Amendments Nos. 1150, 1151, 1152, 1153, 1154, 1155, 1156, 1157, 1158, 1159, 1160, 1161, 1162, and 1163 En Bloc to Amendment No. 1136
AMENDMENTS NOS. 1150, 1151, 1152, 1153, 1154, 1155, 1156, 1157, 1158, 1159, 1160, 1161, 1162, AND 1163, EN BLOC TO AMENDMENT NO. 1136
AMENDMENT NO. 1171
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, for some time now a bipartisan group of Senators expressed concern about the letting of billions of dollars in Iraqi reconstruction contracts without competitive bidding. We have worked very closely with the chair of the Armed Services Committee, Chairman WARNER, and with Senator Collins, who chairs the Governmental Affairs Committee. We have been able to attach an amendment to the Defense authorization bill requiring the disclosure of awards that involve closed-bid or no-bid accounts.
But the fact is, as the legislative process goes forward, too much money is now moving out of public coffers into private hands with too little assurance that those hands have won their contracts fairly.
As a result, today Senator Clinton and I are requesting the immediate public disclosure of all documents relating to USAID's decision to exempt Iraqi contracting from full and competitive bidding. In addition, Senator Clinton and myself are asking Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for explanations regarding particularly troubling contracts that have recently come to light and have been awarded by his Department.
Recently, a number of Senators have returned from Iraq. Every one of them I have heard discussing their trip, Democrats and Republicans alike, have concluded that the U.S. military will be spending more time in that country than originally calculated. The work to rebuild that ravaged nation will be more difficult rather than less so. Certainly, the billions of dollars of costs to the American people seem only to be going up.
This week, Civil Administrator Paul Bremmer said that just over the next 6 months, Iraqi oil revenues will be $2 billion short of what will be needed to finance occupation and reconstruction. U.S. taxpayers are being asked to fund the difference. They are being asked to fund the difference for the 6 months and presumably for the foreseeable future. Yet the rationale behind much of this cost remains unknown to the American people and even to the Congress. Companies have been given contracts for work in Iraq with little or no competition and no explanation.
The history of this, documented by the General Accounting Office, is such that this is a very unwise approach. The General Accounting Office has repeatedly said sole source or limited source contracts are not the best buy. They found that military leaders have often simply accepted the level of services given by a contractor without once asking if it could be done more efficiently or at a lower cost. Yet these noncompetitive contracts now seem to be the rule rather than the exception when it comes to Iraqi reconstruction.
In my view, when Federal agencies employ a process that may expose taxpayers to additional costs, the need for explanation increases manifold.
There is a crying need for transparency in how these billions of dollars are being spent. On April 19 of this year, a $50 million policing contract was awarded through closed bidding. On the same day it was reported that an $8 million contract for personnel services had been awarded nearly a month before the war began.
Think about thatawards actually before the conflict began. By the time the end of hostilities was officially declared in May, billions of dollars of contracts had already been awarded.
Fortunately, the news media has helped to get out the word about some of these issues. Right now the media is the American people's only source, apparently, for insight into these contracts. The more we learn about this, the more troubling the pattern is. Just recently the New York Times ran a feature-length article describing the letting of a multimillion dollar oil field contract to Kellogg Brown & Root.
I ask unanimous consent that important article be printed in the RECORD.
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, the reason that article is so important is because it indicates Kellogg Brown & Root essentially wrote the specs for the U.S. Government with respect to an oil field restoration effort. What that article shows is that the process basically allowed an incumbent contractor to identify the criteria for a multibillion dollar contract and virtually ensured that company would be awarded the contract without competition. If the news reports are correct, the potential for sole-source, custom-crafted contracts is basically guaranteed now by the Kellogg-Brown agreement. Senator Clinton and I have asked the Defense Department to provide within 30 days answers to some of the serious questions that involve contracting processes that seem to be used as of today.
The Department of Defense recently announced, for example, that they had some concerns about the original agreement. That is fine, but we want to know whether there are other contracts that are being let in this fashion. We want to know whether the Department of Defense intends to continue the practice where it has not been discovered by the news media.
The reason we are so concerned is if individual contractors are customarily setting the criteria for the work they plan to pursue, there are conflict-of-interest issues that ought to be resolved by our Government today. When you consider the Kellogg Brown & Root contracts are so-called cost-plus contracts, this arrangement becomes even less acceptable. Cost-plus contracts let the companies spend what they think is necessary, and then on top of it they tack on a percentage fee to make a profit. The more taxpayer dollars the company spends, the more profit they are able to bring home. A number of Iraqi reconstruction contracts, not just Kellogg-Brown's, have been designed in this way.
My view is, if the Federal Government is going to spend my constituents' money in this way, my constituents deserve an explanation.
I was at a town meeting in a small Oregon community on the Oregon coast this last weekend, where they could not afford money to have their port dredged. It may take upwards of $100 billion under some of these plans to rebuild Iraq. When our country can't afford the money to make sure our small ports get help quickly, there is no place for waste in these reconstruction matters.
Finally, to just highlight the immediacy of this concern, questions have been raised as to how MCI, a company that does no wireless service in the U.S. and never has, could end up winning the contract from the Defense Department to set up a wireless telecommunications network in Iraq.
That is the kind of question we want to see answered. That is why we are sending these letters today, calling for immediate public disclosure of these contracts so we can see whether the American people are getting their money's worth. We come to the Senate floor today because these are new concerns that have come to light. Chairman WARNER, Senator Collins, and others have worked with us in a very constructive way with bipartisan legislation that I hope will be passed quickly. But I don't think we ought to allow the outsourcing of accountability over billions of dollars of contracts for Iraq to continue one day longer. That is why I come to the floor today to announce this effort, to try to bring some sunshine to Iraqi contracting. I have always felt sunshine is the best disinfectant. It sure looks like we need some of that right now.
I yield the floor.