The Unprotected Public Trough

Sometimes I feel like the Good Old Days when laws were carried out by the representatives we elected, and who swore to effect them, was some misty land of Camelot, too wonderful really to be true. In this age of sleaze, when the country's representatives actively work to defeat the people's will, our functioning country of laws takes on the quality of myth.

Still, I bet you think that the business interests are being served, since supposedly our high office holders were businessmen, developing techniques for promoting the welfare of those businesses that are supposed to provide the prosperity to trickle down to the peons, hmmm? Nope. Unless you're Carlyle Co's, I guess you're on the receiving end of the dirty tricks, too, it seems.

In 1995, Joseph Cooper won a multiyear contract worth up to $8 million to do public relations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He received the contract through a Small Business Administration program established to increase opportunities for small companies.

But not long after the work was under way, the deal was awarded instead to three multimillion-dollar companies, which were listed as disadvantaged in contract documents. After years of trying to win the contract back, Cooper filed a false-claims lawsuit against the companies, asserting that they had committed fraud by saying they were small businesses.

This year, to Cooper's and his lawyer's surprise, the court ruled that although evidence showed the companies were indeed not small businesses, fraud had not been committed because the INS knew their true status when the work was awarded to J. Walter Thompson, the Bernard Hodes Group and Cass Communications.

The case was dismissed.

"We were floored," Cooper said. "The ruling essentially said that I was right, the companies were not small, but so what."
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It's a hollow victory," said Raul Espinosa, a small-business owner who has won several protests in Florida."You might win the size protest, but you can't claim the contract because the agency allowed delivery to take place, and what's worse, the penalties for the violations aren't enforced."

There seems to be a new ethic among the crooks in high office that simply ignores the laws - and dares the mechanics of law enforcement to enforce them. When the cretin in chief writes out his own version of laws the Congress legally passed, and essentially declares "my way" is the new way of negating legal niceties, our laws are in really deep trouble. When our agencies of administering the laws are enabled by that illegal tactic simply to slough off their job and give public monies without regard to existing regulation, we're all in deep trouble.

Another instance of the subversion of contract requirements is found rampant in military contract awards. Not only in Iraq where the excuse was made of necessary haste in awarding contracts, but also in everyday domestic awards, this government of crooks, by the crooks, and for the crooks ignores what the laws demand.

Cindra Stolk was on the telephone one day in May when her son walked into the office, slapped a fax on her desk, and walked out without saying a word.

Ms. Stolk, chief executive officer of Federal Edge Inc., a small family-run computer reseller in Riverside, Calif., looked at the piece of paper and says she felt "the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

It was a note from the Hill Air Force Base in Utah informing Ms. Stolk that a federal-government contract of more than $600,000 to provide computer equipment was not going to her company, but rather to GTSI Corp., Chantilly, Va.

As part of the government's efforts to help entrepreneurs get a slice of the lucrative federal contract market, this contract had been set aside for bidding by small businesses only. The size standard for "small" differs by industry and contract; for instance, a firm bidding on a telecommunications award can sometimes have up to 1,500 employees while a computer reseller such as Federal Edge or GTSI typically needs 500 or fewer workers to qualify.

With eight employees and $6 million in sales last year, Ms. Stolk's company was allowed to apply. But so was GTSI, which had sales of $954 million in 2003 and employed 685 people as of March 1. "This is small?" asks 49-year-old Ms. Stolk, who opened Federal Edge in 2000 and works alongside her husband and two sons.

That question cuts to the heart of a growing debate over how the federal government awards, counts and monitors its small-business contracts. Each year, Congress establishes small-business buying goals for most federal agencies and for the government as a whole. Contracts get reported into a central database, and the government makes an annual tally of how close it comes to meeting its small-business target. The overall goal is 23% of all prime-contract dollars.[emphasis added]

With a GOP congress in power for the past six years, a 109th Do-Nothing congress that refused to supervise the government itself, the victims were left to try and find just and equitable treatment. With a judiciary run by the same perpetrators of 'signing statement' law evasion, there was little chance of that happening.

On his way into office, Sen. John Kerry has announced that he will be giving these small business awards the attention they are sorely needing. He stated recently, introducing an anti-bundling bill; Although there is current law in place intended to require Federal agencies to conduct market research before bundling a contract, loopholes in the current definition of a bundled contract allow them to often skirt these safeguards.

He will have a lot of help from similarly inclined legislators who have the public's interest as their guiding principle. I am looking for changes, and a return to the law-abiding nation that we deserve, and have to fight for.