Less than two weeks after a nonprofit wrote to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel accusing the Pentagon’s personnel and readiness office of evading contract laws, the head of that office “unexpectedly” retired.
The nonprofit watchdog group Project on Government Oversight has been encouraging the Department of Defense to track how much it spent on service contracting in 2011.
POGO criticized the office of the under secretary for personnel and readiness for its “concerted effort … to willfully breach laws and congressional mandates to implement an improved service contract tracking system” in its Nov. 25 letter to Hagel.
“It is not clear to what extent POGO’s letter to Secretary Hagel had on this decision,” the group said Tuesday of the under secretary’s retirement.
The Pentagon’s reliance on contractors to perform work that federal employees could do wastes billions of taxpayer dollars and leaves the government open to fraud, said Scott Amey, general counsel at POGO.
Defense spent $187 billion on service contracts in 2012, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Defense spending on contracted services has risen “significantly” since 2001, according to a 2013 GAO report.
Such contractors provide the Defense Department with services that range from medical care to intelligence support, GAO said.
Congress stripped provisions that would have required the congressional watchdog to oversee the Pentagon’s service contracting reports from the National Defense Authorization Act, POGO said.
The bill, which outlines defense spending for the next year, passed the House Dec. 3 and is awaiting a Senate vote.
A POGO analysis of the pay civilian defense employees and contractors receive revealed the Department of Defense pays contractors nearly three times the amount they would pay their federal employees to perform the same work.
The Pentagon has struggled to keep tabs on which tasks should be reserved for government employees and which can be outsourced to contractors, with Defense officials expressing “confusion” about how to categorize work according to a November 2014 GAO report.
The absence of clear guidelines that dictate what should be categorized as contract work could prompt defense officials to understate their reliance on contractors, the report said.
Federal agencies have even had trouble tracking which of their workers are employees and which are contractors. A 2013 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found the government couldn’t determine the employment status of more than 300,000 individuals who had security clearances.
