The Republican Deficit Hypocrisy (South Carolina)

At the Republican debate last night in South Carolina, Republicans were happy to talk about, and denounce, the budget deficit and debt. Senator Marco Rubio said that we must “bring our debt under control.”

Mr. Rubio, like other G.O.P. candidates, rails against the deficit as a sign of President Obama’s moral failure. He advocates a balanced-budget amendment.

As a recovering Republican who retired in 2011 after serving on the House and Senate Budget Committees, I have concluded that this ritual denunciation of deficits and out-of-control spending is a fraud. Not only does the party not care about the deficit, but its practice since 1981 has been to worsen it.

We should pay particularly close attention to the Republican budget proposals from the presidential candidates in 2016. If a Republican is elected president, the party will almost surely have maintained control of Congress and, therefore, control the federal budget.

Marco Rubio during the Republican presidential debate in North Charleston,

On the tax side, Mr. Rubio slashes rates on personal and corporate income, and gives bigger breaks to wealthier Americans.

It doesn’t end there. Other candidates would reduce rates on capital gains and dividends, but Mr. Rubio would eliminate those taxes. He almost went out of his way to concoct a policy that would benefit the richest Americans: 79 percent of current revenue from these two taxes comes from the top 1 percent of earners, and less than 10 percent from the bottom 95 percent.

He would also end the estate tax. Republicans invariably call this the “death tax,” insinuating that it hits everyone unfortunate enough to die. Not even close: Only about 5,400 estates in America owe federal estate tax for 2015. But getting rid of it would add about $300 billion to the deficit over 10 years.

Mr. Rubio’s policies would cause a tidal wave of red ink. A repeal of the capital gains tax would cost roughly $1 trillion over 10 years While there as yet is no estimate for the cost of dividend tax repeal, my best professional guess is a minimum of $250 billion.

His entire tax package would increase the deficit by at least $4 trillion. But even Ramesh Ponnuru, a right-leaning columnist who approves of the plan, admits its price tag could be as high as $6 trillion (the plan incorporates highly optimistic economic assumptions).

At the same time, Mr. Rubio piles on military spending. According to a Cato Institute analyst, his all-you-can-eat Pentagon budget could cost at least an extra $1 trillion over a decade. Based on my 28-year congressional career analyzing military budgets, I’d say that’s an underestimate. Among the many programs he wants, an additional carrier battle group, extra ground combat personnel (whose pay and benefits will be with us for decades), and missile defense could easily cost more than $1 trillion. For perspective, just one item, nuclear modernization, could alone cost $1 trillion.

When I began work on Capitol Hill in 1983, President Ronald Reagan adopted policies devised by his young budget director, David Stockman, who came up with a “magic asterisk” in his documents to show that future deficits could be imagined out of existence by additional unspecified budget reductions. This deception allowed the administration to push through steep tax cuts and vast military increases. Over President Reagan’s two terms, gross federal debt nearly tripled.

Republicans have been largely budgeting by magic asterisk ever since.

In 1990, when the deficit hit almost 4 percent of gross domestic product and Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, called for a package of spending reductions and tax increases, Newt Gingrich led most Republicans to oppose the measure. He became de facto minority leader.

After that, no Republican would dare suggest tax increases, regardless of his promise to balance the budget.

By 1998, when the budget was finally balanced, Republicans claimed credit because they controlled Congress. But the real reasons for the budgetary improvement were Mr. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s deficit reduction packages, which Republicans opposed, and the improved economy of the mid-1990s, refuting the Republican assertion that even the smallest tax increase would ruin the economy.

George W. Bush followed the example of Mr. Reagan rather than his father. I was dismayed that he proposed both tax cuts and military increases after taking office while squandering the opportunity to pay down the national debt, an idea that Republicans rhetorically supported during the 1990s. His policies turned a $236 billion budget surplus he inherited in 2000 into a $459 billion deficit in 2008, while in those same eight years doubling the national debt.

He left office discredited, but most Republicans have not changed. During my last year in the Senate, in 2010, the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission offered a balanced array of military and domestic cuts along with tax increases. While my boss, Judd Gregg (a rare and vanishing Republican fiscal hawk — he soon retired), voted for it, Republican deficit scolds like Representatives Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Jeb Hensarling of Texas voted against it, and the plan failed to secure the necessary supermajority.

Mr. Rubio’s current fiscal plan is only in the middle range among the 2016 Republican contenders’ budget-busting schemes: Jeb Bush’s would add about $3.7 trillion to the deficit; Donald J. Trump’s, an eye-watering $12 trillion. Yet they all rail against what they call Mr. Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

Their consistently sorry fiscal record and proposals raise the question: Why hasn’t the public caught on?

Republicans have been remarkably successful in delinking taxes from fiscal policy, “framing” taxes as a distasteful personal burden unconnected to widely desired public goods like roads, food-safety inspections or clean water. Instead, they claim that reducing taxes will spur so much investment the cuts will “pay for themselves.” Three decades of evidence have shown this claim to be false, but the candidates display ferocious discipline in pretending that tax cuts don’t harm the budget.

The party also benefits from public ignorance of the federal budget. When voters think foreign aid is the largest item in the budget (it is less than 1 percent), or that we can reach fiscal balance by cutting waste, fraud and abuse, they are deluding themselves.

Working for Republicans, I learned the hard way that expecting the party to restrain the deficit, let alone balance the budget, is, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “the triumph of hope over experience.”

Why Germany can't face the truth about migrant sex attacks: SUE REID finds a nation in denial as a wave of horrific attacks is reported across Europe

More than 120 women were targeted in Cologne on New Year's Eve
They were chased, cornered and groped; mobiles and wallets were stolen
‘The men were all foreigners, and when we protested, in German, they did not understand us,’ victim Michelle said
German ministers say 3,200 migrants a day continue to enter the country
See more of the latest news on Germany's migrant sex attacks

PUBLISHED: 23:07 GMT, 8 January 2016 | UPDATED: 15:26 GMT, 9 January 2016

Blog of Juan Pardo

The exquisite sound of Cologne’s cathedral choir drifted out into the cool night air of the city’s main square on Wednesday evening. A Holy mass, celebrating the visit of the Wise Men to Jesus's cribside, was packed with worshippers marking the 12th day of Christmas in this fiercely Christian part of Germany.

As the service ended and families poured out onto the pavement, an 18-year-old German girl called Michelle stood under bright arc lights nearby giving an interview to a television crew.

She and a group of friends had been sexually attacked in the same cathedral square by gangs of marauding men a few days before, on New Year’s Eve. The girls were chased, cornered and intimately groped before their mobiles and wallets were stolen.

‘The men were all foreigners, and when we protested, in German, they did not understand us,’ said Michelle during the interview.

Scroll down for video

Crowds of people gather outside Cologne Main Station in Cologne, Germany, on December 31. More than 120 women were attacked in Cologne on New Year's Eve

The men, speaking Arabic and seemingly either drunk or high on drugs, moved around in large groups among a gathering of around 1,000 male migrants and deliberately targeted women. The men easily outnumbered the 190 police officers on duty, who were quickly overwhelmed.

In other cities across Germany, including Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, where a tourist was sexually assaulted by five men right in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate, it was the same disturbing story.

Nearly 50 women in Hamburg complained to police about sexual harassment by ‘North African’ men, who called them ‘bitches’, shouted ‘Fikki, fikki’ to indicate they wanted to rape them, and ‘chased’ them ‘like cattle’ around the streets.

Michelle, one of the victims, described being surrounded by a group of 30 'angry' men

One victim there was a 19-year-old girl called Lotta, who’d gone out to celebrate in a chic dress and high heels with friends. While they were walking from one nightclub to another, they were surrounded by men of ‘foreign origin’ who separated the girls from each other.

‘I was suddenly alone,’ said Lotta. ‘Twenty to 30 men were standing round me … every time a hand went away from my body, the next one arrived. I felt helpless.’

Like her friends, the teenager was sexually assaulted, had her hair pulled and was finally thrown to the ground after the men had finished with her.

In Stuttgart, women complained of sexual attacks by ‘trouble-makers with an immigrant background’ and 15 other ‘Mediterranean men of Arabic appearance’.

When one group of young girls refused these men’s advances, their boyfriends were beaten up. One girl who fought off an attacker ended up in hospital with a broken nose and deep cuts to her face.

The attacks have sounded the alarm bell in Germany over the consequences of mass migration. A country dogged by guilt over its Nazi past, it has enjoyed its recent role as saviour of Europe, welcoming in foreigners from the war-divided Middle East and Africa’s poverty hotspots.

When the migrants began arriving in their thousands each day last summer, there were welcoming parties across the country. ‘We love refugees!’ proclaimed banners outside reception centres.

Yet that warm hospitality is now being replaced by fear, as a society renowned for its good order begins to buckle under the strain — and to worry if it has made a mistake.

Figures this week revealed that 1.1 million newcomers registered for asylum in Germany in 2015. Many more — including potential jihadists and opportunists pretending to be refugees — are suspected of slipping in under the radar since August, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel controversially announced she would welcome all Syrian migrants who knocked on the door. Mrs Merkel has since dramatically changed her tune, saying this week that she wanted to stem the flow of migrants into the European Union, while keeping all borders open.

Yet the influx into Europe since she made her grand gesture shows no sign of abating. German ministers say 3,200 migrants a day continue to enter the country.

Denmark began passport checks on its border this week, and border controls have also been imposed by other countries including Sweden and Hungary, threatening Mrs Merkel and the EU’s cherished Schengen agreement, allowing free movement between member states.

All this is raising questions from ordinary Germans, and this week provoked confessions from their political masters. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere admitted the New Year crimes against women by such large numbers of men from a migrant background were a ‘new departure’ for the country.

Mrs Merkel said: ‘Everything must be done to identify the guilty parties without regard to their background or origins. We must send clear signals to those who are not prepared to abide by our laws. Questions arise over whether some groups are subscribing to misogyny.’

Her words were clearly carefully chosen to avoid specifically linking migrants with these attacks against women. But the truth is the mass assaults have clear echoes of the sex crimes in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, during celebrations welcoming the so-called Arab Spring, when groups of men violently harassed women.

Lara Logan, a CBS reporter, was sexually assaulted by a mob in scenes reminiscent of those in Germany. Her clothes were torn off, and between 200 and 300 men took pictures of her naked body as her attackers ‘raped her with their hands’ over and over again.

Another deeply worrying aspect of the New Year horror in Cologne also emerged this week.

Many Germans, including some of the victims themselves, have accused authorities of a conspiracy of silence over the assaults to stop criticism of the mass immigration policy pursued by Mrs Merkel and her politically-correct supporters. The mainstream media in Germany has, until recently, toed the Government line; a top public broadcaster, ZDF, recently refused to run a segment about a rape case on its prime-time ‘crime-watch’ show because the ‘dark-skinned’ suspect was a migrant.

The programme’s editor defended her decision, saying: ‘We don’t want to inflame the situation and spread a bad mood. The migrants don’t deserve it.’

German police in Cologne's Cathedral Square, Germany, after hundreds of women were assaulted by gangs of men on New Years Eve . The Cologne police force has also been accused of deliberately hushing up the New Year scandal

Cracks only began to show just before New Year. Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, broke ranks by accusing officials of conducting a campaign of deception on a ‘massive scale’ by burying bad news on migration. It reported that drug gangs involved in organised crime were actively recruiting newly-arrived migrants from the vast temporary camps where they live.

The Cologne police force has also been accused of deliberately hushing up the New Year scandal. It issued an official press release the following day describing the celebrations as ‘exuberant, but mostly peaceful’. The release has since been retracted, and last night it emerged that police chief Wolfgang Albers is to resign.

Broadcaster ZDF had to apologise for a ‘cover up’ after it failed to report the Cologne story for three days, even though it knew about it.

The men had been in Germany for just two weeks

And until Thursday, a week after the attacks, there had been silence from Mrs Merkel’s ministers about the backgrounds of the perpetrators. Initially, they insisted there was no evidence that new migrants were involved in the violence.

A leaked police report which emerged 48 hours ago showed this was far from the truth. It revealed that one of the Cologne attackers said: ‘I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly: Mrs Merkel invited me.’

The report by a senior officer added: ‘When we arrived [at the square] our vehicles were pelted with firecrackers. On the cathedral steps were a thousand people, mainly of immigrant background, who were indiscriminately throwing fireworks and bottles into the crowd.

‘Women literally had to run the gauntlet through the mass of drunk men in a way you can’t describe ….many came to officers shocked and crying to report sex assaults. We were unable to respond to all the offences. There were just too many.’

Another unnamed officer told a Cologne newspaper that 14 of those questioned on the night were from Syria and one from Afghanistan.

‘That’s the truth, though it hurts to say it,’ he added. ‘They had definitely only been in Germany for a few days or weeks.’

By yesterday morning, police had arrested only two of the alleged sex attackers, who said they had immigrant backgrounds. Videos of the crowds, together with the howl of fireworks and the shrieks of women they assaulted, were found on their mobile phones.

Officers also found a note on one of the men containing Arabic to German translations for phrases including ‘nice breasts’, ‘I’ll kill you’ and ‘I want to have sex with you’.

Both have now been released due to lack of evidence.

Crowds of people gather in front of the main railway station in Cologne, western Germany, on New Year's Eve. Until Thursday, a week after the attacks, there had been silence from Mrs Merkel’s ministers about the backgrounds of the perpetrators

So far, 18 asylum seekers have also been detained out of 32 other men suspected of theft and violence but not sexual impropriety. The 32 include Algerians, Moroccans, Iranians, Syrians, an Iraqi Serb, an American and two Germans. The involvement by foreigners flies in the face of Germany’s PC lobby which has ruthlessly called critics of Merkel’s migration programme ‘Nazi’ or ‘racist’.

Take 59-year-old Akif Pirincci, an outspoken Right-winger and German writer of Turkish origin, who has warned that Christian Germany is becoming Islamic.

His books, one of which is called Germany Gone Mad, were best-sellers until last autumn, when big publishers and bookshops chose not to distribute them any more. It is the first time since the Nazi era that such censorship has occurred.

In another controversy, Catholic journalist Matthias Matussek lost his job at the respected German newspaper Die Welt after he posted his views on November’s massacre in Paris on his personal Facebook page, saying mildly: ‘I think that the terror in Paris will move our (German) debate about open borders and … young Muslim men in our country in an entirely new and fresh direction.’

Despite the censorship, unpalatable truths have still slipped out. Last month, the interior ministry in the large south-west state of Baden-Wurttemberg published figures on criminal offences committed by asylum seekers between January and November 2015.

They made alarming reading. Asylum seekers represent one per cent of the population of the state but were involved in five per cent (27,255) of all registered crimes, among them 1,000 cases of grievous bodily harm, 22 of attempted murder, and 700 of domestic burglary. The highest number of offenders were Syrians, committing 5,576 of the offences.

Andre Schulz, head of Germany’s criminal police association, said recently that in his experience 10 per cent of the migrants would turn to criminality, including theft, sexual assault or drug dealing.

‘The policy has been to leave the German population in the dark …ordinary citizens are being played for fools,’ he declared.

Meanwhile, an academic report this week claims that hundreds of thousands of young male migrants arriving in Europe will threaten the peace and stability of Germany and other Western nations. Out of those who came last year, 69 per cent were men, 18 per cent were children and just 13 per cent were women.

Dr Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M university, warns that the skewed sex ratio is a recipe for disaster: ‘Crimes such as rape and sexual harassment become more common in highly masculinised societies, and women’s ability to move about freely without fear within society is curtailed. In addition, demand for prostitution soars.’

This morning, police had arrested only two of the alleged sex attackers, who said they had immigrant backgrounds. Officers also found a note on one of the men containing Arabic to German translations for phrases including ‘nice breasts’, ‘I’ll kill you’ and ‘I want to have sex with you’

At Pocking, a well-kept Bavarian town, the headmaster of the grammar school wrote to parents last summer telling them not to let their daughters wear skimpy clothing. This was to avoid ‘misunderstandings’ with 200 migrants who were put up in the school’s gymnasium before being moved on to a proper camp in the autumn.

The letter said the migrants were ‘mainly Muslim, and speak Arabic. They have their own culture. Because our school is directly next to where they are staying, modest clothing should be worn ... revealing tops or blouses or miniskirts could lead to misunderstandings.’

Even charity workers have been horrified by the behaviour of some of the new guests.

Last autumn in Bonn, the Refugees Welcome organisation made an embarrassed online apology for incidents of sexual harassment at a party it helped organise to make migrants feel at home.

A letter also sent last year by prominent women’s groups to the Integration Minister in the state of Hesse, central Germany, where a huge camp housing 6,000 migrants has been set up in the town of Giessen, described a culture of rape and violence.

‘Women and children are unprotected here. This situation is opportune to those men who already regard women as their inferiors and treat unaccompanied women as “fair game”. There are numerous rapes, sexual assaults and forced prostitution.’

The worry is that same rape culture has now spilt out onto Germany’s streets

What is most concerning is that the Cologne attacks were carried out in a public square, with thousands of witnesses, by men who did not cover their faces, grinned at the police, and were clearly not worried about the repercussions.

This was not an organised gang: it was simply men looking for sex on New Year’s Eve who had gathered after contacting each other on their mobiles.

Even now, Cologne’s pro-migrant mayor, Henriette Reker, still appears to be in denial. At a Press conference, she contradicted police by saying that newly-arrived migrants had not been to blame.

She said that, to prevent future attacks, women should follow a new ‘code of conduct’ soon to be published online by the council. They should keep strangers ‘at arm’s length’, stick together in groups, and not get split up even if they were ‘in the party mood’.

One prominent local councillor and lawyer, Judith Wolter, admitted in an open letter to the people of Cologne that the cathedral square and adjoining areas has now become a no-go area — ‘especially for women. It must be assumed that there is a high security risk here in the evening and night hours’.

It is not just Germany. Other European countries with large numbers of male migrants also endured a spate of New Year sex attacks. Women in Switzerland and Austria were targeted. Yesterday, Vienna’s police chief, Gerhard Purstl, provoked outrage when he warned women not to go out alone at night.

Even now, Cologne’s pro-migrant mayor, Henriette Reker, still appears to be in denial. At a Press conference, she contradicted police by saying that newly-arrived migrants had not been to blame. She said that, to prevent future attacks, women should follow a new ‘code of conduct’ soon to be published online by the council

In Helsinki, Finland, which took in 32,479 asylum seekers last year (almost all men, two-thirds from Iraq), police said they had stopped incidents ‘similar to those that took place in Cologne’ by blocking 1,000 migrants from celebrations at the city’s Senate Square.

Extra security guards, hired by police for the night, said there was trouble when 2,000 other migrants caused ‘widespread sexual harassment’ in the square.

The police explained: ‘There hasn’t been this kind of harassment on previous New Year’s Eves. This is a completely new phenomenon.’

They added that sexual assaults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Finland before record numbers of asylum seekers arrived in 2015.

In the Swedish town of Kalmar, some 15 women aged between 17 and 19 said they’d been attacked on New Year’s Eve in the town square, as well as on a dance floor.

Anxious girls do not know if they dare go out

The country took in 160,000 migrants last year, mostly young men — the highest proportion compared with the population of any country in Europe.

As in Cologne, the men allegedly encircled their victims, before groping and assaulting them. When one victim told them to leave her alone, they did not understand because they could not speak English, said Police Commissioner Monica Oldin.

‘We are a bit worried that something is going to happen in the future,’ she added. ‘And, of course, the girls are anxious and do not know if they dare to go out’.

When I visited Cologne’s cathedral square this week, the Christmas tree was being taken down as police stood watching as women’s groups demonstrated over the attacks.

Germany is having to confront the harsh result of welcoming in huge numbers of men from a culture which denigrates women and abhors the social rules of a modern European society.

The European Commission estimates that three million more migrants — many of them ill-educated Muslim males who are illiterate even in their own Arab language — will arrive in the EU this year. The chances of successfully integrating them is next to nil.

Sebastian Coe: Report Alleges Possible Criminal Behavior by Top Track Officials

Sebastian Coe, president of the International Association of Athletics, in 2015.

Top officials running the sport of track and field have for years abused their positions and possibly engaged in criminal behavior, blackmailing athletes who doped and failing to discipline them in a timely fashion, according to a report released on Thursday by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

The 89-page report was the result of an investigation by a task force that spent the last year examining accusations of widespread doping and corruption. It raised questions about past leaders of the sport who were already under criminal investigation as well as the sport’s celebrated current leader, Sebastian Coe, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who was in charge of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Speaking at a news conference in Munich, Dick Pound, a lead author of the report, seemed to both implicate Mr. Coe, who was in the audience, while also defending him. “Giving an opinion as to whether he lied or not,” Mr. Pound said, assessing Mr. Coe’s knowledge of the extent of the corruption: “I’d say he didn’t lie.”

Lamine Diack, left, the I.A.A.F.’s longtime president until last August, with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

The first part of the group’s inquiry concluded in November, with a report that accused Russia of a state-sponsored doping program. Those findings prompted track and field’s governing body to suspend Russia from global competition, jeopardizing its participation in this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

The investigation’s second report, released Thursday in Munich, shifted attention from Russia to the ruling body overseeing the sport globally: the International Association of Athletics Federations.

Well before the antidoping commission’s investigation, the I.A.A.F. knew the extent of Russia’s drug abuse, Mr. Pound said. Top officials, the inquiry found, were complicit in keeping tainted athletes in competition, extorting money from athletes and delaying the processing of drug test violations.

Unlike Russian coaches, trainers, doctors and the state police — whom the commission accused of actively destroying drug samples — I.A.A.F. officials did not erase records but rather delayed processing them, expecting that inaction might make matters go away, the inquiry found.

The report raised new questions about how compromised sports officials can be in investigating and disciplining doping violations, calling the corruption “embedded” in the organization. “It cannot be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own,” it read. “It is increasingly clear that far more I.A.A.F. staff knew about the problems than has currently been acknowledged.”

Implicated are the organization’s longtime president until last August, Lamine Diack, who was re-elected by the I.A.A.F. congress four times, and its former treasurer, Valentin Balakhnichev of Russia, along with high-ranking advisers, including a lawyer and medical doctor once in charge of policing doping violations.

In a statement on Thursday, the I.A.A.F. said that it accepted the “extreme gravity” of the report’s findings, noting that weak governance had allowed “individuals at the head of a previous regime” to act poorly.

In a separate statement, Mr. Coe called the corruption “totally abhorrent,” adding, “We cannot change the past, but I am determined that we will learn from it and will not repeat its mistakes.”

Mr. Diack, of Senegal, solicited illegal payments in exchange for delayed processing of paperwork, the report said, and in at least one instance advised a lawyer he needed to consult the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin, who had become a friend, regarding the doping violations of nine Russian athletes.

He presided over the I.A.A.F. for 16 years, hiring his two sons as consultants and drawing them into his schemes, the inquiry found. Mr. Balakhnichev, too, installed his son as an I.A.A.F. employee in Moscow.

Authorities have reacted to the commission’s yearlong inquiry. Mr. Diack is under criminal investigation in France, authorities there announced last year, as are Habib Cisse, Mr. Diack’s legal adviser, and Gabriel Dollé, a former director of the I.A.A.F.’s antidoping division. None are currently working for the I.A.A.F.

French authorities are continuing their investigation into the matter, they announced Thursday. Interpol, the international police organization, is also leading a continuing global inquiry. The organization has put out a wanted notice for one of Mr. Diack’s sons, Papa Massata Diack, who worked as a marketing consultant. Last week, the I.A.A.F. announced that it had barred him for life from future work in track and field.

Although Thursday’s report said members of the I.A.A.F.’s council “could not have been unaware” of the alleged schemes as they occurred, Mr. Pound emphasized at the news conference that he believed the organization’s current leader, Mr. Coe, had not been a part of any wrongdoing and had not known about it.

Mr. Coe was vice president to Mr. Diack for seven years and has denied any knowledge of nefarious activity at the I.A.A.F.

On Thursday, Mr. Pound attributed the schemes to an “institutional failure,” adding, “I don’t want to lay the failures of an entire council and its governance process at the feet of one individual.”

Mr. Coe has recognized in recent weeks that the sport and his organization are in crisis. Last week, perhaps acting pre-emptively as the results of Mr. Pound’s inquiry were anticipated, he announced that he had hired a team of outside lawyers and accountants to conduct an internal investigation at the I.A.A.F. and that he planned to institute stricter organizational controls and double the antidoping budget by midyear.

“I represent a sport under intense scrutiny,” Mr. Coe said in a statement last week. “Be under no illusion about how seriously I take these issues.”

The three-person commission that wrote Thursday’s report was created in December 2014. It consisted of Mr. Pound, founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency; Richard H. McLaren, a Canadian lawyer; and Günter Younger, the head of cybercrime for the police in the German state Bavaria.

The commission’s investigation was inspired by reports from the German public broadcaster ARD, which released a documentary in December 2014 focused on doping in Russian athletics.In August, ARD and The Sunday Times of London released a second report regarding the leaked results of thousands of blood tests of international athletes dating to 2001. Those results showed one in seven athletes had abnormal blood test results — reportedly including decorated athletes with clean records and prompting the antidoping commission to widen the focus of its inquiry.

In its report, the commission said it had reviewed all blood tests from 2001 to 2015 and found that the I.A.A.F. had, in fact, done a fine job in following up on suspicious tests. The report concluded that the leaked data was not grounds on which to conclude that an athlete had or had not used drugs, and that in most suspicious cases, the I.A.A.F. had ordered follow-up urine tests, required of athletes whose blood tests suggest doping.

The report’s message was of a corrupt administration more than an international culture of widespread cheating among athletes.

Invoking scandals at FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, and the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Pound said the significance of the I.A.A.F.’s corruption was unique in affecting the outcome of competitions.

“It’s not just a bunch of people sitting at a table passing money to each other,” he said. “You’ve got to have 21st-century governance even if it’s an organization that’s 19th century in origin.”