A brief, puzzling update (below the fold) on my attempts to get my hands on actual forms SF-LLL, which government contractors or grantees must file when they make a payment or agree to pay “any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered Federal action,” with the latter phrase referring to any contract, grant, cooperative agreement, loan, loan guarantee or loan insurance worth more than $100,000. A reminder: The hope here is that if we can get enough forms SF-LLL, we can start to distinguish between those contracts awarded through the normal procurement process, and those awarded after lobbyists went outside the normal procurement process to influence members of Congress or administration officials. If we can get a complete set of all forms SF-LLL filed with the government, we might be able to build a database from that information, linking it with or incorporating it into sites like FedSpending.org, which tracks government contracts and spending, or OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political influence.

Now, for the update: I got an answer to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed on Feb. 5, 2007, with Hanscom Air Force Base requesting any forms SF-LLL filed by or on behalf of a company, ProLogic, in connection with this award:

ProLogic Inc., Fairmont, W.Va., was awarded on 19 December 2005, a $7,090,838 cost plus fixed fee contract to research how the best to gather required medical data from medical encounters, analyze it, and make to available to users in support of medical planning and operations using a Net-Centric approach identified as MED-STARS. At this time $2,208,000 has been obligated. This work will be complete by October 2008. Solicitations began January 2005 and negotiations were completed in August 2005. The Headquarters Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., is the contracting activity. (FA8726-06-C-0005).

The response reads as follows:

1. This is in reference to your FOIA request, dated 5 February, for any and all forms SF-LLL.

2. We do not maintain these forms; therefore, we have no records to give you.

3. If you decide to appeal this response, please write to the Secretary of the Air Force within 60 days from the date of this response, and include your reasons for appeal. Attach a copy of this response and address your letter to:

Secretary of the Air Force
THRU: 66 MSG/SCSF
63 Grenier Street
Hanscom AFB, MA 01731-2303

Line #2 strikes me as being oddly worded. I can understand if they don’t have any forms because ProLogic didn’t lobby on that particular contract, and didn’t file the form. Then the response should be that, after searching their files, there are no “responsive documents,” or some such. But what does it mean that they don’t maintain the forms? Does that mean they get them but send them somewhere else? Throw them out? That if they’re offered them, they refuse to take them? Rather than immediately file an appeal, I emailed back asking for clarification of item 2 of the response.

For the record, here is the portion of the Code of Regulations (32 CFR 28 for those keeping score at home) that requires “persons” (defined below as “an individual, corporation, company, association, authority, firm, partnership, society, State, and local government, regardless of whether such entity is operated for profit or not for profit”) “requesting or receiving” a contract, grant, loan and so on, to file form SF-LLL (shown in appendix B).

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Add to the list of Freedom of Information Act requests sent out in pursuit of forms SF-LLL one requesting information related to the contract mentioned in this April 20, 2005, story from the Hill, concerning a federal effort to develop and distribute “intelligent transportation technology.” As I understand it, this technology lets users access traffic information in real time, to see where tie-ups are and, hopefully, avoid them on their way home. (I think Al Gore might have had this system on his mind during the 2000 campaign, when he made livability one of his themes.) Right now, you can see what such a system would look like at Traffic.com, in part because Traffic.com (actually, its government services division known as Mobility Technologies) was the company that, in 1998, was awarded a federal contract to develop the technology in a few, test cities. Here’s The Hill on what happened in 2001, when intelligent transportation technology was supposed to be offered to 50 additional cities:

…[The] Department of Transportation (DoT) attempted to open the program up to competitive bidding in other cities. But a January 2001 letter to Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater from Darrell Wilson, Shuster’s chief of staff, reads, “In no way was this intended that DoT conduct a competition for the awarding of funds.” Ultimately, after more letters back and forth, Shuster triumphed and the program was not competitively rebid, allowing Mobility Technologies access to the entire $50 million.

According to critics of the legislation, Traffic.com’s favorable treatment by Congress stems from its facility in playing the Washington game. From 2000 to 2004, the company enlisted the services of at least 10 lobbying firms…

Now, remember what the exercise is here. We suspect that, when lobbyists are hired to influence federal contracting decisions, there is the possibility that procurement decisions will be made, not on the basis of who makes the best mousetrap, but rather on the basis of who has the better connections. We have learned that there is a disclosure form, SF-LLL, that must be filed “for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered Federal action,” with the phrase “a covered federal action” here meaning a federal contract, grant, loan, loan agreement, loan insurance, or a cooperative agreement. So right now we are attempting to use the Freedom of Information Act where we have reason to suspect that SF-LLLs may have been filed, as a first test to see how difficult it is to get these records. So far, we’ve sent requests to Defense, the General Services Agency, the Coast Guard, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and now Transportation. Ideally, in the future, contracting databases might include a notation saying that for a particular contract, a form SF-LLL had been filed–allowing the taxpaying public, at a glance, to distinguish between contracts awarded through the routine appropriations process, and those awarded in part because a company hired a lobbyist to influence someone in government to award the contract.

For those who don’t want to hear about the labor pains of an investigation, read no further: quite a bit of tedium follows. For those mildly interested in the new wrinkle the tedium gives to our investigation, you can skip down to the last paragraph.

If you search FedSpending.org for Traffic.Com, for Mobility Technologies, or for Argus Networks (the name of the company until it changed it in 1999), you come up with zip. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the reason this is important is that when making a Freedom of Information Act request for a federal contract, it helps to know the number of the contract you’re asking for and, just as important, the agency that issued the contract. If you don’t know what you’re asking for, and who to ask for it from, the already slow and cumbersome FOIA process becomes glacial. You can of course, still pull it off: FOIA any and all contracts–or a list of same–issued between, say, January 1, 1998, and the present by the Department of Transportation to Traffic.com, AKA Mobility Technologies, AKA Argus Networks–and hope that the right one jumps out at you. In this case, though, you would be disappointed.

That’s because the contract referred to in the above-quoted Hill story appears not to have been issued to Mobility Technologies (for simplicity’s sake, let’s stick to calling the company that for now), but insted to Signal Corp. I found this out, after a lot of flailing around, when I came across these documents, copies of a preliminary draft of the form S-1 and appendices that Traffic.com filed in November 2005 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with its Initial Public Offering. It’s a long PDF (441 pages) but if you scroll down to page 330, you’ll find the original contract numbers and the task order for Mobility Technologies’ work. On page 335 of the PDF, you find the office that issued the contract–the Transportation Administrative Services Center.

Since the contract was issued, Signal Corp. was bought out by a company called Veridian, which was in turn acquired by General Dynamics. If you search for General Dynamics or Veridian in the 2002 Fedspending database, you can find contract number DTTS59-99-D-00445, the one under which Mobility Technologies was awarded the task order that I think we’re interested in.

At this point, I don’t know why the contract was done this way, but it does seem a little odd–if the program was important enough to draw the attention of so many members of Congress (go back to The Hill’s story to see what I mean), why did the money to implement it come from a task order tacked onto what appears to be something of an unrelated contract given to another firm?

Now, for the new wrinkle: Generally, it’s almost impossible to get information from the federal government on subcontractors (that is, the companies that government contractors hire to do government work). However, Form SF-LLL, handy little document that is, specifies that subawardees that lobby also have to file: “Check the appropriate classification of the reporting entity that designates if it is, or expects to be, a prime or subaward recipient. Identify the tier of the subawardee, e.g., the first subawardee of the prime is the 1st tier. Subawards include but are not limited to subcontracts, subgrants and contract awards under grants.” So, potentially, in addition to determining what contractors are lobbying for contracts, if we got our hands on a government-wide stack of SF-LLLs, we could also find out what subcontractors are lobbying, and have the first set of data on this underexamined facet of federal spending.

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As they so often are able to do, investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, writing for Vanity Fair, offer both a sense of the scale and the substance of the issues raised by the federal government’s increasing reliance on contractors.

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name “body shops”—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security. The Founding Fathers may have argued eloquently for a government of laws, not of men, but what we’ve got instead is a government of body shops.

The article goes on to profile Science Applied International Corporation, or SAIC, among the top ten government contractors, and how they do business with the federal government–relying on agency records, court filings, and whistleblowers. It’s an amazingly revealing piece of work.

So where’s Congress in all this? I couldn’t help noticing that it appears that the company has lobbied Congress over various appropriations bills–it seems like it would be worth it to find out if SAIC is also lobbying Congress over specific contracting issues. Which means that I’ll be sending out a few more FOIA requests as we continue to pursue Form SF-LLL, which contractors must file “for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered Federal action” — with “covered Federal action” meaning the awarding of a contract or a grant.

UPDATE: Yikes, forgot to add the full disclosure–I had the pleasure of working for Barlett and Steele as a researcher on a 1996 Philadelphia Inquirer series they did that was also published as a book, America: Who Stole the Dream?, which looked at American Trade, Tax and Immigration policy and its effect on the middle class. It’s amazing how many of the issues they raise in that book are as relevant (and unaddressed) today as they were then. But then, I’m biased…

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Last week, GoodbyeJim.com’s Jonathan Marks wrote a post about a company called ProLogic. After noting that that company has made campaign contributions to Rep. James Moran, and has hired a sophisticated lobbying firm, PMA Group, whose employees have been generous contributors to Moran’s campaigns over the years, Marks raises what I think is a fairly important question: How does ProLogic win business? How does it fair against competing firms that don’t have the benefit of any representation from a savvy insider firm like PMA Group (which describes what it does here)? And what does this say about the way procurement decisions are made in the government? Are we always buying the best mousetrap? Are we unable to buy the best mousetrap without the mediation of lobbyists? Conversely, are we making do with somewhat overpriced, somewhat mediocre mousetraps because the company that manufactures them hired the lobbyist with the right connections?

To get back to Marks’ question, I think the first thing you have to do is separate out the contracts on which ProLogic (or any company, for that matter) lobbied from those it got without going beyond the normal procurement procedure–sending a proposal to a government agency, perhaps making a presentation to the acquisitions officials, and then keeping your fingers crossed that yours is the most attractive mousetrap in terms of price and quality.

Sadly, you can’t answer such questions using traditional lobbyist disclosure forms. The one linked, filed by PMA Group on Feburary 9, 2006, and covering the final six months of 2005, lists the following as specific lobbying issues:

H.R. 2528, Military Quality of Life, Veterans Affairs Appropriations, 2006, NASA H.R. 2683, Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2006, R&D

Would anyone care to wager on whether the following contract, described here, falls under that description:

ProLogic Inc., Fairmont, W.Va., was awarded on 19 December 2005, a $7,090,838 cost plus fixed fee contract to research how the best to gather required medical data from medical encounters, analyze it, and make to available to users in support of medical planning and operations using a Net-Centric approach identified as MED-STARS. At this time $2,208,000 has been obligated. This work will be complete by October 2008. Solicitations began January 2005 and negotiations were completed in August 2005. The Headquarters Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., is the contracting activity. (FA8726-06-C-0005).

Or whether any of the other contracts the company won–from the Departments of Energy, Defense and Veterans Affairs as well as NASA and the General Services Administration, were the subject of specific lobbying actions by PMA Group?

I’ve started the process of requesting under the Freedom of Information Act any forms SF-LLL, which a contractor must file with a contracting agency if it’s paid a lobbyist to work on its behalf in connection with the contract award, to see if I can answer that question.

This part is pretty tedious–a lot of cutting and pasting word documents, plus entering what I’m asking for into a simple excel spreadsheet to keep track of what I’m asking for and from whom. Still, even though it’s not the most exciting way to spend a day, I find it’s best to get FOIAs out the door as quickly as possible, in no small measure because the government can be quite slow when it comes to releasing documents, even ones that say, “This information will be available for public inspection.”

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This story, about the problems that the Coast Guard and its contractor, Integrated Coast Guard Systems (a joint venture of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin), are having with their Deepwater program, got me thinking–and about something other than this report on the program by the Inspector General of the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Under federal law (it’s title 31 U.S.C. section 1352, for those of you keeping score at home), contractors and subcontractors, for-profits and non-profits, universities and state and local governments that lobby the federal government for contracts, grants, cooperative guarantees, loans, loan guarantees or loan insurance have to file a form, called SF-LLL, when they lobby the federal government for that contract, grant, cooperative guarantee, and so on. The instructions that come with the form say, “The filing of a form is required for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress,an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered Federal action.”

That’s a mouthful, but what it means, I believe, is that a company that’s lobbying, say, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security for an earmark would have to file an SF-LLL along with its contract proposal to the Department of Homeland Security, and then again every time it makes a payment to its lobbying firm. That’s pretty useful information to have, because the presence or absence of an SF-LLL allows us to distinguish between which contracts, grants and so on are awarded solely through regular procurement procedures, and which recipients of federal funds hired lobbyists seeking House or Senate members, or their staffers, or administration officials, to intervene on their behalf.

It would be helpful to have a nice big pile of SF-LLLs as a reference when looking at federal contracting and grantmaking data. Even more helpful, of course, would be to have that information integrated into the data on sites like FedSpending.org and the Open Secrets lobbying database. However, I suspect that we’re a long way away from having that kind of transparency.

Form SF-LLL says, in a box on the lower left hand side of the page, that “This information is open to public inspection.” I’m curious to see how hard it is to inspect an SF-LLL. Below is a copy of my first serious effort to do so–a request made under the Freedom of Information Act for any SF-LLLs filed in connection with the first Deepwater contract, HSCG23-02-C-2DW001, which Integrated Coast Guard Systems won in 2002. On page seven of this 2002 lobbying disclosure form (that is, the kind filed with the House and Senate), Northrop Grumman notes it lobbied on Deepwater, as does Lockheed Martin on page 19 of this 2002 lobbying disclosure. It does not seem unreasonable to assume that their lobbying would have involved the actual awarding of the Deepwater contract referred to above, but of course I could be mistaken (and hopefully, we’ll find out the answer soon from the Coast Guard).

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to send out some more FOIAs asking for SF-LLLs for different contracts issued by various agencies. Sometimes, like in the Deepwater example here, I’ll focus on a single contract. In others, I’ll see if I can find a broader approach. I’m also going to make some calls around town to lobbyists, to government agencies, to congressional staffs and others to try to trace the history of form SF-LLL (which is actually quite fascnating–and quite relevant to what we’re trying to accomplish here at Sunlight. More on that in a bit).

Here’s the text of the FOIA, sent to the Coast Guard electronically just a few minutes ago:

Donald Taylor
FOIA Officer
U.S. Coast Guard
Commandant (CG-611)
2100 2nd St., S.W.
Washington, DC 20593-0001

Dear Mr. Taylor:

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, I requesting copies of the following documents:

Any and all forms SF-LLL (as required by 31 U.S.C. § 1352) filed by or on behalf of Northrop Grumman Corp. or Lockheed Martin Corp. in connection with the contract award number HSCG23-02-C-2DW001 made to Integrated Coast Guard Systems, Duns number 0364758330000.

I respectfully request a waiver of all costs associated with fulfilling this submission pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). Disclosure of the requested records will further the “public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government and is not primarily in the commercial interest” of the requester, the Sunlight Foundation.

Founded in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)3, nonpartisan organization dedicated to furthering transparency in government. Sunlight disseminates information about its activities to thousands of concerned citizens, policymakers, and the media via its Web site http://www.sunlightfoundation.com.

Please feel free to call or email me if this request requires further clarification. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

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