The Washington Post reports that the Department of Homeland Security has spent millions of dollars on no-bid consultant contracts since its inception, far beyond their budget. Booz Allen benefited from an overreliance on their firm to win contract after contract, eventually billing for over $70 million in contracting services. Many of the jobs Booz Allen filled should never have gone outside the agency in the first place, according to the Post’s Robert O’Harrow.
At Heading Right, I explain that all of this could easily have been foreseen at the creation of the DHS — and, in fact, it was. The creation of superbureaucracies do not increase accountability but diminish it, and resource allocation suffers from institutionally-imposed incompetence. If Congress wants to unleash its venom, they should spare Booz Allen and the DHS, and instead target themselves.
4 thoughts on “The Failure Of Super-Bureaucracies”
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Congress actually accepting responsibility for its own decisions??? Puleeze!
Wait! Wait! The sky is suddenly full of flying pigs!
Unless they can find a way to look good on camera doing it, there is no way! None! Zero! Zilch! Nada!
Gotta go now, just ran out of exclamation points!
Without “no bid” contracts the Feds, especially DOD and a few others, couldn’t do their job. No bids shouldn’t be abused, and should be put out for bid as soon as possible, of course.
The DOD audits rather well on various contracts, even those from bids. And when putting a contract out for bid can take a year or more (what with protests, revisions, and more), and the job has got to be done tomorrow, you go no-bid or extend an exisitng contract , which is close to the same thing.
I know,”no bid” sounds bad, and often is. It makes a good WaPo headline. But it needs more detail to decide good or bad.
I’m a consultant….yes, an evil defense contractor. Let me say a few words in defense of no-bid contracts.
1) No-bids allow you to stand up operations quickly. Wasn’t DHS trying to get up and running as fast as it could, for some pretty good reasons? Namely, that it was created because 9/11 showed us that our country wasn’t really secure? Hence, the need for DHS in the first place.
2) No-bids aren’t forever. EVERY contract I’ve ever worked on isn’t let for a four-or-five year period. No, it’s let for four or five ONE-year periods, running consecutively. If the contractor doesn’t perform, he’s out, within a year. Try getting rid of underperforming government employees that fast.
3) Another point on no-bids not being forever. Eventually, contracts run out. If you let out the initial contract for a particular function/mission as no-bid (to get the job up-and-running or back-on-track), then you can open up future contracts to full competition.
4) “Many of the jobs Booz Allen filled should never have gone outside the agency in the first place, according to the Post’s Robert O’Harrow. ”
Excuse me, but when it was first created, DHS per se was a series of empty offices, no? Its actual workforce was (and still is) spread out amongst twenty-plus government agencies, who probably weren’t that ready to give up their prized people or job functions.
Case in point: the creation of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), in 1996. NIMA was created to centralize US government imagery analyis/production assets, which were then scattered amongst a bunch of agencies. Many of the US government’s best imagery analysts were in the CIA…and there they wanted to stay! The CIA agreed, and NIMA eventually had to hire lots more people to replace the CIA imagery analysts that simply refused to move! No one at Langley really CARED what the President or the executive branch wanted…and for the most part, Langley got its way. I’ll bet that much of this same attitude is now percolating through DEA, ATF and other agencies who aren’t too happy about being part of the new DHS.
I’ll bet that, in many cases, the fastest way for DHS to get something done was to bring in contractors to do it. And, again, DHS could eventually transition those functions to in-agency personnel after DHS finished organizing itself and moving its manpower assets to the workplaces it wanted them to be at.
As a contractor, I’m used to being bashed by government workers for being oh-so-greedy. That’s OK—when you hire contractors, they WORK! You can’t say that for lots of career govvies—believe me.
Food for thought…
I’m a consultant….yes, an evil defense contractor. Let me say a few words in defense of no-bid contracts.
1) No-bids allow you to stand up operations quickly. Wasn’t DHS trying to get up and running as fast as it could, for some pretty good reasons? Namely, that it was created because 9/11 showed us that our country wasn’t really secure? Hence, the need for DHS in the first place.
2) No-bids aren’t forever. EVERY contract I’ve ever worked on isn’t let for a four-or-five year period. No, it’s let for four or five ONE-year periods, running consecutively. If the contractor doesn’t perform, he’s out, within a year. Try getting rid of underperforming government employees that fast.
3) Another point on no-bids not being forever. Eventually, contracts run out. If you let out the initial contract for a particular function/mission as no-bid (to get the job up-and-running or back-on-track), then you can open up future contracts to full competition.
4) “Many of the jobs Booz Allen filled should never have gone outside the agency in the first place, according to the Post’s Robert O’Harrow. ”
Excuse me, but when it was first created, DHS per se was a series of empty offices, no? Its actual workforce was (and still is) spread out amongst twenty-plus government agencies, who probably weren’t that ready to give up their prized people or job functions.
Case in point: the creation of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), in 1996. NIMA was created to centralize US government imagery analyis/production assets, which were then scattered amongst a bunch of agencies. Many of the US government’s best imagery analysts were in the CIA…and there they wanted to stay! The CIA agreed, and NIMA eventually had to hire lots more people to replace the CIA imagery analysts that simply refused to move! No one at Langley really CARED what the President or the executive branch wanted…and for the most part, Langley got its way. I’ll bet that much of this same attitude is now percolating through DEA, ATF and other agencies who aren’t too happy about being part of the new DHS.
I’ll bet that, in many cases, the fastest way for DHS to get something done was to bring in contractors to do it. And, again, DHS could eventually transition those functions to in-agency personnel after DHS finished organizing itself and moving its manpower assets to the workplaces it wanted them to be at.
As a contractor, I’m used to being bashed by government workers for being oh-so-greedy. That’s OK—when you hire contractors, they WORK! You can’t say that for lots of career govvies—believe me.
Food for thought…