(source: Office of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff)
WASHINGTON—At the end of this year the State Department is set to take on far more contracting oversight in Iraq than it ever has in any country — roughly 14,000 contractors.
And some people are questioning whether it can handle the task.
The possibility of waste, fraud and abuse occurring is a “huge risk,” said Dov Zakheim, a former Pentagon comptroller and a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I would go so far as to say it’s a likelihood.”
“They simply are not organized, structured or oriented to doing this sort of thing,” he said, adding that some problems could be avoided if the Defense Department lends personnel to help out.
The State Department said the contractors will be split evenly between security and support, such as medical services and construction, each with roughly 7,000 personnel. So the number of State Department-funded security contractors, currently at its peak of about 2,500, will nearly triple. These contractors will not be replacing tasks the Department of Defense handled this year, with the exception of medical services.
DoD declined to comment on whether it will aid the State Department in contracting oversight, but Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense, acknowledged the potential for problems in a Senate hearing last week.
“I am sure there will be problems,” he said. “The State Department has never done anything this big, even though they have got a reasonable amount of experience with smaller scale.”
The State Department said it has worked with the Pentagon and carefully considered recommendations from various offices and committees as part of “intensive transition planning and implementation.”
The department said it has developed a comprehensive plan for oversight of contracting. “For example, the department has increased the number of contracting management staff assigned to contracts in Iraq,” State said in a statement.
The unprecedented, massive Defense Department contracting operations in Iraq— in which contractors at times outnumbered U.S. forces—faced some scrutiny over the years.
Reports in 2007 of widespread misconduct by the contractor Blackwater led to the Bush administration’s creation of Zakheim’s commission, which recently reported that up to $60 billion of $206 billion spent on contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan over 10 years was lost to waste, fraud and abuse.
Dan Goure, vice president of the conservative Lexington Institute, pointed out the risk of these problems recurring with State.
“They have never run anything of the complexity, size, number of contracts,” he said. “We know how difficult it was—at least initially and for some number of years—for the Pentagon to handle the scale.”
Goure also mentioned some potential positives, such as Iraq stabilizing and taking on some contracts itself.
“They can hire Accenture, or whoever, just as easily as we can,” he said. “This may be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, said she’s “deeply concerned” that what DoD learned will not be passed along to the State Department.
“I would just hate to see us do this and then pour thousands—millions, billions, I don’t know what the number would be—of taxpayer dollars there and have all these lessons just kind of fly out the window,” she said at a hearing last week.