By John Leschak
Steven L. Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at the George Washington University Law School and former employee of the federal Office of Management and Budget, spoke at the University’s School of Law on Feb. 6 about the use of contractors by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
DHS is too reliant on contractors, Schooner claimed. In 2006, DHS spent over $5 billion on private contractors. The contracts included services that directly supported DHS missions, including intelligence analysis.
“Private contractors are used so much not because they are more efficient or less expensive,” Schooner said, “but because [DHS] does not have enough employees.”
According to Schooner, DHS is inadequately staffed, lacking the personnel to effectively oversee the contractors they hire.
Schooner recently testified in a hearing before the U.S. Senate. That hearing led to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal investigative agency.
The GAO report found that there was insufficient oversight of DHS contractors. For instance, the report found that a $42.4 million contract to support DHS’s Information and Infrastructure Protection program had only one DHS employee assigned to provide oversight.
The lack of oversight, Schooner said, increases the risk of DHS paying too much for services as well as not receiving the best possible services for its money. He cited the Parsons Corporation as a perfect illustration.. The Parsons is a construction company that received over 200 contracts from DHS to build health clinics and government offices in Iraq.
A recent report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent federal agency, found that almost all of the Parsons contracts had poor supervision. The report also found that since 2004 Parsons had only completed six of 141 primary health clinics called for in the contracts and that buildings it had completed suffered from poor plumbing, leaking urine and fecal matter.
DHS’s reliance on contractors is part of a larger shift in government procurement policy, Schooner concluded. Since the 1990s, the federal government has engaged in massive out-sourcing of government jobs. Al Gore led the movement to privatize government jobs, Schooner said.
However, the movement has continued under the Bush administration. Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s former chief of the Department of Defense, viewed the invasion of Iraq, Schooner stated, “as an opportunity for an experiment in national privatization.”
The Hofstra Law Review organized Schooner’s lecture. Schooner will be publishing an article in the next edition of the Law Review on the topic of oversight of DHS contractors.