Wednesday, June 15, 2011
It’s impossible to know if the federal government is effectively spending billions of dollars on contractors to help fight the nation’s war on drugs, says a U.S. senator.
Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri, chair of the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, says there is “insufficient oversight of counternarcotics contracts at the Departments of State and Defense,” making it difficult to assess the success of spending $3.1 billion on such work between 2005 and 2009.
McCaskill points to a lack of transparency at both departments, where no centralized database or system has been established to track counternarcotics contracts. To make matters worse, the Defense Department has admitted that the current systems it is relying on are “inconsistent,” “time-consuming and error-prone.”
Spending on counternarcotics contracts increased by 32% over a five-year period, says McCaskill, but contract management and oversight was found to be insufficient.
The majority of the money, $1.8 billion, went to just five contractors: DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC, with $1.1 billion going to DynCorp.
Slightly more than half of the money was spent “on aircraft-related services, maintenance, logistics, support, equipment, and training.” The rest went to other equipment and supplies, intelligence and surveillance, information technology and communications equipment and services, construction and logistics, and personnel.
Although the contracts were spent for operations in eight Latin American countries, almost $2 billion went to Colombia alone.
-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky
Government Unable to Adequately Track Billions Spent on Counternarcotics Contracts (Senator Claire McCaskill)
New Information about Counternarcotics Contracts in Latin America (Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight) (pdf)
DynCorp and Government Waste…This Time It’s Outsourcing Iraq Linguist Contracts (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
More War, More Money for DynCorp (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
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