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Thursday, April 24, 2008
Feds Return Virtual Border Fence to Boeing
Here's a short item reported ($) in CongressDaily yesterday afternoon that as escaped most mainstream media coverage. Apparently the federal government, specifically officials at the Customs and Border Protection office, have decided to scrap continued work on a brand new, $20 million virtual fence along the Arizona-Mexico border. The initiative, called Project 28, was awarded to Boeing, Inc., as part of a $67 million contract to provide advanced border protection technologies.
Project 28 has experienced repeated delays (in June 2007 and again in February 2008) due to technical problems and software glitches since it began about 18 months ago, and now that the government has accepted the program infrastructure from Boeing, it found out it doesn't work. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has testified before Congress that the technology provided under the contract "did not fully meet user needs and the project's design will not be used as the basis for future" development of border protection technologies.
Now I can understand that the development of new technologies is not an exact science and that it is possible the government can gain valuable insights into how to solve problems even if the products of a contract such as this are not used any further. Particularly in research and development programs, more can often be learned through failure than from success. In fact, GAO also testified that "[Customs and Border Protection] officials responsible for the program said that although Project 28 will not be replicated, they have learned lessons from their experience that they plan to integrate into future technology development."
That's great. But something still doesn't feel right about this. It would be one thing if the government and Boeing took a shot on a sophisticated, fancy new system that may or may not work. I'm all for pushing boundaries. But that doesn't appear to be what happened. The system developed by Boeing really isn't all that technologically sophisticated. Here's a passage from a 2007 New York Times article:
Rather than develop new technology, Boeing took existing cameras, sensors, radar and other equipment and bundled them into a system that although not technologically novel is unlike anything the Border Patrol now uses.
The best I can tell, it looks like Boeing proposed to use technology it had already developed, slapped it together in a way which appears to not have worked at all, and sold it to the government for $20 million. And CBP (along with the rest of us) are supposed to be happy because it is simply better than what the government used to have? Do you think this is really what the contract layed out for Boeing to supply? Given that the GAO repeatedly warned Congress to keep the program on a tight leash because it ran the risk of not being able to deliver promised capabilities and benefits, it seems possible they thought Boeing was jerking the government around. It kind of feels like Boeing owes us all $20 million. Shouldn't they burden part of the risk of these so-called "new technologies?"
Unfortunately, we can't really figure that out at this point. I can't really tell if Boeing over promised and under delivered on this contract because I don't have access to the text of the contract. But there is no reason why I shouldn't have access to it. In the last few years we've made great progress in opening up federal government spending (see USASpending.gov), but there much more to do. The text of all federal contracts should be publicly available and searchable online. Then we can all judge for ourselves if Boeing owes us all that $20 million back.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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