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Originally Posted by Deuce
But isn't that true of any business? You go with what and who you know.
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I suppose if you are running a private company and you are spending your own money, then you can do what you want. But government officials who are spending the pubic's tax money are supposed to have companies go through a bidding process.
I do business with many government agencies including the United States Army, and each year I have to submit a bid and they have to get at least 2 other competing bids. They are required to reward the contract to the company with the lowest bid.
But what has been happening the last 5 years is that the Pentagon has been handing out 75% of their contracts on a no-bid basis. As we have found out after the fact, most of these companies are getting the contracts because they know someone on the inside, and they are vastly overcharging the government for the services they are providing. In almost all of these cases, there are other companies that can do the same job for much less money.
The GAO has investigated this on numerous occasions, but the Justice Department has not prosecuted any of these companies. Instead, in a couple of cases that the media exposed and there was quite a bit of public outrage, they made settlements with both Haliburton & Bechtell to return
some of the money they had stolen. But the Pentagon has continued to give no-bid contracts to both of these companies even after they admitted to vastly overcharging the government.
If the government was indeed being run like a business, these two companies would be dropped in a second. But instead, the government is being run like a welfare donor, and these companies are receiving vast amounts of corporate welfare at the taxpayer's expense.