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For Immediate Release
October, 20 2008, 01:58pm EDT
Contact:
Danielle Brian (202) 347-1122
POGO Provides Presidential Transition Teams Reform Priorities
WASHINGTON
Today the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is announcing the release of POGO's government reform priorities for the next administration. POGO has sent these to the transition teams for both presidential candidates. It believes these reforms will make the federal government more effective, accountable, open, and honest.
POGO's advice includes making agency missions more modern and relevant, protecting inherently governmental functions, improving whistleblower protections, halting the revolving door between the government and the private sector, increasing government transparency, and implementing multiple measures to improve and strengthen contract oversight.
"POGO has worked for 27 years towards building a more accountable federal government," said POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian. "Our experience provides us with unique expertise to identify the major systemic problems the next administration faces and the changes necessary to solve them."
In addition to creating a more responsible government, POGO believes implementing the reforms outlined can also result in significant savings for taxpayers.
"While it is always a goal to have the best possible government at the lowest feasible cost, it is even more imperative given the financial crisis our country faces that the next President more effectively use government resources," said Brian. "POGO believes our recommendations will make significant strides towards shrinking the cost of government operations, while at the same time making them work better."
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is an independent nonprofit that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more effective, accountable, open and honest federal government.
LATEST NEWS
Cold Weather Kills Baby in Flooded Gaza Tent as UN Warns of Crisis for Mothers and Children
"The pattern is clear—malnourished mothers, giving birth to underweight or premature babies, who die in Gaza's neonatal intensive care units or survive, only to face malnutrition themselves," said a UNICEF spokesperson.
Dec 11, 2025
Over two years into Israel's genocidal assault on and blockade of the Gaza Strip, the death toll continued to rise on Thursday, with local health officials and relatives confirming that 8-month-old Rahaf Abu Jazar died of exposure after floodwaters hit her family's tent in Khan Younis.
Her death came as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Human Rights Office in the occupied Palestinian territory continued to sound the alarm about conditions for mothers and children, including infants like Abu Jazar.
As CNN reported Thursday:
Weeping and caressing the lifeless Rahaf in her arms, the baby's mother, Hejar Abu Jazar, kept ululating in despair. She said she had fed her daughter the previous night.
"She was completely fine. I breastfed her last night. Then all of a sudden, I found her freezing and shivering. She was healthy, my sweetheart," she cried.
"When we woke up, we found the rain over her and the wind on her, and the girl died of cold suddenly," the mother told Reuters. "There was nothing wrong with her. Oh, the fire in my heart, the fire in my heart, oh my life."
Citing municipal and civil defense officials, the news agency also noted that the storm flooded most tent encampments across Gaza, leading to thousands of calls for help that largely went unanswered due to fuel shortages and damage to equipment such as bulldozers tied to Israel's blockade and bombardment of the exclave since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
After more than two years of war, Hamas and Israel struck a ceasefire deal this past October, though hundreds of alleged Israeli violations have resulted in at least 383 Palestinian deaths and 1,002 injuries. As of Thursday, the Gaza Ministry of Health put the totals at 70,373 dead and 171,079 injured, though with thousands missing, those are likely undercounts.
In addition to killing over 70,000 Palestinians, Israel "has also damaged or destroyed 94% of Gaza's hospitals, largely denying women access to essential healthcare, including reproductive healthcare," the UN Human Rights Office noted in a Thursday statement. "The Israeli blockade has also prevented the entry of objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, including medical supplies and nutrients required to sustain pregnancies and ensure safe childbirth."
"As a result, women were three times more likely to die from childbirth and three times more likely to miscarry in Gaza by October 2024 compared to before October 7, 2023," the office said. "Newborn deaths have increased, including at least 21 babies who died on their first day of life as of June 30, 2025. And births have dropped by a staggering 41% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2022."
Dr. Ambereen Sleemi, an American gynecologist, told the UN office about her experience volunteering in July at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest medical facility in southern Gaza.
"As we did our rounds, bombs were going off in the background. One time, a nurse was shot in the head through the window in Nasser," she said. "Sometimes quadcopters would come in and try to shoot nurses or literally chase them through the hospital corridors."
"I cared for pregnant women who had been shot in various locations, including the abdomen," the doctor continued. "Many women were simply too injured to survive. If their injuries did not claim their lives, then sepsis often did, as there were not enough medical supplies or antibiotics to treat the preventable infections that followed."
"Almost every pregnant woman I treated who had other children said she had already lost a child in the war," Sleemi added. "The collective pain and sorrow were overwhelming and ever-present."
Some of them have died of hunger. While speaking with reporters at UN headquarters in Geneva earlier this week, Tess Ingram, UNICEF communication manager, highlighted how the hunger crisis in Gaza is impacting mothers and young kids.
"At least 165 children are reported to have died painful, preventable deaths related to malnutrition during the war," Ingram said. "But far less reported has been the scale of malnutrition among pregnant and breastfeeding women, and the devastating domino effect that has had on thousands of newborns."
"The pattern is clear—malnourished mothers, giving birth to underweight or premature babies, who die in Gaza's neonatal intensive care units or survive, only to face malnutrition themselves or potential lifelong medical complications," she continued, recalling some of the newborns she saw in the strip's hospitals, "their tiny chests heaving with the effort of staying alive."
Ingram stressed that "low birth weight infants are about 20 times more likely to die than infants of normal weight. They need special care, which many of the hospitals in Gaza have struggled to provide due to the destruction of the health system, the death and displacement of staff, and impediments by Israeli authorities that prevented some essential medical supplies from entering the strip."
She also shared the story of meeting a mother at a neonatal intensive care unit in Gaza City two weeks ago. The woman, Fatma, was there to see her baby, Mohammed, who was born premature and weighed only 3.3 pounds.
According to Ingram:
Fatma told me that unlike her first pregnancy, when she had access to antenatal checkups, vitamins, and nutritious food, "this pregnancy has been full of displacement, lack of food, malnutrition, war, and fear." She said she was malnourished for three months of the pregnancy, displaced three times, and her young daughter and husband were killed, two months apart, by airstrikes.
I have spent many months in Gaza over the past two years, and I see and hear the generational impacts of the conflict on mothers and their infants almost every day; in hospitals, nutrition clinics, and family tents. It is less visible than blood or injury, but it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere.
I have lost count of the number of parents like Fatma who have sobbed while telling me what happened to them, wrecked by how powerless they are to protect their children in the face of indiscriminate destruction and deprivation. Generations of families, including those born into the ceasefire, have been forever altered by what was inflicted upon them.
"And the fear must end," she declared. "This ceasefire should offer families safety, not more loss. More than 70 children have been killed in the eight weeks since the ceasefire began. The ongoing attacks and the killing of children must stop immediately."
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Trump's Indiana Redistricting Scheme Crashes and Burns in Overwhelming Defeat
The vote came after an emotional debate in which some Republican lawmakers detailed threats and harassment they'd received for opposing the president's redistricting scheme.
Dec 11, 2025
President Donald Trump's push to get Indiana Republicans to redraw their congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections went down in overwhelming defeat in the Indiana state Senate on Thursday.
As reported by Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman, the proposal to support a mid-decade gerrymander in Indiana was rejected by a vote of 19 in favor to 31 opposed, with 21 Republican state senators crossing the aisle to vote with all 10 Democrats to torpedo the measure, which would have changed the projected balance of Indiana's current congressional makeup from seven Republicans and two Democrats to a 9-0 map in favor of the GOP.
The Senate vote came after the state House's approval of the bill and an emotional debate in which some Indiana Republicans opposed to the president's plan detailed violent threats they'd received from his supporters.
According to a report published in the Atlantic on Thursday, Republican Indiana state Sen. Greg Walker (41) this week detailed having heavily armed police come to his home as the result of a false emergency call, a practice commonly known as swatting.
Walker said that he refused to be intimated by such tactics, and added that "I fear for all states if we allow threats and intimidation to become the norm."
Indiana's rejection of the effort is a major blow to Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting crusade, which began in Texas and subsequently spread to Missouri and North Carolina.
Christina Harvey, executive director for Stand Up America, said that the Indiana state Senate's rejection of the Trump plan was an "important victory for democracy."
"For weeks, Indiana residents have been pleading with their state leaders to stop mid-decade redistricting and the Senate listened," Harvey said. “Despite threats to themselves and their families, a majority of Indiana senators were steadfast in rejecting this gerrymandered map."
John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, praised the Republicans who rejected the president's scheme despite enduring threats and harassment.
"Threats of violence are never acceptable, and no lawmakers should face violent threats for simply standing up for their constituents," Bisognano said. "Republicans in other states who are facing a similar choice—whether to listen to their constituents or follow orders from Washington—should follow Indiana’s lead in rejecting this charade and finally put an end to the national gerrymandering crisis."
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Senators Demand Trump Admin Come Clean on Plan to 'Quietly Kill' Social Security Offices
The lawmakers accused the Social Security Administration of "a slash-first, think-later approach," for which "beneficiaries will pay the price."
Dec 11, 2025
Leading Senate Democrats and Independent US Sen. Bernie Sanders this week pressed the Trump administration for answers following reports that the Social Security Administration is planning to dramatically reduce visits to its field offices.
"We write with concerns regarding recent reports that the Social Security Administration is reorganizing its field office operations, and has established a goal of cutting the number of field office visits in half—amounting to 15 million fewer visits annually," Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a letter to SSA Administrator Frank Bisignano.
"Given that beneficiaries are already waiting months for field office appointments, and the agency has not shared with Congress or the public on how it plans to achieve this goal, we are concerned that these efforts are in fact part of a plan to 'quietly kill field offices,' implementing a backdoor cut in benefits by making it harder for Americans to access the Social Security customer services they need," the senators said.
"The Trump administration has relentlessly attacked Social Security."
Earlier this month, Nextgov/FCW revealed that the Social Security Administration said in internal documents that it wants “no more than 15 million total” in-person visits to its field offices in fiscal year 2026—or about half the current number of such visits. An anonymous SSA staffer told the outlet that senior agency officials are aiming for “fewer people in the front door" and for "all work that doesn’t require direct customer interactions to be centralized.”
As Warren's office noted Thursday:
The Trump administration has relentlessly attacked Social Security. Under Commissioner Bisignano, the administration has implemented policy changes that make it harder for Americans to get their benefits, including by implementing burdensome in-person and bug-prone identification processes that force millions more beneficiaries to visit field offices each year—at the same time they are slashing SSA’s workforce by around 7,000 and closing regional offices.
Instead of staffing up to meet these needs, SSA’s field office capacity has significantly declined. Beneficiaries are being forced to wait hours to get help—only to be told they will need to call to schedule an appointment.
"We are concerned that your plan is to force beneficiaries onto SSA’s bug-prone website or push them into customer service phone tree 'doom-loops'—which will almost certainly result in delayed or missed benefits for some individuals," the letter adds. "Once again, you seem to have adopted a slash-first, think-later approach to 'modernizing' SSA, and beneficiaries will pay the price."
The senators are asking Bisignano if the reports of proposed SSA office visit reductions are accurate, and if so, how and when the plan will be implemented, how the agency will "provide services to beneficiaries that would otherwise go to field offices," and how the reductions will affect already lengthy wait times and service online users and callers to the agency's 1-800 number.
The lawmakers' letter comes as Republican senators on Thursday voted down a proposed three-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, a move that is expected to result, on average, in a doubling of health insurance premiums for around 22 million people. Critics said the vote underscores the need for single-payer healthcare legislation like the Medicare for All Act reintroduced by Sanders and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) earlier this year.
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