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Contractors have wasted tens of billions of dollars in Iraq and have been implicated in the abuse of Iraqi civilians and their own employees, causing serious damage to the American reputation abroad. While these private companies have earned staggering profits, American troops face serious equipment shortages and an Iraqi populace made ever more hostile by our failure to restore basic services.
IAVA Recommends:
- An end to the use of emergency supplemental funding for the Iraq War, which limits Congressional oversight of war budgeting. After four years of war, the bulk of annual funding needs should be foreseeable.
- Criminal investigations into corruption, cronyism, conflicts of interest, fraud, waste, and abuse in DOD contracting and acquisitions, and particularly in Iraq's reconstruction. While IAVA lauds the recent move by Congress to extend the term of the Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction, a more comprehensive investigation of widespread abuses, modeled after the Truman Commission, is necessary to prosecute war-profiteering and prevent future offenses.
- Congressional hearings into the homeland-security implications of our extensive use of National Guardsmen and Reservists overseas.
- A new Pentagon initiative, spearheaded by the Secretary of Defense, to ensure better oversight of contracting and acquisitions. This must include the confirmation of a wholly independent Pentagon Inspector General, dramatic increases in trained and experienced in-house oversight staff with clear assignments of responsibility and accountability, better inter-agency contract coordination, and a reexamination of the decision to move the much-needed DOD audit from 2007 to 2016. The Secretary of Defense must provide Congress with quarterly updates on the initiative's progress.
- A fundamental change in the DOD's incentive structure to reward only exceptional work, to withhold payment for inadequate work or dubious or unsupported costs, and to bar "repeated offender" contractors from receiving government contracts.
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