Pentagon procurement chief urges better ethics system

The procurement scandal rocking the Air Force has underscored the need to give contracting officers more opportunities to voice concerns over purchasing decisions, the Defense Department's acquisition chief said Wednesday.

Some Air Force officials feel they lacked an avenue to express worries over the $23.5 billion deal to lease 100 refueling tankers from Boeing that eventually landed Darleen Druyun in jail for ethics violations, said Deidre Lee, the Pentagon's director of procurement and acquisition policy. These feelings came to light as the Defense Contract Management Agency investigated the former Air Force executive's transgressions, Lee said at the Federal Acquisition Conference and Exhibition in Washington.

Procurement officials across government should be open to answering questions about contract awards, and should allow discomfort to surface, Lee said. "When we do it in secret, people assume there's something we're not proud of," she said.

Details of Druyun's violations will continue to "dribble out," opening fresh "wounds" over what will likely be a "long, hot summer" for the Defense Department's acquisition community, Lee said. But officials at other agencies should realize that they are vulnerable to similar breaches, she said.

Acquisition professionals across government should watch as the Pentagon implements recommendations from the Defense Science Board, Lee suggested. In March the board published a report with advice on how to prevent a single contracting official from amassing too much power.

One of the notable recommendations was that senior procurement professionals should switch jobs more frequently, Lee said, adding that she feels five to seven years in the same position is plenty.

Druyun's actions are particularly disturbing because they unnecessarily taint the reputation of the thousands of federal acquisition professionals who do good work each day, Lee said.

On top of handling the fallout from the Air Force scandal, Defense acquisition professionals are faced with the challenge of designing contracts to support the department's war-fighting mission, while maintaining the proper delineation between civilian contractors and soldiers, Lee said. Such agreements should be transparent so that the public can more easily understand them, she said.

Across government, contracting officers are struggling to write agreements that reflect agencies' unique missions, Lee said. "We all have a mission that we're supporting, and it's not contracting," she said.

Misuse of the General Services Administration schedules-catalogs of pre-negotiated contracts available to agencies-also ranks among Lee's top concerns. Pentagon contracting officers have been widely criticized for ordering services such as interrogation and counseling from schedules intended for information technology purchases. There's nothing "nefarious" about outsourcing these services, Lee said, but they shouldn't have been obtained off the IT schedules.

"These are great tools; let's use them properly," Lee said. Procurement officials should also be wary that the GSA catalogs can't meet every acquisition need. If an item isn't on the schedule and must be obtained by soliciting bids, then "just do it," she advised.