From Amey to Zakheim: 7 Quotable Quotes on Wartime Contracting Commission's Final Report

By DANA LIEBELSON and BRYAN RAHIJA

Yesterday, the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) held a press conference on Capitol Hill to present their final report. Here are some key quotes from the event, along with a statement from POGO's own Scott Amey.

 

Scott Amey, General Counsel, POGO "The Commission on Wartime Contracting's final report deserves considerable attention to ensure that past blunders are not repeated. The Commission's finding that at least one out of every six taxpayer dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan was lost to waste and fraud is not surprising—but it is absurd. In other words, for the past 10 years, the government has thrown $12 million a day out the window and received nothing in return."

 

Clark Kent Ervin, CWC Commissioner, former Department of Homeland Security Inspector General “We are not naïve, we know that this is a time of severe budget constraints. But it’s urgent that these recommendations be implemented. It’s not just an issue of dollars and cents, it’s an issue of safety and national security.”

 

Christopher Shays, CWC Co-Chair, former ten-term Member of the House of Representatives (R-CT) “The government was not prepared to enter the wars with a large number of contractors and the government has become over-reliant on these contractors.”

 

Michael J. Thibault, CWC Co-Chair, former Deputy Director, Defense Contract Audit Agency “If these recommendations are not adopted, we really ought to put the Congressmen in a hall of shame.”

 

Charles Tiefer, CWC Commissioner, professor, University of Baltimore School of Law [In response to question about projects that should not have been contracted]:  “We’ve been busy building diesel power plants in Afghanistan—one in Kabul and in Kandahar. These are crazy, Afghanistan doesn’t have oil, it doesn’t have pipelines and it doesn’t even have train tracks. So we’re trucking in the oil and there’s no way to keep up the excessive costs. The one contracted in Kandahar has already cost taxpayers 300 million dollars.”

 

Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) “When I served on the Foreign Relations Committee, I asked the State Department to provide a full list of contracts, and details on these contracts, in Iraq. They could not provide that list…when we introduced the legislation for the Commission on Wartime Contracting, we had to give up several things we wanted—like retroactive accountability.”

 

Dov Zakheim, CWC Commissioner, former Under Secretary and Chief Financial Officer, Department of Defense “The estimate for the waste in Afghanistan and Iraq was conservative. I think we’re closer to the 60 billion mark.”

 

Read more about the report here and here.

Dana Liebelson is POGO's Beth Daley Impact Fellow.

Follow @dliebelson

Images: POGO, CAP, America 2050, C-SPAN, OversightandReform, kalexnova, DoD.

Comments

[Bruce E. Woych]

What we are witnessing is a "strategic failure to communicate."

DEATH BY COMMITTEE:

Tactful recognition of failures become tantamount to political revelation and acknowledging the validity of potential corruption and collusion is an affirmation of personal innocence and an empty echo call for a justice remains unanswered.

We go nowhere with resolving or solving the consequences and never even breach the questions of ritual causality. It becomes an exercise in futility to think that the normative approach to self-correcting government can right itself. Kant's "Perpetual Peace" becomes a Utopian wish-wash. Consequently distorted as self proclaiming and self fulfilling Perpetual War expenditure that subsidizes the revenue streams of our most rabid and violent wealth brokers: acting as warlords in finance and political expedience. WAR AS PEACE has become the normative rule.

[pieniaszek]

Having recently reviewed many GAO Reports on DOD problems, Defense Business Board Results, as well as related Congressional Hearings, the DOD Organizational structure is systemically flawed and Congress fails to require that before they appropriate "truckloads of money", that DOD prove they have sufficient trained personnel available to track the expenditure to completion. DOD has so many enterprise systems which are inefficient and wasting money, that Senator McCaskill stated in a recent (27 August 2011) Hearing:"According to the department's systems inventory, this environment -- now this is hard to believe -- this environment is composed of 2,258 business systems and includes 335 financial management, 709 human resource management, 645 logistics, 243 real property installation, and 281 weapon acquisition management systems."
The major systemic flaw in the DOD Management process is the politically appointed Secretary incapable of managing.

[Scott Amey]

DoD says ... “We have already implemented a number of steps to improve contingency contracting based on the department’s own analysis, as well as recommendations from the independent reviews of the Government Accountability Office and the inspector general, and the commission’s previous publications and interim reports,” said Marine Col. Dave Lapan, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations.

http://fcw.com/articles/2011/09/01/reaction-defense-department-wartime-contracting-commission.aspx

[Horatio]

The report and the commissioners, in interviews, seem to bend over backwards to say the fault was with the contracting process and governing policies and with lousy govt oversight. While contractor inadequacies are there in living color and well documented. The contractors have not commented much. And they include a range of our major firms, not just demons like KBR. I would love to see the Professional Services Council comment candidly on lessons learned for contractors. Perhaps at the upcoming meeting at the Greenbriar the women and men of the industry will put on a special panel on this subject. Or, perhaps not.