Senators Urge an Aggressive Probe of Wartime Contracting Abuse

At the inaugural meeting Monday of the congressionally created Commission on Wartime Contracting, Sens. Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb and Susan Collins charged the group to investigate what McCaskill called a “massive failure” of accountability.
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Finding the money and political capital for recommended fixes will be a hard task. Still, the senators urged the group to press ahead vigorously.

“This report is not going to be enough,” McCaskill said of the commission’s final product, due in August 2010. “You’re going to need a two-by-four.”

The commission, made up of experts and former officials, was created by Congress in the fiscal 2008 defense authorization law (PL 110-181). Webb, D-Va., and McCaskill, D-Mo., who sponsored the language, have pushed accountability initiatives, along with other Democrats in the Senate class of 2006. Webb on Monday promised the group subpoena power and more time if needed to fulfill its mission. Collins, of Maine, has also pushed for more accountability as ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The commission and the senators seized on Monday’s release of a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), a 358-page history of waste, fraud and lessons learned over nearly six years of invasion and occupation.

Coordination Problems

While it contains a familiar litany of failed projects, botched management and inadequate security for reconstruction, the report also emphasizes structural blockages within the U.S. government. “The Iraq reconstruction experience was characterized by a continuing and disabling lack of coordination among the government agencies, contractors, and other organizations involved,” it says, noting that 62 offices and agencies ended up managing projects from just one of the reconstruction funds.

President George W. Bush set the problem in motion by delegating all post-war planning activities to the Pentagon in 2003, removing the National Security Council from its traditional coordinating role, according to the report.

Among the commission’s recommendations is strengthening coordination across agencies, notably in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (CRS).

The agency, created in 2004 and authorized in the fiscal 2009 defense authorization law (PL 110-417), is designed to enable inter-agency cooperation as well as run several “civilian response corps” that can be deployed to emergencies and post-conflict reconstruction.

The new system has never been used, however, and the response corps are at less than half their authorized strength. The SIGIR report says the office “has been hamstrung both by weak budgets and a lack of authority,” noting that cross-agency efforts have no natural constituency in Congress.

The $55 million provided for the corps in a supplemental bill (PL 110-252) is emergency funding. Without regular fiscal 2009 appropriations in the omnibus Congress might consider this week, the corps would expire with the end of the fiscal year.

“If that does not happen, the civilian response corps is under threat of becoming the Cinderella response corps,” Ambassador John Herbst, head of CRS, said recently. Bush requested $249 million for the corps in fiscal 2009, but appropriators would have to shoehorn that money into the omnibus.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has its own similar program under way, which SIGIR Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr. said could undermine the idea of coordination across the government.

“They could represent a Balkanized solution to a problem of Balkanization,” he said of the several efforts.

http://www.cq.com/doc/news-3022825?wr=Q1U4djBRbm5MbWtJZDAyVGlTYXljUQ