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Private Contracts Take Beating in Report    [

    GOP Kills Bill to Police Halliburton
    By Bob Geiger
    AlterNet

    Tuesday 20 June 2006

Republicans in Congress have made it clear they're willing to fight for military contractors' right to lie, cheat and defraud taxpayers.

    I suppose it's old news at this point that the Bush administration lied us into the Iraq war and that the cost of this mess will be fully realized by the next generation when Bush leaves office with the biggest budget deficit in U.S. history.

    And, while Democrats have been complaining for years about the GOP-led Congress abandoning its oversight of the executive branch's wrongdoing, a vote that took place in the Senate last week shows how the Republican desire to ignore fraud and abuse extends right into killing legislation that would help stop defense contractors from ripping off the American people.

    In an effort to stop companies like Halliburton and its subsidiaries from cheating our troops and stealing from Americans, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), introduced S.AMDT.4230 and attached it to the Defense Authorization bill currently being debated in the Senate. The bill was intended to improve contracting "by eliminating fraud and abuse and improving competition in contracting and procurement."

    "I think when you are at war, when a massive quantity of money is being pushed out the door, that we ought to decide to get tough on those who would be engaged in war profiteering," said Dorgan in fighting for his amendment last week. "I dare say that never in the history of this country has so much money been wasted so quickly. And, yes, there is fraud involved, there is abuse involved, and it is the case that there is a dramatic amount of taxpayers' money that is now being wasted."

    Dorgan's bill - cosponsored by 17 Democrats and called the Honest Leadership and Accountability in Contracting Act of 2006 - was tabled by a roll call vote of 55-43, effectively rejecting the amendment. Every single Senate Republican voted against the measure to make the contracting process honest and impose penalties on those who break the law.

    And just what were the stern rules that the GOP didn't think their buddies at Halliburton should have to live with? The text of the legislation spelled out that Bush and Cheney's defense-contractor buddies would be in trouble if they did any of the following:

    "Executes or attempts to execute a scheme or artifice to defraud the United States or the entity having jurisdiction over the area in which such activities occur."

    "Falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact."

    "Makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations, or makes or uses any materially false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry."

    "Materially overvalues any good or service with the specific intent to excessively profit from the war or military action."

    The measure called for those found guilty of violating the law to be imprisoned for up to 20 years and be subject to a fine of up to $1,000,000 - a drop in the bucket for these guys - or a percentage of their ill-gotten gains.

    And Senate Republicans still saw fit to reject penalizing companies engaging in overt war profiteering and fraud despite Dorgan spending a considerable amount of time on the Senate floor trotting out example after example of the hideous abuse that has been occurring in Iraq.

    "What we have discovered is pretty unbelievable," said Dorgan last week. "We have direct testimony from physicians, Army doctors, and others about providing nonpotable water for shaving, brushing teeth that is in worse condition as water than the raw water coming out of the Euphrates River."

    "Let me describe some of the firsthand eyewitness issues in Iraq," Dorgan continued. "Brand new $85,000 trucks that were left on the side of the road because of a flat tire and then subsequently burned. 25 tons, 50,000 pounds, of nails ordered by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), the wrong size, that are laying in the sands of Iraq. 42,000 meals a day charged to the taxpayers by Halliburton and only 14,000 are actually served."

    After telling the amazing tale of the KBR Halliburton subsidiary ordering hand towels for soldiers embroidered with the "KBR" logo, to allow them to double the price of the towels, Dorgan told one Halliburton whistleblower's story of his company serving food date-stamped "expired" to American troops rather than throwing it away.

    "[Halliburton was] serving food at a cafeteria in Iraq for the soldiers, and a man named Roy who was the supervisor in the food service kitchen said that the food was date-stamped 'expired,''' said Dorgan. "In other words, it had a date stamp, which meant the food wasn't good anymore, and he was told by superiors that it doesn't matter. Feed it to the troops. It doesn't matter that they had an expired date stamped - feed it to the troops."

    But apparently the support-the-troops types on the Republicans side of the aisle only support them until their major contributors are caught feeding them possibly-tainted food before they go into battle - at that point, I guess the love is gone.

    The best the Republicans could offer in response to Dorgan was a lame statement by Senator John Warner (R-VA), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who said that his committee is on the case and that "the organization is now in place to try to monitor the situations the Senator has enumerated."

    There was no mention from Warner of where the hell his committee - and the GOP - have been for the last four years with all of this going on.

    I'll leave you with one other Dorgan horror story in which he describes a massive amount of money paid to four contractors to install air-conditioning in a Baghdad building.

    "The contract goes to a subcontractor, which goes to another subcontractor, and a fourth-level subcontractor," said Dorgan "And the payment for air-conditioning turns out to be payments to four contractors, the fourth of which puts a fan in a room. Yes, the American taxpayer paid for an air-conditioner and, after the money goes through four hands, there is a fan put in a room in Iraq."

    I guess that's fiscal conservatism Republicans can truly embrace.

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    Private Contracts Take Beating in Report
    By Heather Gehlert
    The Los Angeles Times

    Wednesday 21 June 2006

Rep. Waxman says the administration is using more outside firms even as the federal payroll rises, and the end result is billions in waste.

    Washington - The Bush administration has greatly expanded the use of contracts with private companies to provide public goods and services even as the number of government employees has increased, a congressional report has found.

    But the administration's tilt toward doing business with private companies has failed to bring promised savings and has been characterized by "significant waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement," according to the report released this week by Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee.

    Of particular concern, the report said, were contracts related to domestic security, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina recovery.

    Waxman's report is described as the first comprehensive assessment of contracting under the Bush administration, which had vowed upon taking office in January 2001 to provide services more efficiently while reducing the size of government.

    It reveals an 86% increase in contracts with private businesses, from $203 billion in 2000 to $377.5 billion a year in 2005 - a growth rate nearly double that of federal spending as a whole.

    At the same time, federal payrolls also have grown: The government now has about 1,874,000 civilian employees, up from 1,738,000 five years ago.

    "We've never seen [private] contracting on the scale that we're seeing now," Waxman said. "Nearly 40 cents of every dollar appropriated goes to private contractors, which is a record level."

    Yet, Waxman said, his biggest concern is not the growth in contracts, but the abuse of them.

    Poor contract planning and weak oversight, the report said, have led to government overspending and corruption by companies that have padded their invoices, charged for services not provided and received award fees for jobs that were completed late.

    "Taxpayers should be outraged at the billions of dollars that have been wasted," said Waxman. "And the Bush administration isn't learning from its mistakes, it's repeating them."

    In many cases, the report found, the types and terms of the contracts have made them ripe for abuse:

• Spending on cost-plus contracts - under which the government bears the risk of cost overruns - has increased from $62 billion in 2000 to $110 billion in 2005.
  
  
• Spending on no-bid contracts - those granted without competition from other companies - rose 110%, to $97.8 billion, during the same period.
  
  
• Spending on monopoly contracts, which allow the government to buy goods and services without defining them in advance, nearly doubled, to $15.3 billion.

    The report comes as the federal government's handling of contracts is increasingly in question. On Tuesday, the government's onetime chief procurement officer, David H. Safavian, was convicted of making false statements and obstruction of justice for concealing his relationship with disgraced former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The jury's decision in Safavian's case, Waxman said, "underscores the findings of the new report."

    "The corruption and inappropriate influence of special interests in government contracting has gone virtually unchecked and erodes the public trust in the federal government," he said.

    Also on Tuesday, the Senate rejected - for the third time - a proposal to form a special committee to investigate contracting improprieties in war zones.

    "It's scandalous that the GOP Senate refuses to look into the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the war in Iraq to see that the funds are carefully and honestly spent," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a written statement after the vote.

    Kennedy's comments echoed the concerns outlined in Waxman's report, which also identifies several smaller pieces of $745.5 billion in federal contracts awarded between 2000 and 2005 that the auditors deemed wasteful, fraudulent or mismanaged.

    In 2003, for example, the Border Patrol was found to have paid $20 million for security camera systems that malfunctioned or were never installed. That same year, the Transportation Security Administration awarded Boeing Co. $44 million for installing and maintaining airport luggage screening equipment - a job that was never evaluated.

    In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought $915 million worth of temporary housing and offices for Katrina victims and relief workers. More than a third of them have never been used.

    "The lesson of this report is that there's a massive amount of spending, and yet we very clearly aren't spending it smartly," said Peter Singer, an analyst with the Brookings Institution, a centrist public policy center in Washington. "When the overspending is not just in the billions but in the hundreds of billions - that's worrisome."

    A spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for overall procurement policy, said it made sense to turn to the private sector for providing security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and cleaning up after Katrina - two disasters that affected everyone, not just government.

    Tapping private-sector expertise allows the government to "bring the full strength of American ingenuity to bear as we seek solutions," said OMB spokesman Scott Milburn.

    But, he added, contracting requires constant oversight to make sure "the public's money is spent responsibly."

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    Times staff writer Joel Havemann contributed to this report.