GovernmentExecutive.com

GSA Firing: The Details
By Tom Shoop | Friday, May 02, 2008  |  10:07 AM

In an appearance on Federal News Radio this morning, ex-GSA Administrator Lurita Doan provided some more details on her firing earlier this week, and her reaction to it.

Tuesday evening, Doan said, she was summoned to her first-ever meeting at the White House, with Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, and White House Counsel Fred Fielding. Here's how she described it:

Less than 30 seconds into the meeting, I was told the White House was requesting my resignation. I tell you, it was humbling and frankly, it was bizarre. Naturally, I immediately stated, "I serve at the pleasure of the president," and I immediately gave my resignation.

I was surprised to be told that from the White House point of view, I was considered, and this is a direct quote, a "distraction to progress at GSA." I know I have had a high profile, and I know I've taken very public, very vocal stands on a lot of very contentious issues. You know, I've been a tiger on procurement, of course, I love talking about telework, my passion is talking about expanding and working on expanding our ports of entry and making opportunities for small business. But I saw that as my job.

I have to say, I don't think this was about Doan's position on telework. And it's pretty clear at this point it wasn't about allegations she violated the Hatch Act more than a year ago. But that didn't stop the New York Times editorial page from pushing that notion in today's edition.

Stay tuned to GovernmentExecutive.com Monday for a full interview with Doan.

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Doan's Parting Shot
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, April 30, 2008  |  04:57 PM

The news that GSA's Lurita Doan was forced to resign yesterday wasn't exactly stunning. Given her history at the agency and the fact that, as Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., put it, "her management style was not everyone's cup of tea," it's somewhat surprising this didn't happen sooner.

But as Doan exits the public stage, I have to acknowledge that I (and, I'm sure, many of my colleagues in the media) will miss her. She is, to use an old newspaper term, "good copy."

The feeling, though, apparently isn't mutual. Doan made her feelings about reporters clear during a speech last week at a GSA expo in California in which she appeared with "arrows sticking out of her head, shoulders, arms and legs," according to an official transcript. One of those metaphorical arrows, she said, was shot at her by "the press who say: 'I’ve been covering this issue for some time. I’m the only one who really understands the issue. You need to consult me, listen to my recommendations.' ”

I really wish I knew who she was talking about here. As a general rule, the last thing those of us in the media want to do is consult with agency leaders and issue recommendations. If we did that, we might actually bear some responsibility if those recommendations turned out to be lousy. No thanks. We relish our role as outside observers.

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Catching Up on Competitive Sourcing
By Tom Shoop | Friday, April 25, 2008  |  01:55 PM

Christopher Lee of the Washington Post did a nice job today detailing how President Bush's effort to put federal jobs up for competition from the private sector has fallen short of its goals. But pride compels me to note that from where I sit, Robert Brodsky did just a little bit nicer job more than a month ago with the same subject in the pages of Government Executive.

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McCain: Lean Times Ahead
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, April 16, 2008  |  09:32 AM

John McCain may be a big fan of citizenship and public service, but he's no fan of big government. Here he is yesterday on CNBC's Kudlow and Company, talking about his economic recovery plan:

We need to have a year pause, a year pause on discretionary spending, except for veterans and defense. And let’s scrutinize every agency of government. ... It is not taxes that are insufficient, it’s spending that’s out of control. And one of the areas I would go after first and hardest is defense acquisition.

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Zero Tolerance for Charge Card Abuse
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, April 10, 2008  |  03:44 PM

Here's Bush administration management chief Clay Johnson, quoted in Steve Barr's Federal Diary column in the Washington Post, on the latest revelations of misuse of government charge cards:

"The vast majority of civilian employees, government employees, use the cards responsibly. At the same time, I would say there is abuse, and the goal is zero, and we need to make it zero."

Zero? Setting aside the issue of whether that's at all realistic, it strikes me that getting even close to such a goal would be a lot more expensive than simply setting tough controls and accepting some minimal level of abuse as unavoidable. I know the anecdotes about misuse of cards are irritating (and, at the same time, amusing) but eliminating them entirely seems like a very costly and labor-intensive endeavor. Why does that have to be the standard for an effective card program?

(Hat tip: IEC Journal.)

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VA Purchase Cards: Not Exactly Scandalous
By Tom Shoop | Monday, April 07, 2008  |  11:23 AM

Last night, the Associated Press moved a story over the wires that went out with this headline: "AP Impact: VA Workers Charge $2.6B on Gov't Credit Cards at Luxury Hotels, High-End Retailers."

That's a grabber, huh? And given the fact that we at Government Executive have reported on these kinds of abuses at various agencies in the past, it didn't come as that much of a surprise.

But it turns out there's quite a bit less here than meets the eye. First of all, the $2.6 billion figure refers to the total amount of spending by Veterans Affairs employees using federal purchase cards. And a detailed list of purchases obtained by the AP "reveals few outward signs of questionable spending, with hundreds of purchases at prosthetic, orthopedic and other medical supply stores," the story acknowledges.

Even the stuff the AP characterizes as questionable seems fairly routine -- and doesn't add up to a lot of dollars. It includes purchases totaling $8,471 at Sharper Image, a high-tech electronics specialty store, and less than $2,000 worth of spending at Franklin Covey, purveyor of high-end planners for executives. Those purchases could be perfectly legitimate, and they're certainly not on the order of using a government card to buy photos of Elvis or get DirecTV service.

The AP report also noted that "employees based at VA headquarters made credit card charges at Las Vegas casino hotels totaling $26,198." But the agency is building a VA hospital in the city and -- for better or for worse -- a lot of conferences and events are held there. So $26,000 doesn't seem like an outlandish amount of total spending in Vegas. And the details included in the piece on how the money was spent could be misleading. "One VA headquarters employee appears to have passed up casino hotels by booking at a Holiday Inn Express in Las Vegas for $787.75," the AP notes. But virtually all federal travelers stay at government rates under federal per diem policies, so who's to say if the Holiday Inn Express actually was cheaper?

On the whole, I'm with the folks over at the OhMyGov site on this one: The facts don't appear to support the tone of the article, and the righteous indignation drummed up by the usual-suspects list of members of Congress and heads of watchdog groups quoted in the story isn't terribly convincing.

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GSA Revamps Real Estate
By Tom Shoop | Friday, February 29, 2008  |  02:38 PM

The General Services Administration announced today that it's making some changes in one of its key line sof business: acquiring real estate on behalf of federal agencies.

Here's the agency's full announcement (it's not online yet, as far as I can tell):

WASHINGTON—The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), in order to better fulfill its mission of providing world-class workspace to federal workers at best value to the American taxpayer, has added a new Office of Real Estate Acquisition, the agency announced today.

“As the government’s premier procurement agency, GSA must be vigilant in searching for ways to improve the way we acquire and manage federal assets,” said Administrator Lurita Doan. “This initiative will ensure that our real estate program is managed in the most effective and efficient manner possible.”

The Office of Real Estate Acquisition is responsible for the strategic direction for national real estate issues, including implementing the National Broker Contract, and the lease delegation program. Chip Morris, the former PBS senior legal counsel, was named Assistant Commissioner of the new office.

“This organizational shift is important because it more effectively responds to the fact that the amount of space we lease to house federal agencies has almost quadrupled over the last four decades,” said David Winstead, Commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service. “Real estate is the backbone of GSA.”

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Back to the Coast Guard's Future
By Tom Shoop | Monday, February 11, 2008  |  08:11 AM

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen took the unusual step of sharing a highly-critical assessment of a key Coast Guard modernization program with an audience at the National Press Club Friday:

Let me share with you a detailed report that would trouble any senior leader regarding a high-profile shipbuilding program. The report states the initial construction costs of the new fleet of cutters will be much higher than projected; delivery will almost certainly be delayed; and the cutters will not carry out all the functions they were originally designed to carry out… An early attempt to reconfigure the vessel was so poorly done we were forced to remove it from service without obtaining any value for the taxpayer money invested… During machinery trials, the captain reported: "never has a vessel left a port so badly qualified to encounter seas."

While it sounds a lot like Allen is referring to the now-scuttled patrol boat debacle under the Deepwater program, the report was written in 1845, when the Revenue Marine, the Coast Guard’s predecessor organization, was attempting to shift from sail to steam.

As Allen said, “Change is hard.”

--Katherine McIntire Peters

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Pentagon Seeks Rock Stars
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, January 30, 2008  |  05:20 PM

Looks like this is the week for music-themed posts. The Washington Post's "Government Inc." blogger, Robert O'Harrow, notes today that the Defense Department has issued a contract solicitation for a "rock music band" to tour in Kuwait and Afghanistan. But just being great at Guitar Hero or Rock Band on your Playstation won't cut it. At least one member of the band, according to the solicitation, must be a "professional celebrity."

This is not the first time, of course, that the military has issued contracts seeking musicians to entertain the troops.

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GSA Veteran Admits Taking Bribes
By Tom Shoop | Friday, January 11, 2008  |  09:54 AM

The Justice Department announced Thursday that Dessie Ruth Nelson, 65, of Oakland, Calif., a former longtime employee of the General Services Administration, had pleaded guilty to accepting more than $100,000 in bribes from a firm providing security to federal buildings in return for awarding the company three federal contracts worth more than $130 million.

In exchange for steering contracts to Holiday International Security Inc. (which later changed its name to USProtect Corp.) Nelson received, among other things, a shopping bag filled with $35,000 in cash, an envelope containing $10,000, and a $7,000 Caribbean cruise.

Nelson's case was pursued by Justice's Procurement Fraud Task Force, which is chaired by Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher and includes representatives from U.S. Attorneys' Offices, the FBI, agency inspector general offices, and other federal law enforcement agencies.

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Inherently Interesting
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, January 10, 2008  |  10:05 AM

My post earlier this week about Stephen Goldsmith's essay on the subject of inherently governmental functions is certainly generating a lot of debate. By the way, in that post, I was remiss in not pointing out that GovExec's own Robert Brodsky explored this subject in some depth in the Sept. 1, 2007 issue of the magazine.

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What's Really 'Inherently Governmental'?
By Tom Shoop | Monday, January 07, 2008  |  11:34 AM

Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis, one-time adviser to President Bush on management issues, and an advocate of privatization of government functions, raises a provocative issue in a new essay in The American magazine: "Even if we could agree on core government functions that had to be walled off from contractors," he writes, "we would be left with a thorny question: what happens when government turns out not to be very good at inher­ently governmental work?"

Goldsmith argues that the feds are simply too hung up on the issue of whether particular work is too important to be contracted out to seriously address this question:

It appears almost certain that any significant steps toward privatization are going to occur at the state level. Why? Because that’s where the most exciting work is going on right now, and because Washington appears allergic to public-private innovation. Congress not only clings to the view that gov­ernment workers must produce all government services, but also even tries to impede progress when it surfaces outside the Beltway—witness the provision tucked inside the 2007 farm bill that would prohibit outsourcing by states and require government employees to process all applications for food stamps.

I think Goldmsith's taking it a little too far -- I'm not convinced Washington's "allergic to public private-innovation," or that Congress thinks that "government workers must provide all government services." If he thinks that's true, I think he's missed out on an awful lot of innovation in recent years, and a tremendous amount of outsourcing of government functions that has occurred with the active or tacit approval of Congress.

Nevertheless, Goldsmith's core question is a valid one, and it would be worth some exploration during this year's presidential campaign, if the candidates ever decide to get serious about federal management issues. And lest you think that's a pipe dream, remember it's happened before, and Goldsmith was involved.

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Show Me the $700 Hammer
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, December 27, 2007  |  01:27 PM

The folks over at the editorial page of the Washington Times are disappointed in the recently unveiled Office of Management and Budget Web site containing data on federal contracts, grants and loans, USAspending.gov.

It's not that the data presented on the site isn't useful. USAspending.gov provides "real insight into government's operations," the paper's editorial writers say. They also laud "the ease with which ordinary Internet users can ask questions, begin searches and find information."

So what's the problem? More detailed data would be nice, the paper says. And then comes the real issue: "Nor are $700 hammers and new "Bridges to Nowhere" easily discoverable on this site, we're sorry to report."

At the end of the day, it's all about the horror stories, isn't it?

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Opting Out of Contract Database
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, December 19, 2007  |  10:27 AM

Last week the Office of Management and Budget crowed about meeting a deadline to create a publicly accessible Web site to provide data on federal contracts, grants, and loans. The fine print of that announcement noted that the data would cover about 90 percent of federal spending.

So what's in the other 10 percent? That's what we're starting to learn. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists reports that several defense intelligence agencies have successfully made the case that they should not have to report even unclassified contracting actions to the database due to "operational security isues."

Defense News, Aftergood notes, uncovered a memo from Shay D. Assad, director of Defense procurement and acquisition policy, granting the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and Counterintelligence Field Activity a waiver from reporting requirements, at least for fiscal 2007 and 2008.

"I appreciate your concerns that reporting these actions to the publicly accessible website could provide unacceptable risk of insight to your individual missions and budgets," Assad wrote.

But as Aftergood notes, contracting data from these agencies for previous years will be available on OMB's USAspending.gov site. It's also been available online via other sources for years. So it's a little odd that this information suddenly represents a security risk.

(Hat tip: Government Inc.)

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Holiday Party Do's and Don'ts
By Tom Shoop | Monday, December 03, 2007  |  12:28 PM

It's the holiday season, and you know what that means: party invitations from vendors. If you're in need of some ethical guidance on how to handle them, the Defense Department General Counsel's Standards of Conduct Office has issued a helpful list of rules and regulations.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

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Army Procurement Chief Moves On
By Tom Shoop | Friday, November 30, 2007  |  08:59 AM

The Army's top acquisition official, retired Gen. Claude M. Bolton Jr., is on the way out, the New York Times reports today. Bolton, a retired two-star Air Force general who made the unusual switch to a top civilian position in another military service six years ago, plans to leave on Jan. 2.

There's a brief profile of Bolton in the Sept. 15, 2005 issue of Government Executive.

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IGs: Too Mean or Too Nice?
By Tom Shoop | Friday, November 09, 2007  |  11:40 AM

Interesting juxtaposition of stories on our home page today. First, Jill Aitoro uncovers the story of two more information technology vendors who have quietly dropped their General Services Administration schedule contracts, one of them openly citing "unreasonable demands" by the agency's inspector general.

At the same time, though, CongressDaily's Dan Friedman reports that a bipartisan group of senators are concerned about IGs who they say "work too closely with agency leaders or succumb to political pressure from the Bush administration." They're pushing a bill aimed at making IGs more independent by, among other things, prohibiting them from accepting bonuses from agency heads and reducing the control of agencies over IG pay.

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Taking Another Look at 'No-Work' Deal
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, November 06, 2007  |  12:52 PM

Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has issued her verdict on Robert O'Harrow's story about how the Air Force arranged a job through an intelligence contractor for Charles D. Riechers while he was awaiting confirmation as the service's top procurement official. After the story, which characterized Riechers' deal as a "no-work contract," appeared, he was later found dead of an apparent suicide.

The Air Force complained to Howell that the story was "highly misleading." Howell's conclusion: "There is nothing inaccurate in the story as a narrow slice of the contracting picture." But, she says, it "lacked important context -- whether such contracts are commonplace or unusual and what specific work Riechers did for [Assistant Air Force Secretary for Acquisition Sue C.] Payton under the contract."

As I've already noted, I think the Post's use of the term "no-work contract" to characterize the deal was unfortunate. Riechers, it seems clear, did in fact work -- just for the Air Force, not the company. The type of arrangement under which he worked, known as a "science, engineering and technical assistance" contract, is not uncommon in government. But, as Howell notes, procurement experts differ as to whether that makes it wise.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal.)

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Doan: Grassley 'Flat-Out Wrong'
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, October 23, 2007  |  05:47 PM

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan took to the airwaves Tuesday, appearing on Federal News Radio to respond to allegations by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, of improper influence on her part (and that of other GSA officials) with contract negotiations involving Sun Microsystems. Her response:

"I will say flat out to my knowledge I do not believe there was, but I'll tell you that I'm a glass half full kind of person, so I'd like to just kind of talk about some of the positives first -- which is that Sen. Grassley and I are both saying that we need to leave the contracting decisions to GSA's professional contracting staff. And I could not agree with him more on this issue, and truthfully, I welcome his change of mind on this. Because you know just a few weeks ago, he sent me a letter demanding that I cancel the Sun contract, and had I done so, I would've been the one who was improperly influencing the decisions of a warranted contracting officer. And quite bluntly, I refused. And so I commend him for recommending that no contracting officer should be improperly influenced, but he is just flat-out wrong when he states that I improperly influenced a contracting officer."

Doan has already publicly accused Grassley of using "false innuendo to impugn the motives of GSA management."

In her interview Tuesday, Doan also had some thoughts on the future of the federal contracting workforce:

"We cannot get young, smart people to go into the contracting profession, and I'm telling you, it's not because it's not interesting work, and it's not because of the pay or benefits. It's because we tell our contracting folks to be innovative, we tell them they need to be responsive to the needs of our government customers, but the minute they do something that looks different, we rake 'em over the coals."

You can find a link to the interview here.

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Quote of the Day
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, October 04, 2007  |  11:49 AM

"The rapid increase of federally contracted dollars—100 percent since 2000—makes outsourcing the fastest growing component of discretionary spending. The government’s preference for using outside contractors to provide goods and services makes careful scrutiny of the process and the decisions more important than in the past. At present, loose rules, lack of competition, and limited accountability permit so-called ‘bad actors’ to receive contracts that put taxpayers and our money at risk."

--From "Forgiving Fraud and Failure," a new report by U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups.

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Air Force Work, Contractor Pay
By Tom Shoop | Monday, October 01, 2007  |  02:18 PM

When you take a no-work job with a federal contractor while waiting for your civil service job at the Air Force to come through, here's what you shouldn't tell the Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow when he calls for an interview for a story he's writing:

• "I really didn't do anything for [the contractor] CRI."


• "We needed some way to kind of gap me [between jobs]."

This is especially true if the government position you're about to fill is principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition -- and if that job needs filling because the person who previously held it ended up going to prison for negotiating a job with a contractor while she still worked for the government.

Still that's exactly what Charles Riechers told O'Harrow. And the Air Force insists it did nothing wrong in arranging for him to get the contractor pay while he was actually working for the service.

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Seeking Contractor Input on Contracting
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, September 11, 2007  |  03:01 PM

The National Nuclear Security Administration's job is to issue and oversee huge contracts for managing eight nuclear weapons complexes. Now the agency is looking to its contractors (and others) to tell it how to overhaul its contracting process. The agency has issued an official request for information on "consolidation of management and operating contracts, use of other types of contracts on a single or multiple facility basis, use of function-based contracts (e.g. construction, information technology) applicable to two or more sites, and transfer of work scope from one or more current contracts to other existing or new contracts."

The idea, NNSA says, is to explore "potential contracting alternatives and associated risks and costs for achieving NNSA's mission while promoting vigorous, full and open competition."

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Of Bids, Contracts, Prices and Costs
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, August 22, 2007  |  11:21 AM

The Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow is back on the subject of "no-bid" federal contracts today (and on the front page of the paper), with a story centered on a contract issued by the Homeland Security Department's Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement to prepare a long-delayed plan.

That particular contract is placed in the overall context of growth in federal contracts awarded without full and open competition. O'Harrow notes that "government auditors say the result is often higher prices for taxpayers and an undue reliance on a limited number of contractors."

I don't doubt that. But I wonder if the result is actually higher total costs for taxpayers. The reason why the government implemented the procurement reforms back in the 1990s that have created the opportunity to award contracts with little or no bidding was that agencies were spending billions of dollars on "full and open competitions" -- and often not getting what they were supposed to be paying for.

This is not to suggest that there aren't some serious issues to explore in the area of contemporary federal contracting, but only to note that it's one of those areas where the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater is very real.

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Contracting: Front-Page News
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, July 24, 2007  |  11:02 AM

The Wall Street Journal's all over the federal contracting beat today, with a front-page piece on problems with the Marine One helicopter contract (a classic case of mission creep is dragging it out), and another story on the inside about the breakdown of the lead systems integrator concept. (Full versions of both pieces are only available to subscribers.) Neither story breaks a lot of new ground, but taken together, they provide more evidence that the government's inability to effectively manage the astronomical amount of money spent on contracts (more than $425 billion in fiscal 2006, as we'll be reporting in the Aug. 15 special Top 200 Federal Contractors issue of Government Executive) is more than just an inside-the-beltway issue.

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GSA Adds New Hybrids
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, July 19, 2007  |  02:52 PM

The General Services Administration has added some new hybrid vehicles to its fleet: 55 Saturn Aura sedans, to be exact. The agency plans to lease 43 of the cars to the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps
and Navy, the Departments of Transportation, Interior, Energy and Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA. GSA will use the other 12 Saturns itself -- some of them as demonstration models during presentations to agencies.

GSA says it's bought more than 140,000 alternative fuel vehicles and hybrids since 1991.

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Blogging the Contracting World
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, July 11, 2007  |  09:39 AM

It used to be that the folks who plied their trade providing services to federal agencies could operate in relative anonymity. But now there's more scrutiny than ever of their work, and that of the agencies they work for. Here's just the latest evidence: The Washington Post has launched a blog, Government Inc., devoted entirely to procurement issues. The blog is written by Robert O'Harrow Jr., a financial reporter at the Post who has long focused on the federal contracting industry.

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Securing Contracts Illegally
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, July 11, 2007  |  09:24 AM

The corner of the defense contracting industry devoted to developing systems to secure equipment and cargo may seem mundane, but apparently it's filled with intrigue. The Washington Times reports today that Robert Fischetti, former sales director at Peck & Hale LLC in West Sayville, N.Y. -- which makes such systems -- has pleaded guilty to trying to rig bids on Defense contracts. And he's not the only one: Two Pennsylvania executives have already entered guilty pleas on bid-rigging charges in cases involving Navy contracts for metal sling hoist assemblies.

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POGO vs. Kelman
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, July 10, 2007  |  09:39 AM

Oooh, it's a full-blown federal procurement catfight! In this corner, Harvard professor, Federal Computer Week blogger and former Office of Federal Procurement policy chief Steve Kelman. And in this corner, Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight.

I'm not even going to try to describe the issues that separate the two sides, which have something to do with the government's rules on "buying commercial." I'll just admit to being entertained by the fact that it's getting personal, which is not something you see every day in the world of federal contracting policy.

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The Real Deal on DHS 'No-Bid' Deal
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, June 28, 2007  |  01:47 PM

The Washington Post lets fly today with another of its periodic salvos against federal agencies' contracting processes, with a piece about the Homeland Security Department's $2 billion million "no-bid contract" with Booz-Allen Hamilton that ballooned into a $124 million project to create an information analysis and infrastructure protection organization.

A couple of quick thoughts about the piece:

• The repeated use of the highly charged phrase "no-bid" conjures up cronyistic contracts shoveled out to preferred contractors with connections, political or otherwise. But it's clear from the story that these weren't no-bid deals in the sense of being doled out without any competition. The Veterans Affairs Department handled the procurement on behalf of DHS, using General Services Administration contract vehicles. Booz Allen had to go through a level of competition simply to be included on one of those vehicles.
• What's more, is the "no-bid" aspect really the point? If the contracts had been properly bid out with full procedures, DHS would in all likelihood have had to spend even more money to get the office off the ground. The real issue here is that the department utterly lacked the internal capacity not only to fulfill the mission it was assigned, but even to find a contractor to do it for them. Any way you slice it, they were going to have to spend a ton of money with contractors to do the job they were assigned to do.

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Whistleblower Flareup
By Tom Shoop | Tuesday, June 26, 2007  |  09:20 AM

Illumination flares used by U.S. forces in search and rescue missions are supposed to pass a simple test: that they can be dropped from a height of 10 feet without igniting. A former employee of Alliant Techsystems Inc. says in a whistleblower lawsuit that the company provided flares to the military knowing they might not pass that test due to problems with their igniters. Later, the flares did in fact fail a Navy test.

Now the U.S. government has joined the whistleblower's suit. And if you think this is a small potatoes case, remember this: the Air Force and the Army bought $100 million worth of the flares.

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Security Contractors' Legal Eagle
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, June 20, 2007  |  11:37 AM

This has got to be one of the least enviable jobs in America: American Lawyer profiles David Hammond of the law firm Crowell & Moring, who represents some of the top private security companies working in Iraq. As such, he "not only does much of the contracting and contract-related litigation for these companies, but he also provides the political and legal justification for the growing reliance on their services," the publication says. Of course, Crowell & Moring has long experience in the federal contracting arena. One of their current partners is Angela Styles, who headed the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the early years of the Bush administration.

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Buildings, Bidders and Bandits
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, June 06, 2007  |  12:22 PM

In Washington, the General Services Administration tends to get treated as a backwater agency. But it has a nationwide presence, and it's easy to forget that everything GSA does has political implications. Here's today's case in point. In a column in the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel yesterday, Kevin Leininger reported that Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., has a beef about the new Social Security Administration office GSA has arranged to construct near the city. Local critics have already complained about the site picked for the building, because public transportation is limited. Now Souder says he thinks GSA should have gotten more than two bids for the project. Potential local bidders, he says, may not have even known about the opportunity because they don't routinely monitor federal procurement Web sites.

“People sit in Washington offices and look for that stuff,” Souder said. “That’s why we call them ‘Beltway bandits.’ You can’t bid if you don’t know about the contract.”

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Bush on Iraq Bill: Managerially Unacceptable
By Tom Shoop | Friday, May 11, 2007  |  10:05 AM

The White House has threatened to veto legislation passed by the House yesterday that would provide incremental funding for operations in Iraq, holding back most money until the Bush administration completed a status report in July on the war. At that point, Congress could pass fast-track legislation setting a date for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. In addition to being ideologically opposed to such deadlines, President Bush objected to the House measure (H.R. 2206) on management grounds. From the statement of administration policy on the bill:

Incremental funding will cause breaks in production schedules of critical equipment, delay the delivery of equipment to deploying forces, halt the hiring of needed civilian personnel, lead to far more expensive and burdensome short term procurements, and undermine the [Defense] Department’s ability to relieve stress on the force. It will also disrupt daily operations at installations, driving up costs and impacting support activities for military personnel and their families, affecting quality of life, morale and retention.

Whatever your position on the war, it's hard to argue that point.

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Seeing Signs of Federal Business
By Tom Shoop | Thursday, May 10, 2007  |  10:36 AM

Here's today's federal procurement snapshot, courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Two years ago, Tapco, a family business in Elm Grove, Wis., didn't have any federal contracts. The state and local market had a far bigger demand for the company's products -- street signs and traffic signals. Now, with a little help from an outfit called the Wisconsin Procurement Institute, the firm does more than $2 million in business with the Defense and Homeland Security departments and the National Park Service. That includes making traffic signs in English and Arabic for use at military checkpoints in Iraq.

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