Not sure how many of you are reading The Watcher, our bi-monthly newsletter that has interesting commentary, analysis, and insights into key government accountability issues of the day, but you should sign up for it if you don't currently get it (sign up here). Anyway, earlier this week we ran an article in the most recent issue on the Senate's passage of the FY 2009 Defense Authorization bill, which included a number of long overdue contracting reforms.

While our coverage was not incorrect, we certainly omitted some details on many of these reforms that we probably should have included (not a strike out per se, just a swing and a miss). So, to help us out, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the original sponsor of many of these reforms, has posted a helpful summary of the Clean Contracting Act. This legislation, which was originally introduced in 2006, would:

[E]nhance competition in contracting, limit the use of abuse-prone contracts, start the effort to rebuild the federal acquisition workforce, strengthen important anti-fraud measures, and increase transparency in federal contracting.

These are solid reforms that should have been in place a long time ago, and Waxman and other congressional champions of a more responsible and efficient procurement system should be commended. But the work isn't finished yet. Waxman laments in his statement:

My only regret is that some of the other key reforms passed by the House were not included in the final version of the legislation. I am disappointed that the House and Senate compromise does not include a ban on private interrogators in U.S. military detention facilities or mandate congressional approval for any security pact with Iraq that is negotiated by the President.

Summary of Clean Contracting Act
Waxman's Statement on the Act

Earlier this week, we highlighted two hearings in the House of Representatives that were focusing on issues of waste, fraud, and abuse and federal contracting. Our friends over at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) have had their A-game this week. They not only testified at one of those hearings, but have provided some excellent previews, commentaries, analysis and reports, and summaries on the hearings this week. All of the POGO materials are worth at least glancing through, if not reading thoroughly.

I also wanted to share POGO's perspective on the passage of the contractor responsibility misconduct database this week as part of the defense authorization bill in the Senate. POGO has championed this proposal from the beginning and long ago created a prototype of the database for the public.

POGO regularly harps on the deficiencies of the proposed database, but it's still a positive accomplishment. The database would only include defense contractors and would be accessible only to Department of Defense procurement officials and Congress. The database may be made available to other government officials at the discretion of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, but it's off-limits to the public. It would also include only instances involving the award or performance of contracts, and only those occurring in the most recent 5-year period.

Kudos to POGO for being on top of their game this week.

We'll be shutting down the BudgetBrigade a bit early today to head off to OMB Watch's 25th Anniversary celebration. Yup, that's right. OMBW is 25 years young this year and we're primed and ready for our quarter life crisis! We're taking some time to celebrate tonight with friends and supporters and remember 25 years of fighting for a more transparent and accountable federal government.

While we are looking back over some of our accomplishments of the last quarter century (and honoring the unsung work of some of our public sector colleagues), we are also looking forward to the challenges we'll face over the next 25 years and beyond.

You will be a key part of overcoming those future challenges, just as you've been crucial to our past accomplishments. Your involvement, along with hundreds of thousands of people just like you has helped to make us the success we are today. So thank you for your commitment to the open and accountable ideals that have helped guide OMBW over the past 25 years.

And if you want to help make sure those ideals continue to be realized, consider making a small donation to OMB Watch in honor of our 25th birthday. Your contribution will join with hundreds of others who want to ensure we are able to continue our mission and the important work we do everyday.

The Washington Post has an article this morning that details severe contracting problems at the Department of Homeland Security. The Post describes the agency's efforts to oversee $15 billion in contracts over the last six years as having "failed."

The contracts wound up over-budget, delayed or canceled after millions of dollars had already been spent, according to figures and documents prepared by the House Committee on Homeland Security. A panel of experts is to testify today before the House Subcommittee on Management, Investigations and Oversight on how to fix problems with the DHS acquisitions process.

The experts are expected to discuss a number of high-profile screw-ups at DHS, including the Coast Guard's Deepwater program (ships were built and then scrapped), Boeing's border protection fence, which we've skewered numerous times (over budget, behind schedule, doesn't work), a program to track visitors entry and exit from the U.S. called US VISIT (behind schedule, not being managed well), and some contracts related to Hurricane Katrina (mismanaged, wasted funds).

You can watch the hearing, scheduled for this afternoon at 2:00 pm (EST), on the web by following the link at the bottom of the committee web page.

I should also mention that the full committee hearing held last week on the virtual border fence contract in the House Homeland Security Committee will be finished tomorrow at 10:00 am (EST).

I came across another delay in a federal contracting effort to report today. Seems the Department of Defense, and more specifically Secretary Robert Gates, feels it will not have sufficient time to complete the re-competition for the contract to build the next generation of mid-air refueling tankers. Gates announced this morning during testimony before the House Armed Services Committee that DoD has decided to cancel the competition and leave the issue for the incoming administration to figure out.

At first my reaction was this was just another example of the Bush administration pushing off their screw-ups onto someone else. But after thinking about it for a while, I think I'm changing my mind. Gates described the tanker contract issue as "enormously complex and emotional" and given the energy of the election season, trying to move forward on this contract in 2008 would probably only make things worse.

Part of the reason I think this is that self-interested politicians keep sticking their noses into this issue where they don't belong. The latest is House member Rick Larsen (D-WA), who decided he was qualified enough to judge that the postponement was "great news" and a "step in the right direction." Now maybe Larsen has previous experience as a contracting officer, defense analyst, or refueling tanker pilot (these details are not apparent from his website bio). Not surprisingly, Larsen's district is home to Boeing's enormous Everett aircraft assembly plant, the main company in the team who lost the initial competition for the tanker. Gee, I wonder if that is impacting his perspective on this issue?

The last thing we need is for the contracting process to become even more political than it already is. While Larsen is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, contract competitions are the perview of the executive branch, not Congress and Larsen and other politicians should stay out of a process that is already too political. Gates wisely decided that because the keen interest of politicians in this contract in an election year would only make the competition less fair, the right decision is to postpone.

Yesterday I ripped into folks over at the Professional Services Council (a contractor front group) for implying that current contracting woes had nothing to do with the contractors themselves. Then this morning I come across an update on the SBInet program - which is supposed to establish a virtual fence along the southern border of the United States to monitor illegal crossings. The program continues to be behind schedule and over budget. Big surprise.

We blogged back in April about how the program was behind schedule and over budget, citing two other reports from June 2007 and February 2008 that showed the program was not going well. In fact, the Customs and Border Protection office decided to scrap a part of the program being handled by Boeing called Project 28 after $20 million had been spent on a system that didn't work.

The House Homeland Security committee held a hearing yesterday to explore why the virtual border fence has not become a reality. Two representatives from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified that the SBInet program is pretty much a disaster. From GAO director of information technology architecture and system issues Randolph Hite's testimony:

Important aspects of SBInet remain ambiguous and in a continued state of flux, making it unclear and uncertain what technology capabilities will be delivered and when, where, and how they will be delivered. For example, the scope and timing of planned SBInet deployments and capabilities have continued to be delayed without becoming more specific.

Ouch. Not a lot of grey area there. GAO's Richard Stana, director of homeland security and justice issues, also testified that time lines for the program had slipped, in some cases by up to three years, and the cost of the pedestrian fence has increased from about $4 million per mile to $7.5 million per mile! Wow! Now that's what I call wasteful spending.

Elizabeth Newell wrote an good summary last week in Government Executive magazine of the state of a handful of reforms to the federal contracting process that have been stalled in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

With time running out in this congressional session, a number of sweeping contracting reform bills are languishing on the back burner. Several significant pieces of acquisition legislation are stuck in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and their authors are attaching provisions to other bills in a last-ditch effort to address federal acquisition issues.

We've seen this strategy pay off already this year, as the article goes on to note. At the end of June, two contracting reforms were enacted as part of the latest war supplemental spending bill, and back in May, another reform passed as part of the HEART Act, a bill to give tax cuts to veterans. I'm hoping it pays off again in September (although Neil Gordon writing over on POGO's blog isn't very optimistic).

One small gripe about the article though. Newell quotes Colleen Preston, the executive vice president for public policy with the Professional Services Council (PSC). The PSC is a trade association that represents the interests of government contractors - counting some of the largest government contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing as members. Preston's quotes are, well, predictable.

Preston said to some extent the pileup of contracting legislation is an election-year inevitability. The problems the bills seek to address may be real, she said, the solutions may not be what the government really needs.

"The real problem is the acquisition workforce," she said. "Until the government can address that issue, it's not clear anything will make a difference."

I want to move past the strange assertion that the government doesn't need solutions to real problems in federal contracting and cut straight to the bashing that Preston gives government contracting officers. It's so nice for her to come along and explain to us all that the problem is simply the bureaucrats. Oh, now I get it. Problem solved!

I suppose Preston feels the problem isn't related to contractors? Not at all? Really? Contractors never deliver products that don't work, never go over budget, never intentionally charge the government more than they should, never waste resources, and never fall behind schedule? Contractors never break laws or cheat or try to get every advantage and perk to turn a profit? Please.

I take issue with Newell's failure to mention that PSC is an interest group whose purpose is to promote the use and reliability of federal contractors. Knowing that, it becomes obvious that PSC has no interest in exposing its members to public scrutiny or burdensome reforms; better to blame the government for the failures of private contractors.