Unpatriotic Behavior

Protesting government policy is not necessarily unpatriotic. It's part of our birthright as Americans. Leaking stories to the press about constitutionally questionable practices is not unpatriotic. It's part of our birthright as Americans.

What Harold Rogers, United States Congressman from Kentucky, did, is not patriotic. It is greedy and self-serving.

In Kentucky Hills, a Homeland Security Bonanza

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON, May 13 — The Department of Homeland Security has invested tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of labor over the last four years on a seemingly simple task: creating a tamperproof identification card for airport, rail and maritime workers.

Yet nearly two years past a planned deadline, production of the card, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, has yet to begin.

Instead, the road to delivering this critical antiterrorism tool has taken detours to locations, companies and groups often linked to Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who is the powerful chairman of the House subcommittee that controls the Homeland Security budget.

It is a route that has benefited Mr. Rogers, creating jobs in his home district and profits for companies that are donors to his political causes. The congressman has also taken 11 trips — including six to Hawaii — on the tab of an organization that until this week was to profit from a no-bid contract Mr. Rogers helped arrange. Work has even been set aside for a tiny start-up company in Kentucky that employs John Rogers, the congressman's son.

"Something stinks in Corbin," said Jay M. Meier, senior securities analyst at MJSK Equity Research in Minneapolis, which follows the identification card industry, referring to the Kentucky community of 8,000 that has perhaps benefited the most from Mr. Rogers's interventions. "And it is the sickest example of what is wrong with our homeland security agenda that I can find."

Representative Rogers, "whom The Lexington Herald-Leader last year called the Prince of Pork", was on a committee working on an ID card for all Transportation Workers (known as a TWIC) even before September 11. This need became paramount after 9/11. As work on the new ID card was progressing, Rogers "inserted language into appropriations bills that effectively pushed the government to use the same patented green card technology and to produce this new card in Corbin" [in his home district].

What's so bad about that? Wouldn't we expect Rob Simmons or Nancy Johnson to do the same. Well, maybe. Under ordinary circumstances.

Two former Homeland Security officials said they were confounded. They had already identified a more flexible and secure technology known as a smart card, which relies on tiny computer chips embedded into the identification card. Most other federal agencies were moving toward this approach rather than the technology used for the green card, in which data are recorded on a reflective optical stripe affixed to the card.

Rogers wasn't just doing this to bring jobs back to his district.

Starting in 2004, his staff repeatedly pressed the Transportation Security Administration to hire a nonprofit Virginia-based trade association, the American Association of Airport Executives, to help handle background checks that transportation workers had to undergo to get identification cards. The trade association had no connection to Corbin, but it had longstanding ties to Mr. Rogers.

Since 2000, it has paid for trips by Mr. Rogers and his wife worth more than $75,000, including the six visits to Hawaii, four to California and one to Ireland, financial disclosure records show. Last year alone, Mr. Rogers spent a total of two weeks traveling on the association's tab.

Mr. Rogers was one of many members of Congress to take these airport association financed trips, which coincided with industry conferences. But they earned him a ranking as seventh of the 535 members of Congress in terms of travel gifts accepted, in a tally examining the past five years by Political Money Line.

Rogers is getting more than free trips to Hawaii out of the deal.

Executives at LaserCard Systems, Maximus, Shenandoah Electronic Intelligence and a lobbying firm that represents BearingPoint have also since contributed at least $30,000, with their spouses, to Mr. Rogers's political causes, federal records show. All four companies either sold services through Homeland Security for work done at the identity card plant in Corbin or won contracts to test the identification card.

In all, about $100,000 in contributions have come to Mr. Rogers from parties with at least some ties to the identification card effort, records show.

Another business to whom Rogers has funneled contracts, Senture, has donated $12,000 to his campaign, and hired his son.

All of this has cost the government money, but more importantly, time. That there has been no serious transportation related incident in America since 9/11 is no thanks to Harold Rogers, elected by the people of kentucky, who would rather line his pockets than do what is best for America.