History
While working for the National Taxpayers Legal Fund, Dina Rasor led its investigation into the C-5A transport aircraft. In February 1981 Rasor started "Project on Military Procurement", as an arm of the Fund. The organization was intended as a watchdog group to perform oversight of the military. Early interests included the M1 Abrams tank. The Project first gained wide attention in the mid-1980s uncovering Pentagon waste and fraud by publishing reports, provided by whistleblowers, exposing $640 toilet seats, $7,600 coffee makers, $436 hammers and other overpriced spare parts used by the military. The group was renamed Project on Government Oversight in the late 1990s.
POGO currently has a staff of around 25 people, including investigators, journalists, and administrative and communications personnel, and is located in downtown Washington, D.C. It is funded through grants from foundations, as well as private donations. In order to maintain its independence, POGO does not accept government grants.
Read more about this topic: Project On Government Oversight
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)