State Dept. Contractors Get Biggest Boost in Percentage of Federal Awards

Posted by Stephen Peacock - June 20, 2006 at 2:36 am
The minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee yesterday released a scathing report chronicling the widespread abuse of taxpayer dollars via the awarding of federal contracts.

The report, Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration, points out among its findings that the State Department "had the largest percentage increase in procurement spending of any major federal agency over the last five years. In 2000, the Department of State spent $1.2 billion on federal contracts. By 2005, this spending grew by $4.1 billion to $5.3 billion, an increase of 331.9%.” Across all federal departments and agencies, it identifies more than “100 contracts collectively worth over $700 billion that have been found by government auditors or investigators to involve substantial waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.”

Dollars, Not Sense, which the committee’s Special Investigations Division prepared for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.), also reveals that between 2000 and 2005, “the federal government’s annual procurement spending rose by $174.4 billion, from $203.1 billion in 2000 to $377.5 billion in 2005. The largest annual increase occurred between 2004 and 2005, when procurement spending jumped by $48 billion.”

Report Summary

Full Report
 (101 pages)

Share |

About Stephen Peacock

I'm currently a high school English teacher and writer. I'm also a former Washington, DC, journalist, having worked for Communications Daily and Washington Internet Daily (WID), investigative newsletters that cover the telecommunications, broadcast and Internet industries. Following the 9/11 attacks, my news beat expanded beyond Capitol Hill telecom/TV/IT policy and began to include technology-policy coverage at the Pentagon and Dept. of Homeland Security. I've written over a thousand articles about government and industry affairs, and I'm pleased to say that I was the reporter who broke the story about the Total Information Awareness surveillance/data-collection initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I've written articles for publications including NACLA Report on the Americas, Drug Enforcement Report, Corrections Journal, and The Tampa Tribune. I've also written a memoir about my former career as a plainclothes security officer of the Helmsley Palace hotel in New York City, Hotel Dick: Harlots, Starlets, Thieves & Sleaze.
http://jerseysandstorm.blogspot.com/
View full user profile

Latest Notebook Entries

more

Comments

Add comment

Our Policy on Comment Submissions: Co-publishers of Narco News (which includes The Narcosphere and The Field) may post comments without moderation. A ll co-publishers comment under their real name, have contributed resources or volunteer labor to this project, have filled out this application and agreed to some simple guidelines about commenting.

Narco News has recently opened its comments section for submissions to moderated comments (that’s this box, here) by everybody else. More than 95 percent of all submitted comments are typically approved, because they are on-topic, coherent, don’t spread false claims or rumors, don’t gratuitously insult other commenters, and don’t engage in commerce, spam or otherwise hijack the thread. Narco News reserves the right to reject any comment for any reason, so, especially if you choose to comment anonymously, the burden is on you to make your comment interesting and relev ant. That said, as you can see, hundreds of comments are approved each week here. Good luck in your comment submission!

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

User login

Navigation

Reporters' Notebooks

About Stephen Peacock

Personal Website
http://jerseysandstorm.blogspot.com/

Biography
I'm currently a high school English teacher and writer. I'm also a former Washington, DC, journalist, having worked for Communications Daily and Washington Internet Daily (WID), investigative newsletters that cover the telecommunications, broadcast and Internet industries. Following the 9/11 attacks, my news beat expanded beyond Capitol Hill telecom/TV/IT policy and began to include technology-policy coverage at the Pentagon and Dept. of Homeland Security. I've written over a thousand articles about government and industry affairs, and I'm pleased to say that I was the reporter who broke the story about the Total Information Awareness surveillance/data-collection initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I've written articles for publications including NACLA Report on the Americas, Drug Enforcement Report, Corrections Journal, and The Tampa Tribune. I've also written a memoir about my former career as a plainclothes security officer of the Helmsley Palace hotel in New York City, Hotel Dick: Harlots, Starlets, Thieves & Sleaze.