Lawmakers complain about shoddy intelligence contractor database
The U.S. intelligence community has been outsourcing much of its sensitive work to private contractors, but it’s had a hard time figuring out just how much and explaining why. That’s made it particularly difficult for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to assess whether the contracting is excessive or wasteful, as some independent groups have alleged.
Although the Director of National Intelligence has tallied the number annually since 2006 and reported recently that the number of core contractor personnel is dropping, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report early this year that the data used to compile this tally was inconsistent or inaccurate.
Lawmakers’ frustration about the shortcomings boiled over at a hearing June 18 by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Although members have complained for years about the outsourcing, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., the committee chairman, complained that they still “don’t have the full picture of who is working for the intelligence community as contractors, or why.”
Congressional pique intensified last year after Edward Snowden, an employee for contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked thousands of classified documents. Sen. Intelligence Committee chairman Diane Feinstein, D-Cal., asserted at the time that intelligence agencies had not complied with a promise to cut their use of contractors by 5 percent a year.
A report last year by Maplight, a nonprofit group, showed however that every member of the House and Senate intelligence committees had received campaign funds from intelligence contractors. And earlier this year, another report showed that more than two-thirds of cases of intelligence contractor misconduct examined involved fraudulent billing for work contractors hadn’t done, costing the government millions of dollars. Even if the contractor employees implicated in these charges lost their jobs, they often kept their security clearances and were able to be rehired.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
