Imagine it. Congressional oversight.

A Washington Post article this last weekend prompted Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee to write yet another letter (pdf) to committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) asking him to actually exercise oversight over meaningful government issues such as contracting. 

The Post article by Robert O'Harrow and Scott Higham discusses accusations that Unisys, an information technology company, overcharged the government for labor.  For example, taxpayers have been billed "$131.12 an hour for a technical writer who should have made no more than $46.43 an hour. The extra money was generally not passed along to the employees but was kept by the company."  Unisys has billed the government $940 million of its $1 billion Transportation Security Administration contract to create a computer network linking the nation's airports, though less than half the work is complete. (Which is funny since Unisys's motto is "Imagine it. Done."  Imagine indeed.)

Instead of being upfront about the real price tag, apparently the $1 billion figure was a deliberately low amount--the work will likely cost $3 billion--to gain support from Congress.  Other problems with the Unisys contract, as noted by O'Harrow and Higham, are that TSA:

• used "a little-known Transportation Department program...which speeds the process by pre-qualifying contractors and abbreviating competition, [but] has had documented problems with oversight";
• did not provide "detailed specifications to the contractor," but instead asked "the contractor to determine what was needed";
• did not have enough contracting-oversight specialists to provide adequate oversight.

Waxman is right to demand that the House Government Reform Committee get its act together and start doing its job.  One of Congress's main roles is oversight over the Executive branch and federal agencies.  It's a little something citizens, and hopefully, members of Congress should have learned in high school civics class, called called checks and balances and separation of powers.  And there's no excuse--the Congressional Research Service has even provided Congress with a Congressional Oversight Manual.  Davis could serve the American people better if he'd focus on something more significant than steroids in baseball.

Comments

[Ellery]

Tom Davis doesn't just do steroids hearings. Don't forget, he also sent a subpoena to poor Terri Schiavo and interfered in local land use cases. He's been too busy to do oversight.

[K Street buddy]

Would you please, POGO, publish the missing Page 2 of Waxman's letter???????????????

[Christopher Edison Rudisaile]

I said it once, I,ll say it a BILLION TIMES!
FREEDOM IS TRUELY GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL!
God never set Anyone FREE!
AMERICA IS NOTHING BUT A GIANT EGOISTICAL GIANT THINKING GOD SAT US FREE!
YOU PEOPLE ARE SERIOUSLY LOST!

[Kevin]

Shouldn't the issues be brought forward before solutions for them are proposed? It looks strange and somewhat suspicious when the mechanic says "We're selling you four new tires for your car," and you didn't even know there was anything wrong with them.

* "did not have enough contracting-oversight specialists to provide adequate oversight."

I've noted this as a common theme in testimony from defense industry sources to DAPA, reports, executive priorities in DHS/DoD, et. al. It's definitely a real issue. This might lead one to ask what would be necessary to attract and retain such people - again, any answers forthcoming from Waxman et. al.?

Is the problem really so much that people don't want the job or is the problem that the jobs simply don't exist? Oversight officials were the ones who got the pink slips in the '90s when the government decided it needed to be more efficient. How does one become more efficient? Evidently the answer is "get rid of whoever's watching you."

[Joe Katzman]

Waxman is a moron. He has no idea what standard practice is, or why, and no sense of proportion re: what's important here and what's trivial.

Let's start with the trivial.

I've worked in the consulting industry - civilian, not defense related. Waxman doesn't get out much, does he?

Junior consultants are billed out at around $150/hour. The technical writer's cost is not unusual, and hundreds if not thousands of US businesses pay similar rates for similar work every year. That's the price companies pay for the overhead of the consulting firm having the writer on staff all the time (and paying that cost), vetted for talent and reliability, and familiar with the project management approaches etc. of the consulting team, available when clients need them instead of being on client staff (and salary/benefits) at all times.

Clients could hire their own contractors in certain areas to complement the consulting team they hired, but that means going through several writers until they find one with the right attributes, dealing with any conflicts in working styles between the writer and the team, and possibly creating difficulties in the overall project timeline if things don't work out and replacements are necessary, or if the independent's unfamiliarity leads to misunderstandings. The extra money is a "reliability premium" - and if things aren't working, it's the contractor's responsibility to fix via replacement, extra staffing (a cost the consulting firm will probably eat), etc.

Given the overall size of such projects and the cost of delay, these reliability premiums aren't an insane idea. It may be possible to work with independents some of the time (I am one now) for skills like technical writing, but that's a judgment call.

Waxman's bit about the extra funds being kept by the company was simply pathetic, and makes me wonder if he actually grasps how a company operates. But he's a Democrat, so who knows?

Also in the "real world" category...

"Unisys has billed the government $940 million of its $1 billion Transportation Security Administration contract to create a computer network linking the nation's airports, though less than half the work is complete."

Anyone out there looked at the number of IT projects that come in over budget (often significantly) or late (often significantly)? I'm talking about civilian AND government. The numbers are large, and the reasons are structural, and there's a whole body of literature about it. It's not unusual, it's often worse if projects are managed internally by corporate/government bureaucracies, and you can't know if it's a problem or scandal (and if it is, where the faiult lies) without knowing a lot about the project itself. A bit of illumination there might be nice.

And...

"did not provide "detailed specifications to the contractor," but instead asked "the contractor to determine what was needed";"

This is common. If everything has to be specified, you get the 600-page specification nightmares that lengthen project times and add costs, leading to $1,000 hammer that really did cost the company almost that much to deliver. You can't have it both ways. The question is was that approach intelligent in that specific case? And to ask it, you're micromanaging. In short, it's a dumb question.

If you think this is what your high school civics class taught you as meaningful "oversight"... then I'm sorry about the school you went to. But then, I don't expect things in the real world to be run on the basis of High School, so maybe I should cut yours some slack.

This is all really basic, folks. I expect a reporter to be a know-nothing, but I do expect more from an outfit like POGO that's supposed to have some actual procurement domain expertise.

Now, the major stuff that actually matters:

* "Instead of being upfront about the real price tag, apparently the $1 billion figure was a deliberately low amount--the work will likely cost $3 billion--to gain support from Congress."

This is very common, and it's a real, serious problem. If we want to change it, we'd have to change the process and incentives so that lowballing was, on balance, an ineffective strategy. This would require real work, and the results would be subject to attacks from opportunists like Waxman (chanrges of overpayment and favouritism, no doubt). Does Waxman have any useful ideas or proposals to offer here? THAT would be meaningful - but I'm not holding my breath.

* "did not have enough contracting-oversight specialists to provide adequate oversight."

I've noted this as a common theme in testimony from defense industry sources to DAPA, reports, executive priorities in DHS/DoD, et. al. It's definitely a real issue. This might lead one to ask what would be necessary to attract and retain such people - again, any answers forthcoming from Waxman et. al.?

THIS is what the POGO report should have zeroed in on - and didn't. To the list of failures on this one, I'm afraid we have to add one for POGO.