Testifying in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing today, Trey Hodgkins of technology trade association “TechAmerica” offered some pretty bogus excuses for resisting transparency in government contracts.
[I]f disclosure included posting to a public website the unredacted contract, a number of critical elements would be exposed. Something as simple as identifying the location where work is to be performed could reveal the geographic location of crucial components of our National and Homeland Security apparatuses, thereby exposing them to attack, disruption or destruction. Similarly, if data about program capabilities were to be disclosed as part of the public disclosure of contracting actions, adversaries could evaluate the supply chain, identify critical production components and, by attacking that component, disrupt our security. Data aggregated from published contracting actions also would allow adversaries to discern and reverse-engineer our capabilities and identify our weaknesses.
From a corporate perspective, disclosure of data from a contracting action—particularly the publication of an unredacted contract—would expose intellectual property, corporate sensitive and technical data to industrial espionage and allow corporate competitors to aggregate data, such as pricing methods, and weaken the competitive posture of a company in the government and commercial markets.
There is a remote possibility of risk to domestic security in some contracts, but the public benefits of disclosure vastly outstrip those risks. Hodgkins’ veiled pants-wetting about terrorism is a crock.
The corporate interests Hodgkins cites are balderdash. If you want to do government contracting, you are going to be involved in a public contracting process. Get over it or get out of the business.
I have not been impressed with “TechAmerica” since it was formed by the merger of several smaller trade associations. Hodgkins and TechAmerica should get on the other side of this issue, figure out how to protect what needs protecting, and disclose the rest.
I look forward to seeing something from “TechAmerica” that is actually innovative and not just slavish pursuit of government contracts, good public policies be damned.
I previously lauded the Sunlight Foundation for its intention to bid on the contract for updating Recovery.gov. There’s been extensive excessive discussion of it on the Open House Project Google group.
The general theme among the one or two critics has been “leave the incompetence to the experts.” They’ve been a bit curmedgeonly, frankly.
But an informative and balanced comment highlights the practice of “wiring” government contracts. The contracting authority gets together with the preferred contractor and they collaborate to make it very difficult for anyone else to win the bid.
Well, that’s why Sunlight’s bid is so interesting and different. As I said, “[T]he contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risk if the contract is awarded based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism.”
Government contracting officials aren’t used to encountering public scrutiny and political risk for their award decisions. They’re going to experience it here, and they should get used to it for the long haul. I am eager – nay, giddy! – to report on what happens.
Kudos, and carry on, Sunlight.
The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is delaying the Bush Administration plan to require federal contractors to use the E-Verify worker background check system.
Criticizing the move, Lamar Smith (R-TX), ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee says, “It is ironic that at the same time President Obama was pushing for passage of the stimulus package to help the unemployed, his Administration delayed implementation of a rule designed to protect jobs for U.S. citizens and legal workers.”
E-Verify may well have been designed or intended to protect jobs for citizens and legal workers, but that’s not at all what it would do. I wrote about it in a Cato Policy Analysis titled “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration” (a ten-year follow-on to Stephen Moore’s “A National Id System: Big Brother’s Solution to Illegal Immigration“):
A mandatory national EEV system would have substantial costs yet still fail to prevent illegal immigration. It would deny a sizable percentage of law-abiding American citizens the ability to work legally. Deemed ineligible by a database, millions each year would go pleading to the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for the right to work.
Even if E-Verify were workable, mission creep would lead to its use for direct federal control of many aspects of American citizens’ lives. Though it should be scrapped, the longer E-Verify is delayed the better.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.