Congress pursues dual paths on contracting oversight

Although their goals remain relatively similar, House and Senate lawmakers appear to be following noticeably different paths toward implementing a series of much debated contracting reform bills.

Last week, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, introduced a wide-ranging set of acquisition provisions that covers everything from prohibiting the use of lead systems integrators to providing greater protection for private sector whistleblowers.

The 52-page Clean Contracting Amendment, included as part of the House's fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill, includes provisions that have passed the House but failed to gain traction in the Senate or those that were previously implemented by the Defense Department and would now be expanded governmentwide.

While the House appears to be swinging for the fences, the Senate's version of the defense authorization bill takes a more modest approach to contracting reform.

Peter Levine, general counsel for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Defense Department still was adjusting to the multitude of complex acquisition regulation changes that Congress passed in the fiscal 2008 bill.

"We're trying to be less aggressive this year," Levine said on Wednesday at a conference sponsored by the Coalition for Government Procurement, a contractor trade group.

For example, the Senate bill includes a scaled-down, government-only version of a contractor misconduct database that would that track completed criminal, civil or administrative proceedings against federal contractors. Waxman's amendment, however, mirrors a bill that passed the House in April that opens the contractor database to the general public.

Reaching common ground between the two bills could be dicey.

Mark Stephenson, a staffer on the oversight committee, said at the conference that House Democrats have compromised already by limiting the database to only completed proceedings. He declined to comment on any further compromises.

Senate staffers have raised administrative concerns about making sure documents that are not legally available to the public are excluded from the database. But Stephenson suggested that Freedom of Information Act officials at agencies are equipped to handle the process.

The House and Senate also disagree about the need to address sole-source contracting.

Stephenson cited House committee data showing that contracts awarded without full and open competition had risen from $67.5 billion in 2000 to nearly $207 billion in 2006. The Clean Contracting Amendment requires all federal agencies to develop and implement a plan to minimize the use of sole-source contracts.

Senate lawmakers say those figures are grossly overstated.

Levine said statistics from the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the Pentagon suggest that sole-source contracting has remained relatively stable in recent years. The discrepancy, he said, is that House officials count each task order granted to a single vendor on a multiple award contract, while the government does not.

The House and Senate appear far apart on a handful of legislative tactics, but they generally agree about the source of many contracting-related problems and how to address them.

The two legislative aides concurred on the need to beef up the acquisition workforce development fund, provide greater oversight of interagency contracts and to address personal and organizational conflicts of interest that arise when contractors work side-by-side with federal employees.

"On virtually every subject, we share the same objective," Levine said.