By Robert O’Harrow Jr., Washington Post
Under pressure from the White House and Congress to deliver a long-delayed plan last year, officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-narcotics office took a shortcut that has become common at federal agencies: They hired help through a no-bid contract.
And the firm they hired showed them how to do it.
Scott Chronister, a senior official in the Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement, reached out to a former colleague at a private consulting firm for advice. The consultant suggested that Chronister’s office could avoid competition and get the work done quickly under an arrangement in which the firm “approached the government with a ‘unique and innovative concept,’ ” documents and interviews show.
A contract worth up to $579,000 was awarded to the consultant’s firm in September.
Though small by government standards, the counter-narcotics contract illustrates the government’s steady move away from relying on competition to secure the best deals for products and services.
A recent congressional report estimated that federal spending on contracts awarded without “full and open” competition has tripled, to $207 billion, since 2000, with a $60 billion increase last year alone. The category includes deals in which officials take advantage of provisions allowing them to sidestep competition for speed and convenience and cases in which the government sharply limits the number of bidders or expands work under open-ended contracts.
Isn’t the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-narcotics office a double oxymoron? Homeland Security office being an oxymoron and Counter-Narcotics office being an oxymoron. I guess a double oxymoron is just plain moronic !!
Anyway, how do I get this no-bid contract? I have the experience, I’ve done plenty of drugs. I guess I’d have to start by screwing Cheney’s daughter. That would convince Bush I was a member of the family and a contract would be a good as in the bank. Then I could run a-muck like blackwater with no government over-site and no one to answer to but the crooks in the white house. All I’d have to do is run around beating up old ladies for growing pot for their cancer pain. I could take their drugs and houses and I’d be living high on the hog. I’d be just like the DEA only getting paid fifty times as much.
Oh America, what a country, where else could one get such an opportunity by only going to Yale or screwing the right crooked politicians daughter?