…I’m sorry please change the following:
Bush to Obama
Haliburton to Checchi & Company Consulting
Remember this quote:
Now this:http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=82626
I thought this was going to stop when he became President, what happened?
There are a few possible answers to this.
The first possibility is that Obama has fallen victim to realpolitik. He made claims that for whatever reason he is unable or unwilling to back up because it’s simply not possible to avoid it.
The second possibility is that the contract was awarded without his knowledge, and as a busy man he cannot possibly be expected to oversee and micromanage every little thing that is done on behalf of his administration.
And there is a third possibility that I choose not to consider: He’s simply dishonest in everything that he does and he said that stuff to get elected, now that he is the joke’s on us. It’s possible, but I don’t want to believe it so I don’t.
Well aside from the irony of this happening under Obama/Democrats (and it’s pretty paltry…$25 million? :p), I have to say…meh. This is pretty much how government contracting works, has always worked and will continue to work. The Dems got all riled about Haliburton, but anyone who knows anything about government contracting was pretty much yawning through the entire Dem frothing episode.
I HAVE heard that Obama et al are trying to re-focus contracting away from private companies and back to having Federal employees start doing to work directly, instead of providing oversight and management (which is kind of what they do now). Personally, I think it’s a bad idea, and certainly it will take some time to get it up and working, but, at least in theory, you COULD start to shift contracts away from places like Haliburton and have the government do the work themselves. Not likely, but it’s possible, I suppose.
In the mean time, though, the system is what it is, and Obama and the Dems have to use it just the same way that the Pubs did when Bush was in the drivers seat. While there is certainly a level of corruption and graft in any system like this, generally no-bid contracts are done not for political reasons or even for the purposes of stealing (or whatever), but because it makes sense to the contracting officer or contracting department who is requesting the work, and because they don’t want to go through a lengthy RFP process that will cost time, money (and lots of work) if they can justify a sole source, or if they have interacted with the company in the past and have had a good experience…or if said company has demonstrable and perhaps unique personnel or abilities critical to the contract (as Haliburton did in several of the non-competes they were awarded…and probably as the company in the OP does in this case).
-XT
So do you believe that the President should not have discretionary spending? The process of bidding can take some time. Should he not simply be able to hire someone for a contract?
There is a difference between $ 25m and the multi billions that Halliburton has received.
Is any no-bid contract an ‘abuse’ of no-bid contracts? By saying that he was against the abuse of them, is that stating that he cannot ever use no-bid contracts?
Sounds like a recipe for gridlock to me.
There is a fourth possibility that is kind of a combo of Airman’s 1 and 2 - As near as I can tell, this contract was originated in 2002, and extended in January of every year since then, including for the most recent time in early January, 2010. This, along with the small contract size, does not rid Obama of responsibilty, but it does explain somewhat how such a simple campaign promise was if not broken, at least bent noticeably.
Off to find a real cite of the contract language.
Part of the problem with this, is that the Bush admin had to actually dismantle the military apparatus that provided those services in order to give the contracts to Halliburton. The military used to be able to provide its own logistical support, and there was even a nation-building civil engineering corp in the Army before Bush. My Father-in-Laws Father was instrumental in putting it together.
No, nothing was bent. This is abusing the line between use/abuse. We have to define what abuse is rather than have an unsophisticated gotcha version where any use of it is considered abuse, but only by the President’s political opponents.
First I’ve heard of that. Do you have a cite? My own understanding is that the military was already moving to using civilian contractors for logistics and logistically security, and while it’s true the Army has a corp of engineers, I doubt they ever (well, since WWII) scaled up to the level of rebuilding something like the damage done to Iraq during the war.
-XT
This was nothing when Bush did it; it’s nothing now. Obama was dumb to make the promise (just like the one about getting lobbyists out of government) but he was going for the stupid vote when he said it.
Algore praised Halliburton in his Reinventing Government thing. Then Bush was elected, and it was a scandal (at least to the idiots).
Whoop-de-doo.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t remember the name of the program. I will ask my Father-in-Law. He’s the one that told me about it.
Actually, I think it’s pointless to expect Obama to follow through and pointless to not recognize it as nothing but pandering. It’s practically REQUIRED to lie to us in this way. We pretty much won’t elect anyone who doesn’t make pleasant noises about special interests.
It was simply red meat to the Dem base, many of who are so disconnected from the real world that they haven’t a clue how government contracts actually work. Haliburton basically the war cry and symbol of of everything that was evil about Bush, while the reality is that it was basically business as usual in government contracting. I’ve seen contracts awarded on a non-competitive basis, and in fact, I’ve been a contractor on contracts so awarded (some, in no small part because me and my team had special knowledge or simply were well liked by the customer, who didn’t want to go through the long and arduous RFP process when they already knew who they wanted).
Sometimes it makes sense to go through the compete process (though even there I’ve seen times when the fix was in, as with the Los Alamos labs contract where I was on Lockheed Martins team and they were screwed out of it because of political pressure being brought to bear from from above)…but sometimes it doesn’t. So, government contracting agencies NEED the option, as well as the checks and balances that are already in the system to contain abuse.
-XT
I think rabid partisans are disconnected from reality in general.
You’re oversimplifying it. Halliburton was the company that the Vice President used to run and they got pretty much all of the choice government contracts. Again, there’s use, and there’s abuse.
It seems like you are arguing that this can never be abused.
It could be that only Haliburton has the capability of fulfilling the contract. There are a number of government contract opportunities that many, many organization cannot meet because of all the hoops they have to jump through, many of which can only be met by large organizations. Another possibility is that there are many, many exceptions for which the government procurement official can apply to the situation to let Haliburton continue to provide services. One thing I have realized in my years of government contracts (usually, I pass them off to some underling because I don’t like dealing with the government) is that if the job is getting done, they don’t like to change things.
Certainly.
Which is irrelevant to the fact that Halliburton had the capabilities and expertise to do these contracts, and in some cases had unique capabilities to do them (in terms of scale and in terms of critical personnel).
Certainly there is use and abuse…no one is claiming otherwise. However, in all the ranting I have never been shown that those contracts awarded to Halliburton were ‘abuse’, or in any meaningful way different than the majority of other non-compete type contracts awarded.
If it seems like that then you aren’t reading what I’m writing…or I’m not doing a good job of explaining my position. Take your pick. To clarify, I KNOW there there is abuse…I’ve seen it and even have given an example I was personally involved in. I’ve seen the non-competitive contracting abused as well and have, again, personally been involved in several instances. That said, however, there are mechanisms in place to keep the abuse to a minimum level, and by and large they work, especially in the long run.
-XT
Clearly there’s a difference between a Halliburton no-bid contract of up to $7 billion to put out oil well fires and an extension of a $25 million no-bid contract.
Why is it that if Obama promises to crack down on the “abuse” of no-bid contracts, that people get upset that the government issued a no-bid contract at all? Do people also get upset that Senators McCain and Feingold campaigned to reduce the influence of “soft money” in elections, and then they accept perfectly legal campaign contributions from normal, everyday people?