack of adequate contract administration and oversight” and $9.8 million worth of “inappropriately approving invoices for payment.”
When Lovinger got crosswise with some of his colleagues, at about the time he went to work at the Trump National Security Council as senior director for strategic assessments, he was subjected to a Kafkaesque series of investigations and ultimately stripped of his security clearance. Everything from his Costa Rican in-laws to a trip to Israel for a family member’s bar mitzvah became subject to investigative scrutiny.
“What those who joined the Trump administration would soon realize was that they were not in power. The Deep State held the real power in the U.S. national security, intelligence, and law enforcement federal bureaucracies,” Lovinger writes. “Trump administration officials, even very senior ones, who could not be coopted by the Deep State to do its bidding and insisted on holding those bureaucracies accountable for following U.S. law, would have their careers and reputations destroyed.”
“If a Deep State operative doesn’t get the investigative results he wants the first time, he simply conducts ‘do-over’ investigations until he does. Since almost no one on the receiving end of that has the financial resources to defend himself against a U.S. government investigatory juggernaut, Deep State operatives meet no meaningful resistance as they grind down and destroy whoever dares threaten to expose their incompetence, malfeasance, or criminality,” Lovinger writes.
Lovinger writes about how the press plays a role in the process of destroying careers. He writes about Bill Gertz, a reporter for the Washington Times, “Gertz’s niche was reporting leaks from within the Pentagon, which made it imperative that he kept those sources happy. When issues arose that threatened key Deep State interests, as in my case, he simply couldn’t afford to tell the truth. As he explained to a mutual acquaintance, ‘I am not a well-paid writer at the Atlantic. I live article to article.’ If he refused to do his sources’ bidding, they would stop leaking insider information, his sources would dry up, and he ‘would be finished.’”
I checked with Gertz directly, who responded, “This is utter nonsense and completely false. I never said what he claimed to anyone. I stand by my record of reporting for over 40 years.”
Lovinger writes that his own case has similarities to that of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish artillery officer who was falsely accused in a high-profile case that began in 1894.
This book has no shortage of sensational details. One Defense Department investigator, Steven Luke, is discovered dead in January 2019 in the trunk of his own car. The second-biggest contractor to the Office of Net Assessment turns out to be a company run by Chelsea Clinton’s best friend. Another Office of Net Assessment contractor was Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who figured somehow in the byzantine stories about Russia’s supposed influence in the 2016 election.
The volume ends on an optimistic note, with Lovinger describing what he calls “growing momentum in favor of accountability.”
“ A growing critical mass of informed citizens understands that the Deep State is not ‘Trump’s crazy talk,’ as its fellow travelers want Americans to believe, but a real, existential threat to liberal democracy,” Lovinger writes.
We tend here at the Editors to think that liberal democracy is more durable than the alarmists would have you believe. Yet anyone who personally has been through an ordeal such as Lovinger’s can be forgiven for harboring some doubts. At least Senator Grassley is robustly fulfilling his constitutional role. As is Encounter Books, the publisher of this volume. It is a cautionary tale for anyone considering entering government service in the area of national security, or for any citizens who are relying on that national security establishment to protect America robustly from real enemies rather than the imagined ones.
As Elon Musk searches for low hanging fruit to reduce Federal spending, he would do well to begin by abolishing altogether the unit that was once called the Office of Net Assessment. In it's glory days, the office was run by an extraordinary intellectual strategist Andrew Marshall, a man who commanded the respect of all the Secretaries of Defense during his long tenure. It did important, innovate defense analyses, remembered by many senior officials (I was one) who knew Andy and his small group, and by Secretaries of Defense who paid close attention to his often out-of-the-box thinking. It should have been abolished when Andy retired, but that is not how Washington works. It continued to receive millions of tax payer dollars as it descended into mediocrity, handing out contracts for studies no one read to politically favored contractors. It should be abolished and it's budget notched in DOGE's belt.