Accountability In Contracting Act

Floor Speech

ACCOUNTABILITY IN CONTRACTING ACT -- (House of Representatives - March 15, 2007)

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Mr. TOM DAVIS of Virginia. Madam Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise today to speak on H.R. 1362, the Accountability in Contracting Act, which was introduced by Government Oversight and Reform chairman Henry Waxman last week. I want to thank the chairman for working with us.

This is not a bill that we are particularly enthusiastic about. We have very divergent views in the way we should go about contract regulation, but we both want the same ends. And I want to commend him for working with us, addressing some of our concerns as it moved through the committee process.

This bill would attempt to reform our acquisition system through a series of restrictions and reports geared towards greater regulation and oversight. More specifically, the legislation would limit the duration of contracts awarded under urgent conditions; require agency reports on minimizing the use of fixed-price and sole-source contracts; require additional reports to Congress on cost questions by auditors; and broaden the reach of current limitations on post-employment opportunities for our acquisition workforce, as well as limit the ability of acquisition workers hired by the government from the private sector to participate in certain acquisition activities.

I want to thank the chairman again for working with me by including two provisions that we requested that are both intended to strengthen the Federal acquisition workforce through better training and management. The first would require the administrator for Federal Procurement Policy to come up with a government-wide definition for ``acquisition workforce.'' This modification would help give Federal agencies a clear picture of the composition of their existing acquisition workforce and provide a baseline for the improvement of the human capital resource dedicated to the management of the acquisition workload. The second would make permanent the Acquisition Workforce Training Fund, which was first enacted under SARA, the Services Acquisition Reform Act, which I authored.

Last week our committee revised the introduced version of the bill by approving an amendment I offered to address the concerns I had with the bill's expansion of post-employment restrictions. While I wholeheartedly support the desire to promote integrity, transparency and accountability in government, I was troubled by certain provisions in the bill which sought to significantly expand current post-employment restrictions and curb the government's capability to take advantage of the valuable technical abilities and skills of former private-sector employees.

At a time when we need to be looking for ways to retain qualified acquisition personnel, too many of whom are approaching retirement age, while at the same time looking for effective ways to recruit new qualified people, the introduced version tried to instead impose new restrictions on these Federal employees. These restrictions would have had a detrimental impact on the executive branch's ability to recruit and retain the brightest and the best personnel for the acquisition workforce, something we can ill afford.

Our amendment shortened the bill's 2-year post-employment restrictions on contracting officers to 1 year and provided for a waiver of the restrictions on the ability of acquisition workers hired by the government from the private sector to participate in certain acquisition activities. My amendment also shortened the duration of the activity restrictions from 2 years to 1 year. While this language goes part way toward addressing my concerns about the negative effects such restrictions have had on the Federal Government's ability to recruit, hire, and retain the skilled acquisition workforce, I continue to have the same concerns.

The bottom line is that there are too many good people working for this government for us to pass onerous restrictions based on the misdeeds of a handful of employees. We need to promote the natural churn of employees between the public and private sector, instead of trying to stymie it. We can't, on the one hand, bemoan the quality of contract management, while on the other, create more obstacles to getting the people that we need to do the job.

In addition to the changes we made in committee last week, I am pleased to see the text of the bill that is on the floor today includes the good work of the Committee on Armed Services. That committee made significant improvements and clarifications to the underlying bill. The Armed Services Committee toned down some of the rhetoric in the bill. For example, by changing terms like ``limiting the abuse of abuse-prone contracts'' to ``improving the quality of contracts.''

More substantively, the Armed Services Committee raised the threshold of the report on preliminary audits of contractor costs from $1 million to $10 million.

Nonetheless, I remain concerned a report like this, even at the higher threshold and the limitation to significant contractor costs, still presents a distorted and incomplete picture of the management of cost-type contracts. Contract auditors are critical cogs in the management system. They write audit reports which are submitted to aid the contracting officer in making his final determination whether particular costs are reasonable and consistent with applicable law and the contract terms and, therefore, permitted or what we call ``allowable under the contract.'' It is the outcome of the oversight process, not just the first phase, that we should be reviewing. If we want an accurate picture of costs actually billed to the government which the contracting officer determined the government will not pay, the unallowables, then we might learn something. But that is not what this bill does. The bill would only burden agencies with another meaningless reporting requirement and, I might add, add fodder up here for Members to take this review and make something of it that is probably not accurate.

Each year our Federal contract professionals use the acquisition system to purchase almost $400 billion worth of goods and services, ranging from paper clips to advanced weapons system, from sophisticated information technology and management services to grass cutting and window washing. Recent reforms, culminating in our Services Acquisition Reform Act of 2003, have modernized the way the government does business with the private sector. No longer is our government laden with inflexible, timely, and costly acquisition systems. Legislative efforts over the past decade have provided many of the tools necessary for our acquisition professionals to get the job done.

Unfortunately, the Federal acquisition system has been under stress in recent years because of the extraordinary pressures of a shrinking workforce, combined with the unprecedented Hurricane Katrina disaster relief and recovery efforts, the enormous job of managing contractors who provide logistical support for our troops in Iraq, and overseeing the daunting task of building an Iraqi infrastructure. To no one's surprise, this strain has resulted in a series of management problems that have been exaggerated by the press and exploited by opponents of the system.

Nevertheless, the system has worked pretty well, and the vast majority of the government's acquisitions have been conducted properly. The problems have largely been the result of management difficulties exacerbated by an overburdened and understaffed workforce, combined with improper actions by a handful of officials.

Frankly, Madam Chairman, I don't think that controls, reports, procedures and restrictions in this bill will go very far in addressing the challenges that face us today. Reverting to the bloated system of the past, weighted down with a process-oriented system doesn't help the government acquire the best valuable goods and services the commercial market has to offer and our government so desperately needs in a timely manner. Reverting to the past, under the rubric of fraud, waste and abuse and cleaning up the system may provide flashy sound bites and play well back home, but it doesn't give us the world-class acquisition system that we need to compete in the 21st century.

We have put the current system to the test in some of the most difficult environments imaginable: Hurricane Katrina reconstruction and Iraqi logistics and contracting and reconstruction. The failures which occurred have been rooted in the inadequacies of management and implementation.

And yet the Rules Committee, in looking at the Armed Services Committee report and ours, took out the provision that had the 1 percent additional funding for some of the management and implementation dollars that could have gone into training.

As legislators, we should resist the temptation to micromanage our acquisition system based on unproven anecdotes of failure and misconduct. More controls and procedures will not remedy poorly defined requirements or provide us with a sufficient number of Federal acquisition personnel with the right skills to select the best contractor and manage the subsequent performance.

Why should we force the taxpayers and private entities to undergo unreasonable burdens so politicians can reap short-term gain at the expense of crippling an already overburdened acquisition system and workforce?

It is for these reasons, Madam Chairman, we find this bill has sufficient shortcomings. These shortcomings are shared by the administration in their statement on administration policy in the ITAA, and I will discuss those as the debate goes further.

Finally, let me just say, this country, over the years, has had the debate over what is the appropriate role of oversight, how much is too much. But we need an acquisition system that works. And sometimes we spend so much in our rules and regulations, making sure somebody doesn't steal anything, that they can't do much of anything else either; and we get a system that is burdened and that does not create the efficiencies that we need to more forward. Once again, one of the greater issues that divide the chairman and myself is our philosophies on contracting. But I want to just commend him for working with us on this bill to try to get to where it is today. I know this is important to him.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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