Northrop Grumman Corp. has hired a lobbying firm headed by two former U.S. senators to protect a lucrative military manufacturing project it won with Airbus for a new fleet of tanker planes.

By the time Donald Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary in 2006, even members of his own party thought he had overstayed his welcome after nearly six years heading the Defense Department and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At least three of the people accused of improperly accessing presidential candidates’ passport records worked for two companies that have long histories with the State Department and other government agencies.

Veteran politicians and former government staffers have been lobbying Washington for clients seeking tax cuts as part of the economic stimulus package.

During recent weeks, a coalition of hotel, financial services, energy companies and manufacturers pressed lawmakers to include in the package a reduction in the capital gains tax rate.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is weighing a request by a northwestern Indian tribe to hunt gray whales as part of its religious and cultural practices.

The last time the Makah tribe of Neah Bay, Wash., conducted a legal whale hunt was in 1999, and additional hunts have been held up since 2000 by lawsuits from environmental groups and government bureaucracy.

Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, two of the Pentagon’s largest military contractors, announced last week that they are teaming up to develop a new bomber for the Air Force.

The companies are likely to face Northrop Grumman as they compete for the program, which will cost tens of billions of dollars. The fleet of B-2 bombers, the most recent bomber program, cost the Pentagon at least $40 billion.

Donald Rumsfeld is back, promoting an idea that got him into hot water when he ran the Defense Department.

In his first major speech since departing the Bush administration in 2006, Rumsfeld pushed for a new propaganda agency to combat the anti-U.S. rhetoric emanating from Muslim countries and to burnish the American image abroad. He said the U.S. needs an agency bigger and better than the old United States Information Agency, the Cold War-era operation that was absorbed into the State Department.

The trial of Rep. William J. Jefferson, D-La., begins next month with the nine-term congressman and former chairman of the U.S. congressional caucus on African trade facing a 16-count indictment including fraud, bribery, racketeering and money laundering.

John Ashcroft was a controversial figure while he was U.S. attorney general. He held regular prayer meetings with his staff, ordered a semi-nude statue of Lady Justice at the Justice Department covered, and was a major proponent of the much-disputed Patriot Act.

Although he left the Bush administration nearly three years ago, controversy continues to stalk him as he builds a lobbying and consulting practice.

At issue is a federal contract worth potentially $52 million for the Ashcroft Group, a Washington-based company founded and led by Ashcroft. The contract was approved by Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, one of Ashcroft’s senior employees at the Justice Department.

When Congress gets back to business in the New Year, one of its priorities will be consideration of the Bush administration’s request for a massive arms sale - in the neighborhood of $20 billion - to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states.

Israel and Egypt also stand to gain billions more in U.S. weapons as part of the package Congress will review.

The proposed deal is controversial because of the Saudi component. Given the Saudi government’s questionable record on fighting terrorism and curtailing terrorism financing, its funding of extremist wahabbist mosques, its supply of foreign fighters into Iraq and a judicial system that recently ordered 200 lashes for a rape victim, some in Congress don’t believe the kingdom should be rewarded with top-of-the-line American weaponry.

Sue Payton, the senior acquisition official in the Air Force, is an unlikely military reformer. She has spent a career in the defense industry and recently completed a long stint under former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne swore her in 17 months ago as the service’s top weapons buyer, he said her charge was to infuse “integrity and transparency” into the acquisition process after a procurement scandal.

In her first address as one of the aerospace industry’s top spokespeople, Marion Blakey, a former senior Bush administration appointee, said U.S. aerospace companies had a banner year.

“With good news in nearly every sector, I am pleased to see the American aerospace industry’s strong international presences continuing to keep pace with our domestic successes,” said Blakey, the new chief of the Aerospace Industries Association, the country’s top lobbying organization for military and commercial aviation companies.

What do Reps. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., and Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., have in common?

All are senior members of congressional committees that oversee defense budgets and all are recent recipients of campaign contributions from competing manufacturing powerhouses vying for a military contract worth upwards of $100 billion.

The federal government is trying to reverse a recent judgment favoring a Department of Defense whistleblower who drew attention to overcharges on Lockheed Martin military contracts.

The chief of the Office of Personnel Management has asked the Merit Systems Protection Board to reverse its recent decision in favor of Ken Pedeleose, an industrial engineer with the Defense Contract Management Agency. Agency engineers and inspectors are the Pentagon’s front-line defense against contractor fraud.

The life of a whistleblower is hardly the glamorous stuff of Hollywood. Often it’s a life spent looking over one’s shoulder, hoping for small victories while withstanding reprisals.

What’s so unusual about the plight of Ken Pedeleose, an industrial engineer and whistleblower at the Defense Contract Management Agency, is that he scored a big victory last month from a federal mediation panel in a little-noticed ruling by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.