How far does the cri­sis of gov­ern­ment con­tract­ing over­sight go? Appar­ently, it extends deep into some of America’s most hal­lowed ground: Arling­ton National Cemetery.

The Army Inspec­tor Gen­eral and the Sen­ate Sub­com­mit­tee on Con­tract­ing Over­sight this sum­mer have issued scathing reports on mis­man­age­ment at Arling­ton which they say has resulted in hun­dreds, even thou­sands, of graves mis­marked. Salon broke the story last year, and here are some of the find­ings con­firmed by gov­ern­ment investigators.

• The cemetary OK’ed multi-million dol­lar IT con­tracts but didn’t have an acqui­si­tion strategy.
• No con­tract­ing offi­cer was sta­tioned at the cemetery.
• A cemetary offi­cial served as de facto con­tract­ing offi­cer for the tech­nol­ogy upgrade, though he was not trained in that role.
• Con­tract­ing offi­cers up the com­mand chain usu­ally just rubber-stamped whichever com­pany ceme­tery offi­cials recommended.
• That de facto offi­cial was the government’s point man on dozens of con­tracts that Army inves­ti­ga­tors say wasted more than $5.5 mil­lion and came up with no work­ing data­base to track grave sites.

In the words of sub­com­mit­tee head Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.):

We know that nearly every pos­si­ble prob­lem in con­tract­ing occurred, and con­se­quences are appalling.…I’m look­ing for­ward to talk­ing with those responsible.

Just who is respon­si­ble? Of course cemetary man­age­ment is tak­ing the heavy knocks but the Arling­ton case is also a symp­tom of a far big­ger, government-wide cri­sis in the capac­ity to ade­quately over­see con­tract work. Janine stud­ied this as part of her research for her book Shadow Elite, and in a follow-on study (sup­ported by the Ford Foun­da­tion), Sell­ing Out Uncle Sam: How the Myth of Small Gov­ern­ment Under­mines National Secu­rity, that’s just been released.

In the­ory, con­tracts and con­trac­tors are over­seen by gov­ern­ment employ­ees who would guard against abuse, but there are sim­ply not enough of them to keep up with all the out­sourc­ing.
In a 2008 sur­vey of fed­eral acqui­si­tion pro­fes­sion­als, one respon­dent described the per­cep­tion that con­tract offi­cers have gone extinct, that they are “.…as rare as white Siber­ian tigers.”

That’s an over­state­ment of course but the num­bers are not encour­ag­ing. The num­ber of civil ser­vants who could poten­tially over­see con­trac­tors fell dur­ing the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion and con­tin­ued to drop dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. The con­tract­ing busi­ness boomed under Bush, while the “acqui­si­tion workforce”–government work­ers charged with the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion, design, award­ing, use, or qual­ity con­trol of con­tracts and contractors–remained vir­tu­ally con­stant. In 2002, each fed­eral acqui­si­tion offi­cial over­saw the dis­burse­ment of an aver­age of $3.5 mil­lion in ser­vice con­tracts. In 2006 the aver­age work­load expanded to $7 mil­lion and, in 2008, to $10.6 mil­lion, while also demand­ing of the work­force increas­ingly com­plex con­tract­ing skills.

One big area of con­cern: the Depart­ment of Defense, where the num­ber of pro­cure­ment pro­fes­sion­als has been shrink­ing since the early 1990s, even as the vol­ume of con­tracts (both the num­bers of con­tracts awarded and the value of these con­tracts) has risen rapidly. This dis­pro­por­tion puts the gov­ern­ment at risk of los­ing con­trol over mission-related deci­sions and the decision-making process, the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Office has con­cluded. Gov­ern­ment offi­cials are made respon­si­ble for not only prop­erly award­ing con­tracts, but also super­vis­ing and eval­u­at­ing the per­for­mance of con­trac­tors on the job. There is not enough capac­ity for them to do all this effec­tively. As the U.S. Comp­trol­ler Gen­eral expressed:

At the same time pro­cure­ment spend­ing has sky­rock­eted, fewer acqui­si­tion pro­fes­sion­als are avail­able to award and–just as importantly–administer con­tracts. Two impor­tant aspects of this issue are the num­bers and skills of con­tract­ing per­son­nel and DOD’s abil­ity to effec­tively over­see con­trac­tor performance.

The Comp­trol­ler Gen­eral con­cluded that “The acqui­si­tion work­force faces seri­ous chal­lenges” in such mat­ters as “size, skills, knowl­edge, and suc­ces­sion planning.”

The issue of over­sight is fur­ther com­pli­cated by the mul­ti­ple lay­ers of con­tract­ing and sub­con­tract­ing that are endemic to the con­tract­ing sys­tem. Large con­tract­ing projects typ­i­cally farm out areas of work to mul­ti­ple sub­con­trac­tors. While the prac­tice makes sense in terms of assem­bling a vari­ety of com­pe­ten­cies in one project, it fur­ther dis­tances gov­ern­ment mon­i­tor­ing from the work being done and the abil­ity to assess it.

In sum, when the num­ber of civil ser­vants avail­able to super­vise gov­ern­ment con­tracts and con­trac­tors pro­por­tion­ately falls, thus decreas­ing the government’s over­sight capac­ity, and when cru­cial gov­ern­men­tal func­tions are out­sourced, gov­ern­ment begins to resem­ble Swiss-cheese–full of holes. The gov­er­nance land­scape becomes vul­ner­a­ble to per­sonal and cor­po­rate agen­das and to oper­a­tions that are less than in the pub­lic inter­est. Cer­tainly the pub­lic inter­est hasn’t been served at Arling­ton National Cemetary, and in fact a crim­i­nal probe has report­edly been launched. But it seems likely that sim­ple, per­fectly legal mis­man­age­ment and poor over­sight was a key cul­prit here: cemetary offi­cials saw their bud­get nearly dou­ble in less than 10 years, an increas­ing por­tion went to con­trac­tors, they were not trained to deal with con­trac­tors and they did not have a strat­egy before hand­ing out the deals. This is a dis­turbingly famil­iar story in var­i­ous cor­ners of fed­eral gov­ern­ment. The dif­fer­ence here is that faulty over­sight has led not just to waste and inef­fi­ciency, but real heart­break for hun­dreds of fam­i­lies whose loved one or ances­tor served their coun­try, and assumed, in the end, that their coun­try would do the same for them. They assumed wrong.

By Janine Wedel and Linda Keenan

Pub­lished in The Huff­in­g­ton Post, August 19, 2010.