Whose Business Is It?
IBD Editorials
Posted 01/25/2010 07:02 PM ET
Politics: During last year's presidential campaign, Democrats blasted "sweetheart deals" for companies like Halliburton and vowed to end no-bid contracts. Now the Democrats' political donors are reaping them.
Monday, Fox News found that Checchi & Company Consulting was awarded a $24,673,427 no-bid contract for "rule of law stabilization services" inside Afghanistan. And by coincidence, its president, Vincent Checchi, donated $8,350 to Obama's campaign, according to opensecrets.org.
Supposedly, Checchi will train the "next generation of legal professionals" and develop the capacity of Afghanistan's justice system "to be accessible, reliable and fair."
None of those things describe the contract process Checchi is operating from. The U.S. Agency for International Development and other government agencies award contracts on a bid basis, making exceptions only if there's a singular good or service only one company can provide. The exceptions are designated IQC — indefinite quantity contract.
In 2002, Halliburton was awarded a renewal of a no-bid contract on this basis in Iraq because no other company could do the specialized firefighting work at oil wells that was needed.
The left, steeped in irrational hatred of Vice President Dick Cheney, who once ran Halliburton, howled the deal was corrupt, but ignored that no one else could do the work. They also missed that it was President Bill Clinton who signed off on the original Halliburton contract. The Bush administration merely renewed it.
It's a far cry from the aid scene in Afghanistan these days. Unlike Halliburton, which does something others can't, Checchi is just one of many aid groups that can do the vaguely defined work of democracy-building. Yet, it has the same "IQC" designation.
Shut out by a no-bid contract, rival contractors told Fox it's a corrupted process that will only institutionalize the aid rackets of Afghanistan and delay the work of real democracy-building.
It may also lead to cost-overruns and the shutting out of qualified people — all for political reasons.
"Why do you think there's a constitutional crisis in Iraq?" asked Maggie Petito, president of Friends of Rule of Law in Ecuador, who's familiar with USAID contracting. "These no-bid contracts exclude competition and wrongly deprive the U.S. of what should be vibrant, competitive services to foreign governments."
If Afghanistan weren't so important it might be written off as just Chicago politics as usual. But there's a war that must be won and few signs from the White House of what it wants to achieve. Instead of winning the war, President Obama seems to be using Afghanistan to reward his political cronies.
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