The Daily Background

Phew. According to the Washington Post today, Bush’s Department of Defense has been sneaking no-bid contracts and in some cases illegal contracts out of the Department of the Interior. According to the Post, DoD officials find it easier to get their contracts through the DoI, and have routed 1.7 billion dollars through it over the last years. Audit documents that the Post was able to get their hands on revealed that the DoD and DoI had “routinely violated rules designed to protect U.S. Government interests.”

More than half of the contracts examined were awarded without competition or without checks to determine that the prices were reasonable, according to the audits by the inspectors general for Defense (DOD) and Interior (DOI). Ninety-two percent of the work reviewed was awarded without verifying that the contractors’ cost estimates were accurate; 96 percent was inadequately monitored.

A few specifics of what we’re talking about here:

In one instance, Interior officials bought armor to reinforce Army vehicles from a software maker. In another, Interior bought furniture for Defense from a company that apparently had not previously been in the furniture business. One contract worth $100 million, to lease office space for a top-secret intelligence unit in Northern Virginia, was awarded without competition. Defense auditors said that deal cost taxpayers millions more than necessary, and they have referred the matter for possible criminal investigation.

The secret audit the Post obtained also said that dozens of contracts- more than half of those they examined- “had evidence of illegal contracts, ill advised contracts, and various failings of contract administration procedures.” This is pretty outrageous, and it never ceases to amaze me that the supposed party fiscal responsibility, and Barry Goldwater “where’s our tax money going?” conservatism has been the one to screw things up. Sure, they pledge to restore fiscal responsibility to Washington, and balance the budget, and eliminate ‘wasteful excesses’ (these ‘wasteful excesses’ tend to help poor Americans), and reduce the size of government. How do no-bid contracts do that? They don’t.

Conservatives rail against public subsidies, saying that they’re inefficient, wasteful, too big, and anti-competitive (they’re right about this sometimes), they say that the private sector is much better able to handle many tasks. The whole rationalization behind contracting jobs out is that private industry, since it has to be competitive, will be able to do things more efficiently and in a more cost-effective manner than public subsidies. But no-bid contracts take that very rationalization away- corporations awarded major contractsdon’t have to compete to come up with the best price. Instead, it’s somebody on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee or some bigwig in the Department of Defense who’s deciding where our tax money goes. How is that better that traditional public subsidies? It isn’t.

Filed under: Tax Money, Z-TDB Blog