![\"Heather](\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Wilson-Heather-336x248.jpg\")
Heath Haussamen \/ NMPolitics.net<\/p>
Heather Wilson<\/p><\/div>\n
Wilson, a Republican who represented New Mexico in Congress from 1998 until 2009, faces potentially robust questioning on Thursday at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.<\/p>\n
In separate letters to McCain and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the committee, the public-interest nonprofit Project on Government Oversight [POGO] and a consortium of three ethics organizations from across the political spectrum \u2013\u00a0the National Legal and Policy Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Public Citizen\u00a0\u2013\u00a0encouraged the committee to question Wilson about her contracts with the weapons firms she\u2019ll help oversee if confirmed.<\/p>\n
Both letters cited a series of reports published in February by the Center for Public Integrity as a basis for their questions about Wilson\u2019s nomination. The Center\u2019s reports were based on federal records, many obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that detail internal Department of Energy concerns about Wilson\u2019s refusal to report<\/a> in writing\u00a0to three nuclear weapons laboratories how she was spending her time in return for payments totaling $20,000 a month.<\/p>\n The documents obtained by the Center also detail Wilson\u2019s role in helping a subsidiary<\/a> of Lockheed Martin \u2013 the Sandia Corporation \u2013 try to win to win a new seven-year Energy Department contract worth more than $16 billion without the competition ordinarily called for by federal regulations. \u201cYour message to these people is that competition is not in the best interest of the government,\u201d she told Sandia officials in a July 2009 email.<\/p>\n Sandia Corp., the Lockheed Martin subsidiary in Albuquerque that operates Sandia National Laboratories, where nuclear weapons are engineered, wound up billing the federal government for the $226,378 in fees that it paid to Wilson. But after an investigation by the Justice Department, it agreed in August 2015 to repay what it spent on Wilson and also give the government $4.7 million to settle<\/a> the department\u2019s claims that it had violated federal law by using federal funds to lobby for more federal money.<\/p>\n