Since it was created in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has overseen about $15 billion in failed contracts-a third of the agency’s contract spending-for a a wide-range of projects, according to documents and other data obtained by the House Committee on Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, a lawyer with the watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight, an official with the Government Accountability Office and the DHS deputy inspector general will testify before the House Subcommittee on Management, Investigations and Oversight about overhauling the acquisitions process that resulted in wasteful spending.
The Washington Post, which first reported the story late Tuesday, said the witnesses will “talk about a series of problem projects: About $351 million was wasted and not properly overseen in the U.S. Coast Guard’s Deepwater program after ships were built and then scrapped, according to Homeland Security committee staffers and oversight agency reports. A $1.5 billion Boeing program to help secure U.S. borders with electronic sensors and other equipment is being shelved after it was over-budget, late and had technology problems.”
“A $10 billion program called US VISIT, a computer system designed to record the entry and exit of visitors to the United States at airports and border crossings, is behind schedule and not being managed well, according to figures prepared by the committee staff,” the Washington Post reported. “And $200 million was mismanaged and poorly spent in buying trailers from Bechtel and Fluor for Hurricane Katrina, according to committee staffers, the GAO and other oversight reports.
DHS was created five years ago by merging the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration, and more than a dozen other agencies. The agency employs more than 200,000 people and has an annual budget of roughly $50 billion. Its contract spending has skyrocketed from $3.4 billion a year to $12.2 billion last year.
