Grassley Digs into Waste, Fraud and Abuse at DOD’s Office of Net Assessment

Grassley Digs into Waste, Fraud and Abuse at DOD's Office of Net Assessment

WASHINGTON - Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is calling on the Department of Defense (DOD) to eliminate egregious waste, fraud and abuse at the Office of Net Assessment (ONA). In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Grassley pressed DOD to determine how many formal net assessments ONA has completed since 2007 and whether its purpose is still necessary in light of its consistently wayward performance.

"Since 2019, I've engaged in oversight of the Office of Net Assessment within the Department of Defense, requesting information and documents related to Professor Stefan Halper's contracting work and ONA's contracting practices more broadly. To date, ONA has failed to provide full and complete responses to my inquiries," Grassley wrote.

ONA is tasked with researching and comparing trends in military capabilities to identify future threats and opportunities. However, Grassley's oversight has shown it has breached contracting rules and inappropriately spent millions of taxpayer dollars on projects unrelated to a net assessment.

In his letter today, Grassley requested all ONA-produced net assessments since 2007 and the date when ONA plans to conduct its next assessment. Grassley also requested a full list of contracts issued over the last 10 years, including the total cost of each contract to the taxpayer in unclassified form after ONA previously improperly classified the information to hide it from public scrutiny.

"I remain concerned that ONA is not performing its mission for the taxpayer and has engaged in financial waste. Moreover, ONA's improper classification of taxpayer funded work product must come to an end," Grassley continued.

Grassley has scrutinized ONA's contracting practices since 2019, with a particular focus on contracts awarded to Stefan Halper. Halper was a confidential human source tasked by the Obama and Biden administrations' FBI to surreptitiously record members of President Trump's 2016 election campaign during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Text of Grassley's letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth follows:

February 7, 2025

VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION

The Honorable Pete Hegseth

Secretary

Department of Defense

Dear Secretary Hegseth:

Since 2019, I've engaged in oversight of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) requesting information and documents related to Professor Stefan Halper's contracting work and ONA's contracting practices more broadly.^[1] To date, ONA has failed to provide full and complete responses to my inquiries.^[2]

As part of my oversight, in January 2020, I requested that ONA "provide a list of all contracts issued for each year over the last five years, the title of each funded project, and the total cost of each contract to the taxpayer."^[3] I also asked that ONA specify which of these projects were considered classified research.^[4] On February 5, 2020, ONA produced a list of contracted work, but classified all of it.^[5] On June 18, 2020, I wrote again to ONA noting that the list was improperly classified and only served to hide information that the taxpayers ought to know about.^[6] Accordingly, I requested that the entire list of contracts and funded projects be declassified and provided to my office.^[7] In response, on July 1, 2020, ONA stated that "it remains [Director Baker's] judgement that the previous classified enclosure should remain classified."^[8] Such a position is indefensible and is designed to prevent embarrassment, which my oversight has previously highlighted.

For example, in my June 18, 2020, letter, I noted a paper entitled, "On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People: Workshop Report," which was authored by the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG).^[9] The workshop paper highlighted the "level of American belligerency . . . [which is] the result of the persistence of Scotch-Irish culture in America, with its emphasis on violent responses to challenge[.]"^[10] It further stated that "[t]he role of Scotch-Irish culture must also be understood as having been reinforced by slaveholding, and American Protestant religious beliefs," and that the Scotch-Irish culture was "shaped by endemic warfare that placed high value on violent and immediate personal responses to challenges and high loyalty to clan and kin."^[11] The paper continued by stating that the Scotch-Irish culture placed value "on violent immediate responses to challenges [which] shaped [their] views, and thus of the United States as a whole, toward war."^[12] Additionally, in my June 2020 letter, I also raised concerns that ONA spent taxpayer dollars on a paper titled, "A Technical Report on the Nature of Movement Patterning, the Brain and Decision-Making," which focused largely on Vladimir Putin's neurological development and potential Asperger's diagnosis.^[13] These have nothing to do with ONA's core mission, which is to produce a net assessment that measures our military capabilities against our foreign adversaries.

My oversight work has shown that ONA has lost its way. In June 2020, I introduced legislation that required ONA to perform the work it was created to do-complete a net assessment, which at that time hadn't been done since 2007.^[14] That legislation included a provision requiring the DoD Inspector General (IG) perform a comprehensive review to determine ONA's failure to comply with government contracting laws and regulations for research projects.^[15]

I remain concerned that ONA is not performing its mission for the taxpayer and has engaged in financial waste. Moreover, ONA's improper classification of taxpayer funded work product must come to an end. So that Congress can conduct independent oversight of ONA and determine how it has used taxpayer dollars to comply with its mission, please provide answers to the following questions by February 21, 2025:

1. From 2007 to 2025, provide all ONA produced net assessments.
2. When does ONA plan to conduct its next net assessment? Provide all records.^[16]

1. Provide a list of all contracts issued for each year over the last ten years, the title of each funded project to the extent applicable, the recipient of taxpayer money, and the total cost of each contract to the taxpayer. Produce that information to me in unclassified form.

Thank you for your prompt review and responses. If you have any questions, please contact Tucker Akin on my Committee staff at (202) 224-7708.

• Print
• Email
• Like
• Tweet