Wednesday, October 06, 2004
No-bid contracts from the Pentagon - get yours today!
More than 40 percent of Pentagon business, a total of $362 billion, has been awarded on a no-bid basis over the last six years, according to a report issued Wednesday that showed that the biggest companies won the bulk of their contracts without going through a competitive process.
The nation's largest military contractor, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, received the most Pentagon business on a noncompetitive basis. Seventy-four percent of Lockheed's $94 billion in Pentagon contracts received since fiscal 1998 was awarded without competition, according to the report, which was written by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington nonprofit group that studied 2.2 million Pentagon contracts worth a collective $900 billion.
"Competitive bidding at the Pentagon happens less often than we think, and the no-bid controversy surrounding Halliburton in Iraq actually is, unfortunately, not an aberration," said Charles Lewis, the center's executive director. Mr. Lewis's organization was one of the first to study contracts won by Halliburton and other companies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and today's report grew out of that earlier work.
At Boeing, the nation's second-largest contractor, 60 percent of the $81 billion in Pentagon contracts since 1998 was awarded without competition, as was 67 percent at the No. 3 contractor, the Raytheon Company, which received $40 billion in contracts over the same period. Of the nation's top 10 military contractors, 9 won more than half of their Pentagon contract dollars through noncompetitive awards.
Story.
posted by chris at 2:03 PM
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