Measuring high-level corruption and government favoritism has been the object of extensive scholarly and policy interest with relatively little progress in the last decade. See what these authors found in their most recent study.
Continue readingCongress to President Obama: Make government contractors disclose political spending
Members of the Senate and the House wrote to President Obama urging him to draft and enact an executive order forcing all government contractors to disclose any political spending.
Continue readingMuch of Northrop Grumman’s Washington influence flies under the radar
Northrup Grumman spends millions on lobbying and campaign contributions — but those only tell part of the story.
Continue readingGovernment data should be public — not owned by contractors
Many federal agencies still have a nasty habit of giving up control of valuable data and vital technology to contractors instead of sharing it openly with the public that pays for it.
Continue readingUser interface pro tips with Senator McCaskill
Yesterday morning the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing on contractor performance information and its ease of use for oversight purposes.
Continue readingFITARA Isn’t a Panacea for Government IT Contracting
Ever since Healthcare.gov's epic launch failure, problems with IT procurement have entered the mainstream. Can a promising new bill known as FITARA fix the system?
Continue readingReport by HELP Committee Recommends More Open and Transparent Contracting Data
Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) released a report revealing that 30% of the largest labor law violators in the country are also government contractors, receiving $81 billion dollars worth of contracts in 2012 alone.
Continue readingHow Much Did Healthcare.gov Actually Cost?
The new healthcare exchange site has been the topic of several news stories these past few weeks. Many of them are quoting vastly different numbers for how much it cost to build. You'd think that sites like USASpending.gov or the Federal IT Dashboard1 would be able to give us some idea. But in reality, that's just not how federal spending is reported.
Much of government spending is bundled into huge contracts called IDIQs (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) that are meant to span many years and may go to multiple recipients. They're a lot like regular contracts except they can have very vague requirements and once the IDIQ itself has been competed, the government no longer has any requirement to compete any contract within that IDIQ. CGI Federal has one of these IDIQ contracts with the Department of Health and Human services. It was signed in 2007, long before the Affordable Care Act became law, and lasts until 2017. Within each IDIQ, the government creates purchase or task orders for specific services, which you can find in the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). You can see a list of all the task orders for the CGI Federal IDIQ here.
Given a few constraints (was the task order post-ACA? does the description sound like it might contribute to healthcare.gov?) I highlighted in blue my guesses at what task orders might be related to healthcare.gov. I think my guesses err on the over-inclusive side. Even so, if you add them up, it's about $70 million. That's not unheard of for a government website and it's certainly far lower than the $600 million cost that has been reported in some places. But the fact that we can't figure it out shows the dire state of federal spending transparency.
Announcing Sunlight’s Open Data Guidelines for Procurement
Since we started our new research initiative around procurement in March, we've spent months doing research into policies and data availability relating to procurement at all levels of government, as well as interviewing all kinds of people on the subject. Today we're excited to launch the culmination of our efforts so far, as well as an extension of Sunlight's previous work on our Open Data Policy: The Open Data Guidelines for Procurement.
Adventures in Government Contracting
As part of our initiative around procurement, we've been meeting with several experts, inside and outside the government, to get a broad perspective on contracting in the federal government. Many agree that federal procurement suffers from problems, whether it's over-budget, over-time contracts, the limited pool of government contractors, or the over-reliance of government on contractors to perform core governmental functions. What is the real source of these problems and how can we overcome them? Well the answer is pretty complicated, but over the last several weeks, the picture is coming into focus. Across all of these conversations we've had, there are several themes that have consistently stood out. Since we're making an effort to blog about our work as we go, I wanted to step back and summarize what we've learned. While there will be a host of problems specific to one agency or type of procurement, these themes seem to apply across the government, and aren't necessarily as earth-shattering as you might think.
Continue reading
59063
