Defense contractor uses tax dollars to lobby for more tax dollars


If only they were as careful with our money as they are with their own: Defense contractor Lockheed Martin sought an extension of its lucrative federal contract managing the Sandia National Laboratories, and it lobbied for the renewal using money originally paid to do research at Sandia.
This sort of double dipping is illegal under federal lobbying law, and the Energy Department's inspector general labeled the contractor's actions "highly problematic" and "impermissible."
Nevertheless, Lockheed got the renewed Sandia contract for $7.7 billion over two years.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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