Over half a trillion dollars is handed out to contractors each year by the federal government, an amount which nearly tripled over the course of George W. Bush's presidency. A recent IG report found that defense companies are literally writing their own contracts:
The Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General's (IG) office recently found that the Marine Corps allowed their contractors for a vital troop protection system to act as government employees, including directing and evaluating government employees' work, grading their own work and writing up requirements for the follow-on contract. The contractors then bid on those requirements and won multimillion-dollar contracts.
The IG issued a report this month with the mundane title, "Contract Management of Joint Logistics Integrator Services in Support of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles Needs Improvement." The report points out, in glaring examples, how the Marine Corp allowed two companies to infiltrate and control two very important logistics and maintenance contracts.
The contractors are performing nearly every administrative task of the program, with all but one government employee reporting to them:
The report contained an amazing chart that showed that the intermingling of the government and the contractor was complete. In the top box of the organizational chart, the program manager was a government employee, but in the four boxes below him, which included the deputy and assistant program managers, were all contractor employees. The lower eight boxes for locations were government employees who had to report to the contractor employees and not directly to the government program manager.