As Congress hammers out new spending cuts, a special emergency fund for commanders in Afghanistan has remained largely out of the limelight.
But Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and others have continually pressed for more oversight and accountability.
The Commander’s Emergency Response Program is intended to give field commanders the ability to address urgent relief needs in Afghan and Iraqi communities. According to the Defense Department’s 2009 Money as a Weapon System Afghanistan manual, projects should be quickly executable, highly visible to the local population and benefit and employ Afghans or Iraqis.
The program has been characterized as walking-around money, but McCaskill said in a June hearing that CERP has turned into unprecedented reconstruction spending.
“There is a disconnect between what the commanders in the field want to have happen and what actually happens,” said McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s contracting oversight panel. McCaskill and others on the committee say that disconnect is where millions of dollars could be saved on reconstruction.
Since 2004, Congress has appropriated $2.64 billion in CERP funds for Afghanistan and $3.89 billion for Iraq. A Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report in January said that of 69 projects reviewed in Afghanistan’s Laghman Province, 27 were either at risk of failure or had questionable outcomes. The report warned that $49.2 million was at a serious risk of being wasted.
David Sedney, the Defense Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Afghanistan, said that CERP funds were still fulfilling their original role, although he agreed that they were allowing the military to play a new role.
“CERP money is not reconstruction money,” Sedney said. “It is not meant to be in place of long-term reconstruction funding.”
HEARTS AND MINDS
But as senators and defense officials debate whether CERP has morphed into a program going far beyond its intended use, one expert says the only thing that matters is whether the projects make a good impression on the community.
James Dobbins, director of the Rand Corp.’s International Security and Defense Policy Center, said that the goal of CERP funding is to make a good impression on the local population, and reduce violence and casualty rates by turning around a hostile population. If this happens, Dobbins said, “Even if it had no effect on development at all, it was money well spent.”
“We didn’t invade Afghanistan to make it rich. We didn’t invade Afghanistan to make it democratic either,” Dobbins said. “We invaded to make it peaceful.”
Although the exact number of contractors being paid to work on CERP projects in Afghanistan is unknown, several government watchdog groups have recommended reducing reliance on contractors generally.
“We were looking to identify programs that we thought could have real savings from the national security budget,” said Ben Freeman of the Project on Government Oversight. “We only chose to focus on things that we felt confidently knowledgeable about, where we could provide very precise estimates for cuts.”
His group and Taxpayers for Common Sense recommended reducing spending on military contractors overall by 15 percent, with an estimated savings of $300 billion over 10 years.
“Our contractor proposal was intentionally broad because unfortunately we just don’t know about a lot of the contracting that goes on in DoD and national security-related agencies,” he said. “DoD itself has difficulty telling you how many service contractors it has working for it at any given time.”
A Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report that issued the first list of all contracts and contractors in Afghanistan was originally found to be inaccurate.
Dobbins said that CERP funding should be more heavily scrutinized, and the success of the CERP programs could be correlated to the success of nearby missions.
“I think the program is quite valuable,” Dobbins said, “and I wouldn’t argue that it should cease or even be radically altered, but I think at the margins there is room for improvement.”
The Defense Department said it has information that overlays data showing where CERP funds have been spent on hot spots in Afghanistan, but this data has not been released to the public.
Pentagon spokespeople declined to answer further questions regarding the CERP funds or contractors using them.