Hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Armed Services Committee

Statement

HEARING OF THE\, SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: ROLE OF THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT IN PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS
CHAIRED BY: REP. VIC SNYDER (D-AR)
WITNESSES: GINGER CRUZ, OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION; MICHELLE PARKER, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, RAND CORPORATION; FREDERICK BARTON, POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

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REP. HANK JOHNSON (D-GA): Yes, I'm going to talk a little bit about money.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The contract civilian employees employed on the PRTs, are they necessary? And if so, why?

MS. PARKER: Well, I was one, so I think I was necessary. USAID has a hiring mechanism called a personnel service contract in which USAID hires me directly. I was not in the Foreign Service. And basically, I can give a two-week notice and quit, but I directly worked for USAID, and I got all the benefits, diplomatic passport, you name it. That is a critical function, and I think that's part of why USAID has been able to staff differently than the State Department who requires drawing it from their own resources.

The other contract employees that you might be talking about from, what, the local nationals or who?

REP. JOHNSON: What roles do the other contract employees fill on the PRT?

MS. PARKER: Well, we had contracted interpreters that were hired through a mechanism, and there's good and bad with that. I found that having a local who actually knew what was going on and knew the political environment was a little more useful than necessarily having someone with a security clearance. But I wasn't doing security- cleared required work. The other contracted employees we had was DynCorp police trainers. And that was really useful, because the police program was not particularly well coordinated with our PRT. And so by having those contracted employees living on the base, it helped with coordination.

MS. CRUZ: In the case of Iraq, there are very few contract employees relative to the overall effort. In the case of State Department and Department of Defense, they use their own employees unless they use 3161 hiring authority which allows them to hire temporary federal employees. In the case of translators and some of the other bilingual-bicultural advisers, they do use contracting mechanisms. But most of the individuals that staff the Iraq PRTs are either temporary federal hires or are employees of the various agencies.

MR. BARTON: I don't think you could possibly do the work out there unless you had personal services contractors as well as some private contracting. There just isn't a pool of talent in the U.S. government to even get started on these jobs as presently set up. And on the security clearance thing, we have to take a huge review of that. It's absurd. One of my very best people working in the Balkans, I knew he'd been arrested for civil disobedience. I like that quality. He had been outside of the governor's office in Alaska, and he had been causing a lot of problems; (in lieu of ?), taking on Milosevic in Serbia. And it struck me as if that is about as good a credential as I could come up with. And after we did the FBI security check on him, six weeks later they came back and told me that he had been arrested for civil disobedience. And I said well, we already knew that. And in fact, this is exactly why we were hiring the guy.

So we've got to change this model. It's costing a lot of money. It's taking a lot of time. It's not getting us the candidates we need. And it's putting us in second place.

REP. JOHNSON: So now, in Iraq where the PRTs are commanded by military personnel, correct, versus Afghanistan where it's State Department --

MS. PARKER: EPRTs -- no actually, Iraq has both models. Iraq is sort of a conglomeration of -- (audio break) -- because the military had a fund to hire local nationals, and I did as well as USAID, so it was really a mixed bag.

MS. CRUZ: In the case of Iraq, the decision to hire primarily rests with the Department of State which has gone out, cast a very wide net and tried to get as many people as they could with matching skill sets. And then what they do is the secondary screen would be the PRT leaders, who are usually State Department folks at the primary PRTs, would then screen and see what types of skill sets they wanted. So if they needed more agricultural advisers or if they needed economists, that would be the type of person that they would look for, and then they would be able to hopefully pick people that would be a better match for their PRT.

REP. JOHNSON: Let me ask this question. Do these civilian contract employees get paid from any of the (QIP ?) funds or SERP funds or the local government and community development program funds? Do any of those funds go to any of the contract employees?

MS. CRUZ: They do not.

REP. JOHNSON: And are they paid through the -- is there some other pot of money that the PRT commanders, if you will, control that pays the civilian employees?

MS. CRUZ: It's more of an (L&M ?) budget issue for the Department of State. And that's one of the limiting factors, because they don't have sufficient funds to really be able to hire I think as many contracted employees as they would like. So one of the limiting factors in their being able to bring on more contractors at the State Department is the limitation in the amount of funds that they have to hire people to staff the PRTs. All of the money right now that's appropriated through the supplemental and through the main State Department is for actual program work, not only for projects but for the operations of the PRT. A lot of the staff, it's hard to nail down where the money's coming from, because the State Department eats the salaries and the contract funds within their operational budgets.

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