Bigness Redux

Drudge posted the following bit of news which recalls this early post of mine:

State firms cry foul over stimulus projects -- Federal approach to contracting tilts toward bigger players

KALISPELL - Across the nation, local firms can expect to lose billions of economic stimulus dollars to large multinational corporations, thanks to a government contracting scheme that puts paperwork speed ahead of community recovery.

In Montana, that means qualified building firms are out of the loop, while many millions in federal construction funding will go to a California company that recently earned a stern rebuke for its failures in Iraq - a war-profits scandal that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

"It's a farce," said Dewey Swank of Kalispell's Swank Enterprises. "It stinks of politics and big special interests."

Over the past several years, Swank has teamed with Montana-based CTA Architects to successfully design and build four federal border stations. Several more ports now are being built along the Montana-Canada line, thanks to the massive stimulus bill, but this time Swank and CTA didn't have a chance to bid.

That's because the government is using a controversial contracting method that speeds bidding but also tilts the playing field in favor of mega-companies. It's called IDIQ contracting, which is shorthand for "indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity," and it's essentially an all-you-can-eat money buffet for big corporations.

An IDIQ is a broad and open-ended agreement, in which the government essentially creates a sort of long-term, all-purpose contract under which specific tasks can later be defined. The scheme moves projects quickly, which is a priority for economic stimulus jobs, but critics argue it's anticompetitive, because only a handful of large firms can afford to engage on such undefined and unrestricted terms.

In Montana, where about $78 million is earmarked for border-station construction, that means Swank and CTA are out, while Parsons Corp., from Pasadena, Calif., is in...

The company entered Iraq in 2003, with just eight government contracts for reconstruction. But those few vague umbrella agreements eventually came to cover about 1,000 projects in 500 locations. Oversight was spread as thin as the contracts and, when projects stalled, taxpayer money hemorrhaged.

By 2007, the man in charge of overseeing Iraq's reconstruction issued a scathing report to Congress, charging that Parsons had failed to deliver. Hundreds of millions had been spent, Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen said, but 150 health centers did not get built and some work that got done was "substandard."
...
Swank, for one, wonders why someone with Parsons' recent history is still winning government contracts, and then he answers his own question: "Someone's palm is getting greased."

In fact, Parsons ranked third among the nation's construction-services firms in terms of federal campaign contributions during the 2008 election cycle, donating about $600,000 split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats. The company also spent more than $1.5 million lobbying federal lawmakers between 2004 and 2008, with $305,000 shelled out during the 2008 presidential election year.

"That," Swank said, "tells me a lot about how things get done."
...
Federal data show that job orders made through pre-existing IDIQ contracts (as opposed to individually bidding jobs) grew from 14 percent of total dollars spent in 1990 to 52 percent in 2005, and it's growing faster than ever now that the stimulus puts priority on speed...


Goes without saying that this IDIQ does not at all further the cause of Government transparency and accountability.