The Fourth Branch of Government

By Pratap Chatterjee

Technology consultants Booz Allen Hamilton may not be on the top of everyone's lists for conflicts of interest, but Congressman Henry Waxman revealed some rather interesting information about this McLean, Virginia, company at last week's hearing on contracting abuse.

Waxman told the hearing that Booz Allen had $97 million in contracts with the Department of Homeland Security in 2005. One job that Booz Allen staff were hired to do was to help plan, award and manage the federal government's SBI-Net program, a high technology security fence between the U.S. and Mexico (Joe Richey wrote us an article on this program - see Border for Sale)

Of the 98 personnel assigned to the SBI-Net project office as of December 2006, 60 work for contractors like Booz Allen. The company that these personnel are overseeing for SBI-Net is Boeing.

What Waxman finds worrying is the fact that Booz Allen has had an ongoing relationship with Boeing since 1993 to assist Boeing in maintaining its market share in the airplane industry, and other extensive relationships with the aircraft manufacturer since 1970.

The question is an important one: how can you be an impartial supervisor over someone who also pays your bills?

Booz Allen is no stranger to the inner workings of government, though. They happen to be one of the largest contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Tim Shorrock has done some digging into this subject, which you can read in his Mother Jones article: The Spy Who Billed Me.

Contractors supervising their own business partners is fashionable in Washinton DC these days, so we are glad to see that Scott Shane of the New York Times has started a regular series on this subject which he calls "The Fourth Branch of Government". In the first article about this phenomenon he wrote:

In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government's reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour.

... CACI had itself been reviewed in 2004 for possible suspension in connection with supplying interrogators to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The use of private interrogators at Abu Ghraib another matter we've been tracking, to read more about that, see David Phinney's article: "Prison Interrogation for Profit". To be fair, CACI is no longer in the interrogation business. To find out more about who has this lucrative work, do read "Intelligence in Iraq: L-3 Supplies Spy Support"