Is Northrop Grumman Influencing Local Legislation in Utah?
Curious legislation is afoot in Utah, and the bill lays out circumstances that resemble Inkstick’s last year. Plus: Northrop Grumman’s new local lobbyists and an appointee.
Hi,
If you’re reading Military-Industrial America, you’re probably the kind of person who’s pretty game for a deep dive into Northrop Grumman and its nuclear weapons and missile production in Utah. That said, heads up, our latest story dives into some minutiae and fine print to connect the dots to show what we think is a picture of how powerful defense contractors exert influence in the company town-like places where they have outsize economic power.
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The latest news is this: In February, Keith Grover, a Republican state senator in Utah, introduced a bill to modify a portion of the state’s public records law that deals with commercial and non-individual financial information in curious ways. The amendments to the Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA, would criminalize individuals should they “inadvertently” receive a “private, controlled, or protected” record and then “improperly” use it.
Why did we take note of this? The circumstances described in the bill closely resemble the situation Inkstick Media’s legal team in Utah faced last year, when a government employee’s court filing unintentionally disclosed to them an unredacted version of the state’s Economic Development Tax Increment Financing agreement to subsidize Northrop Grumman’s new intercontinental ballistic missile production (ICBM) in the state. Inkstick’s attorneys alerted the government to the error and sequestered and deleted the document.
Even though a government attorney told a judge that Inkstick’s legal team handled the inadvertent disclosure “appropriately,” Northrop Grumman’s lawyer still opposed my legal team being granted temporary access to the full document under a provision called “Attorney’s Eyes Only.” Here’s what he said in an August hearing:
“My client is very concerned about possession of this information by anyone — short of an ultimate court order — because… I'm not suggesting that counsel for Inkstick would improperly disclose it to the public or to its client, but even the existence of the document electronically or through notes or sitting in an office that where it could be inadvertently disclosed through a personnel issue, a procedural issue, a process issue, within and even on the computer systems — I don't have any clue what kinds of security measures, how robust they are, that Inkstick counsel’s firm employs. I can tell you that Northrop Grumman's systems are incredibly secure. And… without knowledge of what these other systems are, it perceives a big risk to its business of having this information exist someplace [that] it doesn't have control over.”
That Northrop Grumman has hired an attorney to fight us for two years now isn’t the only sign that the company, one of the top two nuclear weapons manufacturers worldwide, cares a lot about its micro-affairs in Utah.
In January, the defense contractor rehired a lobbyist in the state, according to financial disclosures posted to lobbyist.utah.gov. The lobbyist, Ginger Chinn, was formerly a managing director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity — i.e., the exact agency that Inkstick Media has two public records lawsuits against for documents on subsidies to Northrop Grumman.
And finally, Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, recently made an eyebrow-raising appointment to the State Records Committee (SRC), a body that hears public records disputes between the government and requesters. We at Inkstick appeared before it in 2023. Amid tumult at the SRC, Cox appointed a senior employee at Northrop Grumman in Magna to the committee, meaning that, if we or other local watchdogs probing the state’s largest defense contractor end up at the SRC again, the engineer’s presence could hamper our ability to be heard. An SRC administrator told me that members can recuse themselves from matters they have a conflict of interest in, but the committee has recently struggled to have quorum of five members — and a recusal could push that number down below five.
We detail more about these micro-local moves in our latest story. I hope it fleshes out a bit of what Eisenhower said in his farewell address warning of the rising power of the military-industrial complex: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.”
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Extra
I really enjoyed going on the Brigham Young Money podcast to discuss the Mormon Church’s investments in nuclear weapons contractors. The podcast’s creators have personal histories with the church and now report on a variety of church and Utah topics from a leftist perspective. I was curious to hear from the host how cultural changes in the LDS world, including the church’s increasing numbers of international converts, may affect the Utah-based faith’s politics.