Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Now the military charges the government fees, too?
According to this article in the NY Times, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Air Force both charged the US gov't for oversight of construction projects.
In all, the Army Corps and the Air Force charged more than half a billion dollars in fees to oversee the $10.3 billion in Iraq reconstruction projects examined in the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent federal office.And the Junior Birdmen do it better than the Army, who could have known?
Calculated according to byzantine formulas and little known to the American taxpayers who paid them, the corps’ fees supported an arcane management structure at the heart of what detractors cite as an example of how not to carry out reconstruction in a country emerging from a war.
The fees, officials in the inspector general’s office said in interviews on Tuesday, paid for American civilians working for the corps to travel to Iraq and to oversee reconstruction projects.
The Air Force chose much more often to hire Middle Eastern engineers who were already in Iraq or the region.
As a result, the Air Force program — run out of the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment in San Antonio — was significantly less expensive. Perhaps more surprising, the Air Force program was also regarded as quicker, more adaptable and more likely to produce functioning projects, officials in the inspector general’s office said.
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