National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009--Continued
Floor Speech
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2009--Continued -- (Senate - September 15, 2008)
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I rise to speak in support of amendment No. 5276 to the National Defense Authorization Act, an amendment that would establish a government-wide Contingency Contracting Corps.
Through numerous hearings and investigations, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has documented many costly failures in contracting and acquisition management related to Federal operations following Hurricane Katrina and in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, other IGs, and the Government Accountability Office have also reported on serious problems in Federal contracting. Many of these well-documented problems might have been avoided or mitigated if the government had a reserve cadre of skilled acquisition professionals who could be dispatched to areas in urgent need to assist with procurement and contract-management tasks.
Last year, I introduced S. 680, the Accountability in Government Contracting Act of 2007, with Senators LIEBERMAN, CARPER, COLEMAN, and MCCASKILL as original cosponsors. The Senate passed this bill unanimously last November 7, including a title that would establish a government-wide Contingency Contracting Corps. Unfortunately, House leaders have failed to take up our unanimously passed bill.
Just a few days before the Senate action, the Army released the report of a special commission on procurement headed by former Under Secretary of Defense Jacques Gansler. The Gansler Report noted that while contracting workload had increased by 350 percent since 1995, the Army's contract-oversight staff had declined by almost 50 percent. The report's recommendations for more people, better training, organizational reform, and other improvements offer us a case study of the challenges facing the Federal acquisition process.
``First and most important is the people,'' Dr. Gansler said while presenting his report. He was right, and that truth is at the core of the amendment that Senator Lieberman and I now offer.
The need for a Contingency Contracting Corps is urgent. The Federal Government purchases more than $440 billion of goods and services each year. Some of these purchases are pursuant to contracts issued under the stress and urgency of military operations or an emergency response.
Purchasing on such a prodigious scale and across a vast array of departments and programs can create abundant opportunities for fraud, waste, and abuse. And doing so under the stress of military or disaster-recovery operations without sufficient staff skilled in working in those conditions can multiply the potential for trouble.
Unfortunately, our government moved into the 21st century with 22 percent fewer Federal civilian acquisition personnel than it had at the start of the 1990s. And as noted, the decline in the DOD acquisition workforce was even more pronounced.
We have seen that the urgent demands of natural disasters, a terrorist attack, or active military operations can overwhelm any agency's acquisition workforce. This amendment would provide the equivalent of a rapid-reaction force or strike team to ensure that emergency acquisition activities are performed swiftly, effectively, and economically.
The Corps would draw on volunteers from civilian and uniformed Federal-acquisition professionals. It would be managed by the OFPP Administrator. The Administrator would be authorized to prescribe additional training and determine when the Corps would be deployed. Any deployments would be made in consultation with the heads of the affected agencies, and in the case of military or civilian DOD employees, with the concurrence of the Defense Department.
The Contingency Contracting Corps is not a substitute for the many other reforms needed to improve government-wide acquisition, but it can help our Nation deal with urgent demands by temporarily reallocating trained acquisition staff from their regular duties to areas of pressing need. The Corps would help guard against the wasteful and excessive spending that too often occurs in exigent circumstances.
I urge my colleagues to adopt this much-needed, carefully constructed, and bipartisan amendment.
Mr. President, I rise to speak in support of amendment No. 5277 to the National Defense Authorization Act, an amendment that will improve stewardship of taxpayer dollars while promoting more transparency and competition in the procurement of goods and services by our government. Senator Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, joins me in sponsoring this amendment.
Our amendment, the Accountability in Government Contracting Act, is a bipartisan response to contracting problems identified by the Homeland Security Committee that pose increasing dangers of waste, fraud, and abuse as Federal contracting continues to grow.
The amendment consists of provisions that passed the Senate unanimously last November as part of S. 680. Many of that bill's provisions were included in last year's defense authorization. The remaining provisions are offered in this amendment, with modifications based on discussions with other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Joining Senator Lieberman and me in this effort are Senators Coleman, Carper, Akaka, McCaskill, and Tester.
The Federal Government purchases about $440 billion in goods and services each year. The rising costs of military operations, natural disasters, homeland security precautions, and other vital programs will drive those expenditures to even higher levels in the years ahead.
This prodigious level of purchasing creates abundant opportunities for fraud, waste, and abuse. We have seen far too many outrageous failures in government contracting, such as unusable trailers for hurricane victims, shoddy construction of schools and clinics in Afghanistan, or the installation in Iraq of showers for our troops that pose electric-shock hazards. All of these failures and more demand strong steps to protect taxpayer dollars and deliver better acquisition outcomes.
Obstacles to improvement include personnel shortages, resource constraints, poor program administration, and inadequate accountability an transparency in the contracting process.
The resource challenges go far beyond funding, and start with a simple lack of trained personnel. The Federal Government moved into the 21st century with 22 percent fewer Federal civilian acquisition personnel than it had at the start of the 1990s. The Department of Defense, which has the largest acquisition budget, has been disbursing enormous amounts of money to contractors since the first Gulf war, but saw its acquisition workforce shrink by more than 50 percent between 1994 and 2005.
Among the current, attenuated Federal acquisition workforce, nearly 40 percent were eligible to retire at the end of the last fiscal year. Meanwhile, the number and scale of federal purchases continue to rise, making this human-capital crisis even more dire.
Other challenges to fair, effective, and open competition and oversight include inadequate definition of requirements, overuse of letter contracts that fail to include all critical terms until after performance is complete, excessive tiering of subcontracts, and insufficient publicly available data on Federal contracts.
Our amendment offers sensible, practical reforms to address these problems.
A critical feature of this legislation will help recruit, retain, and develop an adequate Federal acquisition workforce. It establishes an acquisition internship program that will provide professional training and development for careers in Federal procurement and acquisition management to at least 200 college graduates per year. Another provision would require that government chief acquisition officers have extensive management experience--a requirement lacking in current law.
Our amendment also promotes more competition for government contracts--a positive step for both contractors and taxpayers.
Competition for government contracts helps to control costs, encourage innovation, and improve quality. Unfortunately, the tide has been running the wrong way. While the dollar volume of Federal contracting has nearly doubled since the year 2000, fewer than half of all ``contract actions''--new contracts and payments against existing contracts--are now subject to full and open competition, down from more than three-quarters in the year 2000.
Our Homeland Security Committee investigations of federal contracting problems in the Hurricane Katrina disaster and in our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have confirmed the obvious concerns about this trend.
We need more competition, less sole-source contracting, and tougher management of Federal contracts. Our amendment mandates enhanced competition for each task or delivery order over the simplified acquisition threshold.
It further encourages competition for those orders by requiring Internet postings of notices of all sole-source task-or-delivery orders above the simplified acquisition threshold, within 14 business days after the award.
Another provision takes aim at abuse of interagency and enterprise-wide contracts, which account for 40 percent of Federal contract spending. It requires the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to survey, review, and provide guidance on procedures for creating, using, and continuing these interagency acquisitions. This step should eliminate some of the redundancies that have been discovered in these complex arrangements--redundancies that reduce the government's purchasing power and waste tax dollars.
I shall briefly note some other important provisions of the amendment.
The amendment will rein in the practice of hastily awarding letter contracts missing key terms, such as price, scope or schedule, and then failing to supply those terms until the contractor delivers the good or service--thereby placing all risk of failure on the government. In Iraq and Katrina contracting, we saw the perils of failing to supply the ``missing term'' promptly. For example, in July 2006, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction identified 194 individual task orders valued at $3.4 billion that were classified as ``undefinitized contract actions.''
The government has allowed too much money and too many contract actions to linger in this status. The amendment corrects this flaw by requiring clear guidance in the Federal Acquisition Regulation and strong justification for making such contracts or orders.
Contracting for Hurricane Katrina and in Iraq has also involved excessive tiering of subcontractors, driving up costs and complicating contract administration. The amendment mandates regulatory guidance for minimizing tiering to ensure that every layer of subcontracting adds value or serves a valid purpose in meeting Federal requirements.
In our committee investigation of debris removal after Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that required clearing away nearly 100 million cubic yards of debris, we found that some contracts involved five or six tiers of subcontractors, often with little or no apparent added value. This provision would put in place government-wide requirements to control this practice and its potential for wasting tax dollars.
Another important provision requires the OFPP to review and report on existing policies and to recommend needed changes to ensure that Federal agencies are not contracting out essential core responsibilities of government. The risks of such activity were made starkly clear in our committee's recent discovery that a contractor wrote parts of FEMA's request for proposals for the TOPOFF 5 emergency-management exercise and was then allowed to bid on the contract. This clear conflict of interest threatened both the integrity of the competitive process and objective implementation of Federal policy.
The amendment also restricts the de-facto outsourcing of program-management responsibility when a large contractor becomes a ``lead systems integrator'' for a multipart project and requires the OFPP to craft a government-wide definition of lead systems integrators.
The Accountability in Government Contracting Act combines practical, workable, and targeted reforms to improve a complex process that expends hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year. As the SIGIR said of these proposals in a Homeland Security Committee hearing last year, ``these kinds of reforms are exactly what will save taxpayer dollars ... and address very directly the problems that we have been experiencing in contracting in Iraq.''
My amendment will pay recurring dividends for years to come in higher quality proposals, in avoidance of wasteful and excessive spending, and in better results for our citizens. I urge my colleagues to support it.
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