Reforming Government Contracting: Common Ground for Obama and McCain

In light of yesterday's meeting, numerous pundits have argued that there are few or even no common ground agendas that President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain share.  However, they have strongly agreed on on the need to reform government contracting, also known as "acquisition reform."  Both have been leading lights on legislative efforts in the Senate to improve the transparency and accountability of the government's contract spending.  Senator Obama (D-IL) and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) sponsored legislation to make information about federal contracts and grants accessible to the public.  Senator McCain (R-AZ) has worked tirelessly year after year to advance acquisition reforms in the annual defense spending bills, in many cases only to be blocked by his colleagues in the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

The Obama Administration will need to find billions of dollars in government funds to advance its agenda.  There's no lower-hanging fruit than government contracting, where companies have, since Clinton Administration era "reforms", gorged taxpayer dollars with little or no oversight and accountability.  Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office identified $295 billion in cost overruns just on defense weapons spending in recent years.  Imagine cost overruns government-wide.

The Obama Administration could learn much from Senator McCain and his staff, who have dug into the minutia of the government's contracting rules.  Senator McCain's advice could be particularly helpful at this moment when many of the Clinton Administration appointees who supported the effort to decimate taxpayer protections in contracting during the 1990's are posing as reformers in an effort to get back into government.  Their legacy led to the astonishing cases of contract misspending during the Bush Administration, from Hurricane Katrina to Iraq reconstruction to Deepwater.

To learn more about contracting reforms needed to restore honesty and accountability in government spending, visit POGO's contract oversight investigations page.

-- Beth Daley

Comments

[Posted on: Nov 18, 2008 at 10:13 PM]

Yeah, McCain is a real reformer. He's such a great reformer he stopped the Department of Defense from buying C-130Js commercially and put them under a military contract. That means that instead of Lockheed risking their won capital for upgrades to the C-130, they now get to risk your money on them. And what do you know, all of the sudden everything takes longer. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the profit they're making on every hour the drag out the development of these modifications. Noooo, they'd never do that.

Why has POGO still not investigated why the development of C-130J upgrades cost 1/2 of what the same upgrades for the C-5M cost? Plus the C-130J works. You can't say the same for that piece of garbage Honeywell flight management system on the C-5. Same plant, same people, same job and one costs twice what the other costs yet POGO is not at all interested? Gee, I wonder why?

[Posted on: Nov 18, 2008 at 03:16 PM]

Beth: you know better than to extrapolate from swollen Defense hardware contracts to the rest of the government. Think of defense as the fruitbowl and the rest of government spending as the pits and peelings.