Contracting Reform Bills Stuck in Election Year Limbo

With the '08 election campaign heading into the homestretch, you can pretty much write off the chance of any meaningful legislation passing Congress.  This is especially true for the blizzard of comprehensive contracting reform bills introduced in the past year.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney's (D-NY) 2007 Contractors and Federal Spending Accountability Act (H.R. 3033) would mandate the creation of a contractor responsibility database similar to POGO's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database.  Even though significant revisions were made to the bill before its House passage last Spring, it is currently stuck in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, along with companion measures by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) (see sections 4502 and 4503 of the FY 2009 Defense authorization bill) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), as well as a number of other contracting reform measures.

The sponsors of these bills are attempting to bypass the committee by attaching contracting reform provisions to other bills.  For example, Sen. McCaskill's database provision was inserted into the FY 2009 Defense authorization bill (S. 3001, Section 831).  The big trade-off: the database would not be accessible to the public.

"If we had our druthers it would be public, but forces on all sides were concerned it would create an imbalance," a McCaskill aide told Government Executive this week.  The database would also be accessible only to the Defense Department, but McCaskill plans to offer an amendment on the floor to make it government-wide.

Also stuck in the committee are bills introduced by Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN) and Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to ensure that contractors with delinquent tax debts do not receive contracts, along with bills introduced by Senators McCaskill, Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) to enact into law a recent regulatory rule requiring federal contractors to self-report violations of contracting law.  POGO blogged about this rule when it was proposed last November, and again in March when many expressed outrage at a provision in the rule that exempted contractors performing overseas contracts from the reporting requirement.  That loophole was eventually eliminated from the rule, which went into effect in May.

Hopefully, when the election finally ends and a new President and Congress take office next year, something will be done about this massive backlog of desperately-needed contracting reform legislation.

-- Neil Gordon