What happens when you hand out money like candy at Halloween to government contractors overseas to rebuild infrastructure in Afghanistan, and then you fail to properly check take sure the work is being done? Take a wild-assed guess (I bet even our conservative friends could get this one right):
WASHINGTON — The U.S. has spent more than $732 million to improve Afghanistan’s electrical grid since 2002, but many of the projects have been plagued by delays and rising costs in part because of poor oversight by the American government, a watchdog agency reports.
Of six projects underway in 2009, only one has been completed on time.
The report issued by auditors with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR, for short — who thinks up these names anyway?) says it was all the fault of “poor communication” between the contracting firms and officials for the U.S. Agency for International Development, who apparently relied almost solely on reports by the companies which were often incomplete and untimely.
So this is all Obama’s fault, right? Well, not exactly. You see the companies involved were given contracts to rebuild the electrical grid in Afghanistan before anyone had prepared a “concrete plan” on how to rebuild the grid — back in the Bush era. In fact, it wasn’t until Democrats controlled Congress in 2007 that SIGAR was created.
Inspector General Arnold Fields told McClatchy that his agency should have been created before 2008 so waste and fraud could be better detected.
The U.S. government “should have been more aggressive years ago,” he said. “We’re behind in terms of providing the oversight.”
His agency currently has 41 ongoing investigations.
Not surprisingly, the contracts involved were given to companies who are suspected of fraud, waste and corruption — the Louis Berger Group of New Jersey and Black & Veatch.
Plagued by delays and rising costs, the project reveals how the U.S. government continues to ignore the hard lessons of Iraq, critics say, where contractors received billions of dollars with little oversight and inspectors have found rampant waste, fraud and abuse.
Like Halliburton, which by some estimates took in more than $10 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts, Louis Berger/Black & Veatch received a so-called “cost plus contract,” which reimburses costs and pays a percentage of those expenses as a fee. […]
Even so, cost-plus contracts can encourage waste and overbilling, experts said. Auditors and investigators who scrutinized Halliburton’s contracts over several years in Iraq, for instance, found millions of dollars in double-billing and inflated costs.
Oh, and those power plants being built? Afghanistan’s government won’t be able to afford operating them, because of the cost of the diesel fuel they require to generate electricity.
The Afghan government is expected to need up to $70 million in aid a year to truck in diesel fuel for the plant and at least another $60 million to maintain and repair it.
I wonder who will get stuck with the tab for “another fine mess Bush” left President Obama to deal with?*
* That’s a rhetorical question, folks. We all know who will bear the cost of Bushco’s incompetence — You and I.
