Waxman Attempts to Plug Truck-Sized Loophole for Theft
Remember that truck-sized loophole for theft the Bush Administration created? The one that takes a rule that says contractors have to reveal contracting fraud, and adds a loophole for anyone doing business outside the US? Well, Waxman is on it:
On May 23, 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that the Federal Acquisition Regulation be amended to “require contractors to establish and maintain internal controls to detect and prevent fraud in their contracts, and that they notify contracting officers without delay whenever they become aware of a contract overpayment or fraud, rather than wait for its discovery by the government.” DOJ believed such a rule was necessary because few government contractors voluntarily disclose suspected instances of fraud. DOJ proposed specific changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation.
In response, on November 14, 2007, the Civilian Agency Acquisition Council and the Defense Acquisition Regulations Council published a proposed rule on “Contractor Compliance Program and Integrity Reporting.” This rule requires contractors to have a code of ethics and business conduct, to establish and maintain specific internal controls to detect and prevent improper conduct in connection with the award or performance of government contracts or subcontracts, and to notify contracting officers without delay whenever they become aware of violations of Federal criminal law with regard to such contracts or subcontracts. The proposed changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation closely track the DOJ proposal, with two primary substantive changes: the exemption for contracts to be performed overseas and a second exemption for contracts for commercial items.
On January 14, 2008, DOJ filed a comment on the proposed rule stating that “we do not agree with” the exemption for overseas contracts. According to DOJ, “[a]lthough these contracts may be performed outside the United States, the United States still is a party to these contracts and potentially a victim when overpayments are made or when fraud occurs in connection with the contracts. Under these circumstances, the government still maintains jurisdiction to prosecute the perpetrators of the fraud. Moreover, these types of contracts, which in many cases support our efforts to fight the global war on terror, need greater contractor vigilance because they are performed overseas where U.S. government resources and remedies are more limited.”
The addition of the exemption for overseas contracts against the wishes of the Justice Department, as well as the exemption for commercial items, raises questions as to why and how these provisions were added to the new rule proposed by DOJ.
To assist the Committee in its review of this proposed rule and related legislation, we ask that you provide the following documents to the Committee no later than April 4, 2008. At this point, only documents created on or before November 14, 2007, need to be provided to the Committee:
1. Any documents received from or sent to persons outside the executive branch relating to the overseas exemption or the commercial item exemption;
2. Any documents describing the reasons or justification for the overseas exemption or the commercial item exemption or urging the inclusion of the overseas exemption or the commercial item exemption in the proposed rule; and
3. Any documents objecting to the overseas exemption or the commercial item exemption or urging the exclusion of the overseas exemption or the commercial item exemption from the proposed rule. [my emphasis]
I’m most intrigued by the addressees of Waxman’s letter–it includes several people whom he has tussled with before:
- Secretary of Defense Gates
- Attorney General Mukasey
- National Aeronautics and Space (NASA) Administrator Griffin
- Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Nussle
- General Services Administration (GSA) Administrator Doan
Of course, Doan is working with the certitude that if she does–or did–anything to stick this loophole in the rule, she still won’t be fired. She was busted for violating the Hatch Act already, of course, but President Bush pointedly ignored those violations, which would normally require her termination.
Any bets on the culprit?
Can Doan be impeached?
Bob in HI
Yes, but it requires a political will that seems demonstrably absent on both sides of the aisle.
An exemption for commercial contracts? Well, that’s Ms. Doan operation, it’s all she buys. What an intriguing way for the president to grant a de facto pardon without putting his fingerprints on it. It also leaves out, oh, IT contractors who process, oh, reams of data, and quite a few other players.
Rove printed a Get Out of Jail Free Card and left it on the xerox; everybody gets to push the “copy” button. Not in law, perhaps, but with statutes of limitation passing and evidence going stale and a gazillion dysfunctions to fix at DOJ, it’s pretty close.
Well, he also sent this to NASA. NASA also does a lot of the same contracting, so it’s not clear who did the commercial exemption. And Griffin is just as big a hack as Doan.
indeed. jet propulsion lab employees have struck one blow against the hacktacular Griffin and his attempt to hoover up all their personal info and dump it into a permanent database to be overseen by partisan ideologues – the appeals court remanded their case for trial in the district court.
constitution: 1
griffin: 0
I think Harry Turman would have appreciated Henry Waxman.
LOL–Harry TRUman, maybe?
But yeah, I think so too.
CREW strikes another blow for truth and justice:
Bob in HI
EW wrote: Any bets on the culprit?
First, it’s a safe guess that ‘culprit’ should be plural.
Culprits include Doan, and surely extend to DoD, DoS, and other divisions of the Fed.
Doan is so partisan that she comes across as a one-woman cartoonish freak show. But no doubt the Blackwater advisors and the Halliburton execs find her useful.
So it’s OK for companies to steal from us overseas. I’m hearing this for the first time, and I am appalled (even though I thought I was immune to surprise at their depredation).
BTW, here’s James K. Galbraith on “The Predator State.”
http://www.motherjones.com/com…..state.html
Yes, the “commercial contracts” language seems to exempt all but defense purchases. Multiple tens of billions per year. Where “national security” fits in I don’t know, but most of it comes under defense spending. That makes it harder to learn about questionable purchases – conceivably the purchasing processes themselves – by virtually all government departments, not just Doan’s GSA.
The exemption applies not just to traditionally purchased goods and services, but to the many activities commonly considered “governmental activity”, that this administration has outsourced with abandon.
This is just one brigade in the administration’s assault on oversight, on the public’s awareness of on what and how effectively its government spends tax dollars. Others include its attacks on whistleblowers, on the independence of departmental IG’s, its imposition of political commissars to vet all public comments by departmental staffs. All of which dovetails neatly with the converse, which is the government’s assault on its citizens’ privacy. As does the dismantling of the fed’s principal bloodhound, the DOJ.
The Bush Administration is covering tracks the size of a Sherman tank’s, as it executes a quite different March to the Sea.
EW, et al — it is being reported that the State Department has had firings because of a breach of Obama’s passport file…shades of Watergate? Who knows…KO is covering now. Anyone have more info?
A passport file includes a laundry list of personal details. In the case of a sitting Senator, many of them might be public, but not all. It may also contain highly confidential details obtained in connection with the security clearance(s) Obama must have, as well as any Hoover-like special details the administration may collect on domestic persons of interest. Those would include comments by persons interviewed and investigators themselves, including any recommendation to grant a clearance.
Such files ought to be among the most confidential in government. But just as the Rove White House permitted a Gothic horde of White House staff to communicate directly with the DOJ about pending investigations, this administration seems to have torn down walls among many departments, the better to allow them to communicate and keep us “safe”. (Dentist’s drill bit and oil of cloves optional.)
A hole in State’s system should have allowed many more files than Obama’s to leak out. If it turns out to be only Obama’s, he’s the target of nasty, powerful forces.
Department of Defense should poll the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to see what they think about the reporting exemption.
Obama scares these wingnuts beyond belief…I pray for his safety — nasty is an understatement I fear. I am so sick of the criminal activity of this administration and they keep getting away with it!
Yes, Obama would have an extensive passport file too — since he has lived and traveled so many countires starting at a young age.
I know it’s cynical, but…
thank god, something to knock the air out of the “Bad Obama Minister” balloon… finally.
not cynical at all…the MSM have been relentless sharks on that story. I’ll be happy to have it replaced.
The Obama passport file story on NPR is that two outside contractors – coincidentally working under commercial contracts exempted from special scrutiny – seem to have gained unauthorized access to Obama’s file to satisfy their own curiosity. Those two were apparently fired and a third person reprimanded.
I may be less curious than normal, though I’ve never been accused of it. But why would two people, who make a living doing that work, jeopardize their living – and impose on themselves a probably lifelong prohibition on doing similar governmental work – by accessing Obama’s file for a lark?
I can see it worth that risk for oppo research, but not because of curiosity, no matter how many cats it kills. The press would do us a favor by letting us know what those two are doing after six and twelve months, just in case it turns out to be a WingNut Welfare gig.
what a joke…if the information these clowns found out was disseminated to anyone — it would be a felony! That is serious shit.
But wasn’t the treasonous act of outing a CIA operative, and the politicization of the DOJ, and lying to the American people to take them into an unjust criminal an dcostly war — serious shit too?
Who would prosecute this felony if there were one? Surely not Mukasey DOJ and Mukasey designated to guard the hencoop, was required to get down on his knees before Cheney and swear that he wouldn’t appoint any special counsels from the time he’s there until he writes his 6 figure book brokered by Bob Barnett at Williams & Connolly of course, and is safely tucked back into a corner office at Austin Sidley.
If there were any Swiftboat actionable info, it has already made its way to 327s. But I personally think this is going to be a blip erased by tomorrow’s Jerimiah Wright or the dummy documents that HRC had released with everything and anything redacted that told you nothing but purported to be disclosure.
I know this is sophmoric, but the Republican kill machine will have access to each and every wiretap they want to use to try to go after Obama and it will belly flop on its face.
Did they manage, or at least try, to disseminate the contents of the file? Even if not, they should be in trouble, but I’m wondering about damage.
Then again, we might not know what if anything was disseminated until the election race’s home stretch.
Don’t know. Josh Marshall has a couple of items on it at TPM. One has the three dates in January and February on which Obama’s file was accessed, which correspond with important Democratic primary events, including the debate in Texas. The other is that Bill Clinton’s passport file was also illegally accessed in 1992; a special investigation “came to nothing”. Plus ca change, n’est-ce pas?
Curiosity my ass. They did it with a purpose, and they are covering for whomever sent them on this mission.
Bob in HI
Can someone tell me what kind of things are in a “passport file” and how one gets generated? Is it everyone with a passport or one of a million contractors in Nation 1984 who generate files on your every molecule?
This is odd. Why in the world would Bush’s State Department disclose this incident to the news media? There must be unauthorized accesses to important peoples’ passport files happening all the time. Was somebody going to spill it or something?
Does anyone know why the State Dept. has contractors rather than regular federal employees here in homelandia?
I rather suspect it makes them easier to bribe.
My guess it’s just another chance for Bush cronies to fleece the country. In this case it does have the added bonus of access to “interesting” material.
It’s a component of the comprehensive Bush/Paulson Economic plan to combat the recession. The ratio is three contractors to one fed employee.
That’s how many contractors it’ll take to get the same work done, right?
Btw, here’s my first prediction for when I’m on vacation.
At 1:00 tomorrow, Waxman will have his request for COndi for more information on the passport breach. Asking who the contractor is, who reviewed the breach, who made the decision to fire but not press charges.
It’ll be online abournd 1:27.
Hope it’s good. I’ll be on the roard.
Bon voyage.
A great vacation probably doesn’t have a lot of Waxman in it.
There’s no reason at all for Republican operatives to use low-level contractors for their dirty work when they have the entire police state apparatus of the Homeland at their disposal. Darth undoubtedly has a massive dossier on Obama that includes his every phone conversation, email, pillow talk, college term paper, kindergarten craft project, etc etc. He will certainly share the juiciest bits with whoever has been appointed to carry out McCain’s dirty tricks. It is very much to Darth’s advantage to have the Chimp succeeded by someone who will continue the coverups, and who incidentally owes Darth some favors. That’s why the Bush administration is letting us know about this — there’s probably no more to the story than meets the eye.
Plausible deniability.
I’m lookin’ for the pillow talk to get into the primary. Why hasn’t it been vetted yet?
Bob, have to agree. Outside contractors doing any IT or substantive work for State must themselves have security clearances, which obviously didn’t catch these two (or more, who knows, the investigation is still “in process”). It defies belief that these two on three (?) separate occasions over several weeks illegally accessed a file “for a lark”. The repetitive access suggests they were pretty cocky and didn’t think they’d be caught. The purpose is nefarious and must have been coordinated with others relatively high in government.
Good point about why the public disclosure if it involved only a single person – who happens currently to be the leading Democratic contender for the presidency. Every top Democrat should wonder about their own file. If it were the kind of leak described, one would have thought it would have been communicated to Obama, but no one else. Presumably, State assumed Obama wouldn’t keep it private and tried to control the issue via the public disclosure.
Why outside contractors, Loo Hoo? It’s in the First Book of Bush, chapter one, verse one: Why spendeth one tax dollar on a government employee, when thou can spendeth ten tax dollars on a private contractor for the same thing? Bush fundamentally doesn’t want government to do anything that could be done by a private contractor; he has outsourced with abandon.
My guess is that the contracts are poorly written, not favorable to the government, and make it expensive and hard to undo. Like attempting to make long term commitments in Iraq without asking for Congressional approval, it’s partly to cement their preferred arrangements in place, partly to grab as much money out of the poor box as possible before the verger makes his rounds to collect it. Outsourcing, IMHO, is also used to circumvent recalcitrant “old hands” who aren’t with the program, to get them to leave, if possible, at a minimum, to prevent them from influencing policy, or even knowing about it.
Pre-Bush, State primarily often used former State employees – who still had the necessary clearances and knew how things worked on the inside – to do lots of things, but mostly administrative and HR stuff, not policy analysis. During Bush, who the hell knows?
Webb said he had no idea why the president rejected a congressionally authorized oversight of “contract” administration; Webb-McKaskill amendment v. section 841 of the Defense Bill; similar information on Webb’s senate site. If this were 2 years ago, Tom Clemons would have guessed Woolsey made a call to Addington making a suggestion to write a signing statement for bluepenciling although lineitem veto is illicit. Snyder at the March 11 2008 subcommittee hearing on the signing statement said he invited DoD to explain what it thought of the January 27 signing statement on the even of the SOTU, but DoD refused to send any witness to the hearing; other witnesses were there, though.
Then perhaps congress needs to limit state department monies to federal employees.