Guest Blog: Smart Contracting is Saving Money

By Teddy Kidd
PSC Manager of Legislative Affairs

In an environment of increasing budget austerity a surprising piece of wisdom was shared at a recent meeting of the House Smart Contracting Caucus: This is a time of opportunity for federal contractors to help the government save money.

Guest Blog: PSC on DCAA: Progress Made, More Improvements Needed

By Roger Jordan

Vice President, Government Relations

Recent coverage of the Defense Contract Audit Agency’s problems, including the recent HSGAC Contracting Oversight Subcommittee hearing on February 1, has focused on how the agency has improved its audit processes through risk-based audit strategies that prioritize high-risk contracts and related actions. In testimony and recent interviews with the media, DCAA director Patrick Fitzgerald touted that the changes he’s implemented, coupled with a new contractor business systems rule, will put the agency back on track, he believes.

Admittedly, Fitzgerald has more work to do, and from an industry perspective we encourage him to look at the effect of his reforms on contractors and what further steps must be taken to improve DCAA-industry collaboration. For example, DCAA is still not effectively communicating with industry about corrective action plans contractors implement in response to DCAA audit findings deeming contractors’ systems deficient. In addition, DCAA is taking an excruciatingly long period of time to give contractors’ systems a “clean bill of health” after corrective action plans have proven effective.

Unfortunately, the Senate hearing represented a missed opportunity to focus on these issues.

Guest Blog: Non-profits’ Faustian Bargain with the Taliban

By Lawrence J. Halloran

Director of PSC's International Development Initiative

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story* about non-profit aid groups “distancing themselves from the U.S.-led coalition” and cutting separate safe-passage agreements with the Taliban in Afghanistan exposed a dangerous naiveté among some humanitarian actors there who are complicit in appeasing a lethal enemy. I wonder how fast those same aid workers would cover the distance between themselves and the nearest NATO military unit when some of Mullah Omar’s men who didn’t get the memo open fire.

To pretend the Taliban is just another benevolent community organization looking to “register” foreigners for their mutual peace of mind ignores the Taliban’s bloody past and their brutal plans for all they subjugate, especially women. Too many dedicated professionals from aid development and other firms have already suffered tragic losses of life to conclude that anyone’s safety lies in such dangerous delusions.

And if the Taliban’s safe passage registration is “free” in terms of money or tactical military intelligence, it surely comes at the price of an explicit endorsement of the group’s goals and the tacit acknowledgement of their illegitimate governing authority. Why else would the local Taliban bureaucrat quoted by the WSJ welcome “unaligned” aid groups into areas he controls while he feels free to shoot at others doing essentially the same work on behalf of the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government?

When a congressional subcommittee found that transport contractors were paying insurgent militias for convoy protection for supplies for U.S troops, the practice was roundly denounced. The widely publicized October 2010 Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded it was important to address those “who act contrary to our interests and contribute to the corruption that weakens the support of the Afghan people for their government.” Is it so different when a non-profit aid group pays the Taliban with its good name? Even when no money changes hands, letting the Taliban take tacit credit for the provision of medical supplies and other aid paid for by countries with soldiers in the field gives comfort to the enemy. Even the most expansive view of the humanitarian space between active combatants and innocent civilians does not have room for that indefensible double standard.

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Guest Blog: PDD on Global Development “Step in the Right Direction;” Sustained Leadership Needed to Ensure Success

By Stan Soloway

Professional Services Council President and CEO

Yesterday, President Obama signed a Presidential Decision Directive on Global Development (PDD) and described a new, unified policy approach to international development in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly High Level Summit on the Millennium Development Goals. PSC and its international development firm members support the elevation of development as a co-equal third pillar of national power, alongside diplomacy and defense. We believe the articulation of a U.S. Global Development Strategy will bring needed coherence and momentum to aid programs that are fragmented and duplicative. In discussions with Obama administration officials, we have supported plans to rebuild USAID as the nation’s leading voice in development issues and as the clear leader of a coordinated “whole of government” approach to foreign assistance.

PSC welcomes the president’s focus on economic growth as the fundamental force that will eventually transform the developing world and we support the president’s call to “use all the tools at our disposal” to achieve complex and difficult development goals. However, U.S. government support for greater “country ownership” should not be read as a code phrase for a wholesale shift away from the use of U.S development firms to direct assistance to foreign governments and organizations. Design and delivery modes for development projects must still be strategically tied to program goals and must reflect the political, social, economic and governance capabilities of the recipient nations and organizations.

Guest Blog: Reaching the Millennium Development Goals: Use All the Tools of International Development

By Stan Soloway
Professional Services Council President and CEO

As the U.N. General Assembly gathers to measure progress toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, they can take pride in celebrating important accomplishments, but should also begin to consider what happens when many of those ambitious plans are not met. The global needle has moved in a positive direction to address global poverty, universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, HIV/AIDs, environmental sustainability and development partnerships, but U.N. officials have admitted that some goals in many places are already beyond reach. A weak global economy will get most of the blame, but how much money is spent does not alone account for the failure to meet key development targets. Policies on how international aid is delivered also need to be examined in light of new global realities.

One key policy debate deals with the role of the private sector in funding and delivering development assistance. Some decry the “privatization” of aid projects funded by foundations and corporations while others denounce the use of contractors from donor nations as high-cost colonialism. MDG gaps and failures will be offered as proof of insufficient “ownership” of aid projects and that only local buy-in, purchased through direct transfer of funds to recipient-nation governments and non-profits, guarantees development success.

These arguments overlook the vital role private sector donors and implementers already play in advancing developing nations from unproductive dependence to self-sustaining economic and governance capabilities. The Obama administration’s MDG strategy prudently looks to leverage innovation, deploy new technologies and introduce “new business models to make aid agencies and the international development architecture more effective.” That recognition that development is about doing business is a good first step toward a balanced, effective assistance strategy for the MDGs and beyond.

Guest Blog: Washington Post’s "Political Bookworm" argument about development assistance is full of holes

By Lawrence J. Halloran

Director of PSC's International Development Initiative

The Washington Post’s "Political Bookworm," Steven Levingston, should have burrowed a bit deeper before he published the Sept. 2 commentary by Rachel McCleary, a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

In her guest blog, McCleary claims U.S. humanitarian aid should be “reclaimed” from the pernicious influences of for-profit development firms. She argues that non-profit private voluntary organizations should deliver the bulk of U.S. development assistance because they are apolitical, impartial and transnational, “that is, not identified with national ideologies or driven by short-term policy agendas.” But she offers no proof to suggest for-profit firms are the opposite.

Nor does she address the more pertinent issue of performance. Nowhere in her piece does she argue that non-profits are more effective or cheaper at completing development projects than tax-paying U.S. development firms. In effect, McCleary demands a needless, ultimately counterproductive, choice between aid delivery actors based on a misreading of the facts and a misunderstanding of how indispensible both U.S. companies and non-profits are to achieving humanitarian and development goals under the most difficult conditions on earth. Her post is replete with inaccuracies and irrelevancies, like where an organization is headquartered and its headquarter's proximity to Congress, rather than where it does the work and what the work achieves.