With the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Housing Administration and the Treasury combining to promise trillions (as much as $7.7 trillion to be precise, but who, other than Bloomberg News, is counting?) with little or no transparency or disclosure for the bulk of the money, it’s easy to lose sight of the relative nickels and dimes doled out in contracts awarded by federal agencies to private firms — all $430 billion of it.

The extent to which contractors interact with government is breathtaking — to give on example, the army field manual setting forth the rules contractors must abide by on the battlefield was written by Military Professional Resources Inc., a government contractor. And abuses in the system have been well-documented: Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham went to jail for steering federal contracts in exchange for bribes; Darleen Druyun, an Air Force procurement officer, earned her prison stripes by swinging a sweetheart tanker deal for Boeing before leaving the Pentagon for a sweetheart job with…Boeing.

Sites like FedSpending.org and the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database bring a little transparency and accountability to the process, but there’s far more information that Congress should require that the federal government provide.

Once upon a time, contractors had to publicly disclose when they went outside the normal procurement process and hired lobbyists to attempt to win contracts. Bringing back those disclosures (which required lobbyists to list those they were meeting with on behalf of clients) and integrating those disclosures with the data available on USASpending.gov (FedSpending’s less robust government cousin) would be one place to start. Clearly identifying which contracts satisfy presidential and congressional earmarks would be useful as well. Linking up contract awards in USASpending with archived solicitation notices in FedBizOpps, the government’s official contracting opportunities database, would also provide the public with a fuller picture of what the government is buying. (In USASpending, a Blackwater State Department contract is described as being for “protective services - Iraq.” Fedbizopps provides somewhat more detail on what a security contract might entail.)

Government can’t do its work without contractors — everything from the security of State Department officials to answering requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act have been outsourced. But government can require more transparency from contractors and the federal agencies they work for — keeping them open keeps the system honest.

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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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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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