The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

We've Seen This Video Before: Drunk Security Contractors Gone Wild

When we first heard that ABC News was working on a story about U.S. security contractors in Afghanistan getting drunk and doing drugs, we had one of those collective sighs: “Here we go again.”

The leaked cell phone video that ABC News and CNN broadcast this week showed a shirtless, staggering security manager for Jorge Scientific showing off his drunken Kung Fu and later wrestling another man. Even more troubling was a shot of the company’s chief medical officer appearing stoned out of his mind on what the report identified as the drug Ketamine.

As Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, told ABC News, the men in the video were not only endangering themselves, but also the civilians they were hired to protect.

There was other questionable behavior in investigative reporter Brian Ross’s Nightline report. Employees of Jorge Scientific, which has a $47 million contract to train Afghan police, also supposedly threw live ammo into bonfires they built outside their Kabul residence.

One of the former employees who blew the whistle on the improper behavior said, “It was like a frat house.”

Frat house antics. Drunk, shirtless contractors. Bonfires. It’s déjà vu all over again.

Three years ago, my colleagues at POGO heard similar stories from whistleblowers working for a different security contractor in Afghanistan. That contractor, ArmorGroup North America, provided security at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

Drones: Unmanned, but Inherently Governmental?

By NEIL GORDON

U.S. Air Force Captain Keric D. Clanahan has written a paper on the legal and policy controversies surrounding the Air Force's use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), more commonly known as drones. Specifically, Clanahan examines the kinds of tasks contractors are performing in the Air Force's drone program and discusses whether these tasks should be entrusted to contractors.

Drones have profoundly changed the nature of warfare in the last few years. The drone program greatly depends on private contractors, from drone manufacturer General Atomics to the hundreds of employees of companies like SAIC and BAE Systems who help the Air Force conduct drone missions. According to Clanahan, the U.S. military’s fleet of drones has grown from 167 in 2002 to over 7,000 in 2011, and the Air Force plans to acquire hundreds more over the next few years at a total cost that will exceed $20 billion.

Clanahan argues that government personnel should perform many of the roles necessary to sustain the drone program because they are inherently governmental functions, or functions which must be performed by federal civilian or military employees. Clanahan is somewhat vague about whether contractors in the program are performing or have performed inherently governmental functions, stating only that “there have been situations” where contractors might have crossed the line and either commanded military forces or participated in combat operations, activities which would be in violation of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the White House’s 2011 policy letter on inherently governmental functions. What is certain, however, is that contractors in the drone program are performing tasks that are closely associated with inherently governmental functions, such as drone intelligence processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED), and “critical” tasks, such as drone maintenance and repair. (Critical functions, a category introduced in the White House policy letter, are functions that are core to an agency’s mission, over which it must maintain sufficient internal capability.)

Background Check Contractor is Back in the Police Blotter

By NEIL GORDON

POGO saw a familiar name pop up in the news this week. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced that a former employee of federal contractor United States Investigations Services (USIS) had pleaded guilty to a charge of making a false statement in the course of his work for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) conducting background checks of individuals either employed by or seeking employment with federal agencies and contractors.

Bryan M. Marchand of Montgomery, AL, became the latest in a string of background investigators prosecuted in recent years for falsifying their work—claiming to have interviewed a source or reviewed a record regarding the subject of the background investigation when, in fact, they had not done so. Former USIS employee Miccah L. Dusablon pleaded guilty in January. Stewart Chase, who worked as a background investigator for both USIS and top 100 contractor CACI International, pleaded guilty last July. According to the DOJ, in the last three years, 11 background checkers and two record checkers have been convicted of making false statements while working on federal background investigations.

New Reports Find Out "What Works" in Government Contracting

By NEIL GORDON

Long-time POGO friend Pratap Chatterjee has written three excellent papers on federal contracting for the Center for American Progress (CAP). CAP's "Doing What Works" project promotes solutions that will boost government efficiency and accountability. Chatterjee, a Visiting Fellow at CAP, explores the money-saving and accountability-enhancing potential of contracting from three different angles and proposes many sensible recommendations. Here is a quick summary of the three papers, which you are encouraged to read in full by clicking on the heading links:

Insourcing

There is a simple way for the federal government to save billions of dollars while ensuring contractors do not perform inherently governmental functions—transfer certain jobs back to the public sector. In addition, the government should cut down on unnecessary layers of subcontracting, improve the cost data used in preparing service contract inventories, and streamline the federal hiring process. Insourcing will save money (as POGO reported in last year’s Bad Business report), eliminate conflicts of interest, and help the government build up and maintain vital in-house skills.

Gonna Put IT in the Want Ads: Keeping Contractors from Crossing the Line

By NEIL GORDON

While browsing Craigslist recently, POGO came across this job advertisement (pdf) posted by an unidentified “large firm” in Arlington, Virginia seeking a “Procurement Acquisition Analyst” with information technology experience to work for an unnamed government agency client. (POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database contains several Northern Virginia-based IT companies. One of them, CACI International, is headquartered in Arlington – could it be them?)

This job involves procuring IT software, hardware, and services, and it must be pretty sensitive, too, because the top of the ad declares in bold, capital letters that an active top secret clearance is required – no exceptions. (CACI also derives a substantial amount of revenue from intelligence work.) Among the functions to be performed:

- [P]rovide contractual, procurement, acquisition and technical support in the area of license management for our government client in the area of IT software purchases, expanding to hardware purchases.

- Support follows the entire lifecycle of the contract. This includes contract creation, contract maintenance, accountability throughout the life of a contract, and enforcing policy and software licensing compliance.

- [A]ssist the Contracting Officer Representative (COR) in writing and executing contracts; developing out-year budgets for software products and maintenance; assist with maintaining the inventory of licenses purchased and distributed throughout the enterprise; and tracking and monitoring contract performance. (emphasis added)

Why are we blogging about this particular job listing? After all, it’s no different than the thousands of others you see every day in newspapers or on the Web. Yet it perfectly illustrates the extent to which the federal government relies on contractors to provide a wide range of services, even those that arguably should only be performed by government employees.

White House at Odds with Senate Contracting Proposals

By NEIL GORDON and PAUL CHASSY

When it comes to the use and oversight of contractors, the Senate and White House haven't been seeing eye-to-eye lately.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) would like to clamp down on the use of contractors to perform "functions that are closely associated with inherently governmental functions" and require agencies to collect data to help better determine the actual cost of contractors.

Inherently governmental functions are functions that must be performed by federal government employees, not contractors. These functions include conducting criminal investigations, commanding military forces, determining agency policies and budgets, and awarding and administering contracts. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) also recognizes a category of functions not considered inherently governmental but which “may approach” being inherently governmental in certain circumstances. Typically, these are functions that support the performance of inherently governmental functions. The government may contract out these functions, but with extreme caution to ensure this line is not crossed.

Insourcing Road Blocks Should Be Cleared For Key DoD Weapons Offices

By BEN FREEMAN and NICK SCHWELLENBACH

The case for insourcing work performed by Pentagon contractors is growing stronger and stronger. As our latest report made clear last week, billions of dollars could be saved if the federal government converted many jobs into federal positions that are currently outsourced to more expensive contractors. On top of that, a Department of Defense (DoD) report from earlier this month said that of the nearly 17,000 jobs that the Pentagon insourced in FY 2010, 50 percent were brought back in house because it cost less to have the jobs performed by federal employees.

Furthermore, there are thousands of government positions outsourced to contractors that are considered “inherently governmental,” in other words, core government tasks that no one but government employees should undertake (many more positions are “closely related to inherently governmental”). Nine percent of those 17,000 insourced positions were insourced because they were inherently governmental, according to the DoD report.

But in the summer of last year—close to the end of fiscal year 2010—insourcing at the DoD largely stopped. “With regard to insourcing, other than changes planned for FY '10, no more full-time positions in these organizations will be created after this fiscal year to replace contractors,” then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said at an August 2010 press conference. “Some exceptions can be made for critical areas such as the acquisition workforce.”

According to senior officials at the DoD, two important areas where more insourcing needs to occur are the DoD’s Developmental Test and Evaluation office and its system engineering office. While Gates said that insourcing might still continue in this part of the workforce, winds have been blowing the other way even though the case for insourcing is stronger than ever.

OMB Issues New Policy on Inherently Governmental Functions

By NEIL GORDON

This week, the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) issued new guidance on inherently governmental functions, or activities that must be performed by federal government employees, not contractors. The new policy, which will go into effect next month, largely mirrors a draft policy issued last year.

The policy provides a standardized definition of “inherently governmental function” based on the definition in the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 (FAIR Act), which is that an activity is inherently governmental when it is so intimately related to the public interest as to require performance by government employees.

In addition, the policy explains how agencies must manage two other types of functions that can be performed by contractors. In the case of functions “closely associated” with inherently governmental functions, agencies must give special consideration to using government employees. In the case of “critical functions,” or functions considered necessary to the agency being able to effectively perform and maintain control of its mission and operations, agencies must ensure they have sufficient internal capability to oversee contractors. Agencies must take specific actions both before and after a contract is awarded to prevent contractor performance of inherently governmental functions and over-reliance on contractors performing closely associated and critical functions. 

McCaskill to Maddow: Contractor Math is Not Working for Taxpayers

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

By JOE NEWMAN

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show last night to discuss the findings of our report, which showed that the U.S. government is wasting billions on overpriced private contractors.

Of POGO, McCaskill said: "POGO is a great non-partisan group--they call them balls and strikes."

POGO studied 35 federal job classifications and found that, on average, the govermment was paying contractors nearly twice as much as it would have cost federal workers to do the same work.

During the interview, Maddow asked McCaskill if she thought POGO's report would lead to federal contracting reforms:

Maddow: Is putting a price tag on the contractors issue giving you any more traction on it in a bipartisan way? Is telling people that it's costing us 30, 40, 50, 60 billion dollars more than it ought to be gaining you any political ground?

McCaskill: I think it is. Because I'm an auditor--I want to do the math and when you do the math on this, it's not working for the taxpayer.

Joe Newman is POGO's Director of Communications.

Follow @JFNewman

POGO Study: Contractors Costing Government Twice as Much as In-House Workforce

By DANA LIEBELSON

The U.S. government's increasing reliance on contractors to do work traditionally done by federal employees is fueled by the belief that private industry can deliver services at a lower cost than in-house staff.

But a first-of-its-kind study released today by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) busts that myth by showing that using contractors to perform services actually increases costs to taxpayers.

POGO’s new report is the first to compare the rate that contractors bill the federal government to the salaries and benefits of comparable federal employees. The study found that while federal government salaries are higher than private sector salaries, contractor billing rates average 83 percent more than what it would cost to do the work in-house.

The study comes at a crucial time, considering that Congress’ special “Super Committee” is looking for ways to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal deficit.

“We’re wasting tens of billions of dollars on a belief that it’s cheaper to have contractors doing the work, without any hard evidence. The government should operate on evidence, not belief” said Paul Chassy, a POGO Investigator.

Pentagon Response to POGO on Contractor Interrogator Rule: Talk to the Hand

By NEIL GORDON

The Department of Defense (DoD) just announced it is adopting as final, without any changes, an interim rule implementing a ban on using contractors to interrogate detainees. POGO submitted a public comment on the interim rule last December voicing our support but recommending several changes.

Even though the public comment period coincided with the holiday season, it is still surprising to see that only three respondents submitted comments on this important issue. Doesn’t anyone still remember Abu Ghraib, when the Army allowed employees of contractors CACI International and Titan Corp. to run amok at the Iraqi prison?

One nice thing about being one of only three commenters on a federal agency action is that you get that agency’s nearly full and undivided attention. In this case, it seems like POGO had a one-on-one chat with DoD, which apparently wasn’t interested in what we had to say. We think our comments deserved more thoughtful responses from DoD, because the final rule fails to adequately address several issues.

FOIA Friday: Air Force Outsourced Work "Closely Related to Inherently Governmental Functions," Audit Says

FOIA FRIDAY

Every Friday, POGO will strive to make one document available that we or others have obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), especially documents that have not previously been posted online. Some of these documents will be more important than others, some may only be of historical interest— although relevance is in the eye of the beholder. POGO is doing this to highlight the importance of open government and FOIA throughout the year.

By NICK SCHWELLENBACH

This week's document: Audit report on "Advisory and Assistance Services Contracts"

Document agency: Air Force Audit Agency (AFAA)

Document number: F2011-0001-FC1000 

Document date: November 30, 2010

In a nutshell: The Air Force spent $94.3 million on eight contracts "that constituted work so closely supporting inherently governmental functions as to create significant risk that the contractors could influence or direct decisions that are not in the best interest of the Air Force," according to the report. This work included developing and recommending policy changes, governing, strategic planning for the Air Force, creating and submitting budget requests, and evaluating other contractors cost proposals. The three Air Force locations that contracted out this work were Hanscom ($71.7 million), Los Angeles ($14.7 million), and Wright-Patterson ($8 million).

In other words, contractors were doing things that we expect government employees, and only government employees, to do. Thus, “the Air Force increased its risk for potential loss of government control over and accountability for mission-related policy and programs.”