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Barack Obama's vow after after his first inauguration that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency" has long been a source of derision for critics, but he's taken secrecy a step further in the multi-hundred-billion-dollar realm of federal contracting.
His administration's lack of transparency is most recently evident in its handling of a Department of Homeland Security plan to deploy private agents across northern New Jersey.
DHS has revealed only tidbits of information regarding its $61.3 million contract award to a Hawaiian security vendor, which will provide "armed protective security officer services" on behalf of the government for at least a year but possibly up to four-and-a-half years.
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As required under federal contracting law, DHS disclosed the arrangement via the publicly accessible FedBizOpps, which WND located through routine database research.
But in this case, anyone who wants information about the public expenditures must have a "government sponsor" access contract details above and beyond basic information such as the type of service provided, the award amount and the identity of the contract recipient, Honolulu-based HBC Management Services Inc.
Journalists and the general public literally get locked out by the General Services Administration, which operates the database.
It comes at a time when more and more media members are publicly complaining of their treatment by the Obama administration.
Among them is former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkinsson. Earlier this year, Attkinsson declared in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that President Obama regards members of the media as "enemies of the state."
Having reviewed tens of thousands of federal contracting documents over the course of nearly two decades – a period of intense individual scrutiny and analysis spanning several administrations – this WND contributor has observed a relatively recent, escalating federal-government pattern of thwarting efforts to obtain unclassified information that has no real reason to be secret.
As the primary repository of new and archived federal contracting information, FBO during the Clinton administration, for example, began providing online public access to contract data and accompanying documents. The move corresponded with the beginning of pervasive Internet service-provider subscribership in the U.S.
In some instances, the government had established roadblocks to full and open access, continuing to rely on age-old practices such as delaying the release of documents or redacting portions of official documents.
But increasingly now GSA and its federal partners are devising technical and procedural obstacles to journalists and general-public access to project documents.
By instituting multi-level registration and approval processes, the feds have managed in many instances to create a bottleneck that limits information distribution solely to governmental entities and the vendors with whom they procure goods and services.
In the recent DHS contacting action endeavor, for example, FBO simply posted an award notice, citing the $61.3 million cost, the contract winner and a number designating the original procurement announcement: Solicitation no. HSHQE2-15-R-00001.
A separate search was necessary to locate additional documents accompanying the solicitation, such as the more detailed Statement of Work, or SOW. Though such an additional database search is not unheard of, the next step appears to be happening with greater frequency.
Upon locating the relevant posting, for instance, all supplemental documents were listed as "locked," eliciting the pop-up message “Log in is required to view all controlled unclassified packages."
As this writer already is registered, logging in was not an impediment. Once logged in, however, further attempts to open the DHS documents were met with yet another hurdle: separate registration with the federal System for Award Management, or SAMS.
Once again, even though registration already was complete – as this writer is legitimately registered as a potential federal contractor to conduct searches of writing-related business opportunities – indeed yet another procedural layer thwarted access to such information.
That roadblock occurred with a pop-up message declaring: "SAM Validation Required: The controlled unclassified documents require that your account be verified in SAM. Please contact http://www.sam.gov for more information."
Such validation, however, requires approval from a "Government Sponsor/Supervisor and Government Security Official."
The SAM site additionally declares:
Under "Approver Information" you will need to put your Government Supervisor (or Sponsor if you are a Federal contractor supporting a Federal agency) who can verify your justification and your Government Security Official who can verify you have current security and privacy training.
The SAM sponsor process also warn: "You must provide a strong justification for why you need to access non-public data in SAM. It must be related to your Federal agency mission."
An attempt was made to provide such justification and obtain that approval, but the site allows self-identification in only two categories: "Government user" and "Federal contractor."
Sometimes federal entities partly satisfy Federal Acquisition Regulations by posting the contract awards, while withholding all other information about how and why it solicited contractor bids prior to those awards.
WND in 2013, for example, during an investigation of Obama family travels, had discovered that the Department of State spent $52,000 in the super-luxurious Hotel Hessischer Hof in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2011. Zero additional information was made available.
The mysterious contract additionally served as a red flag because the expenditure did not coincide with any presidential, vice-presidential or other high-ranking official visits to Europe.
It then took two years for State to fulfill WND's Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request for supporting documents. State partly satisfied the FOIA request by providing mostly redacted, unreadable and even German-language documents.
The FOIA request took place in the wake of Obama's Open Government Initiative, which promised to improve the federal government’s responsiveness to citizens' federal informational needs.
Obama in 2009 said of the endeavor that his administration was "committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government."
In the six years since Obama's launch of the initiative, State in particular has increasingly – though not exclusively – relied on the FedBid.com system to buy equipment and procure services.
While State releases some information about those individual projects via FBO, the details often are veiled in the secrecy of the FedBid system, which restricts registration and access to buyers and sellers of federal-related procurement actions, excluding the media and the general public.
There also have been several cases of the federal government simply removing contracting documents from public view.
Indeed, entities such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and the U.S. Navy sanitized the FBO system of such documents in reaction to reports published by WND and by this writer as an independent blogger.
A series of articles beginning in 2012 revealed the Obama administration's self-described "exponential increase" in the number of USAID programs in Kenya. As part of that coverage, WND discovered an agency propaganda initiative to sway how "opinion leaders" – including those in the media – depict U.S. operations in Kenya.
That "strategic plan" laid out tactics that it admitted were taken directly from the public relations industry to "target specific journalists at key media outlets to be groomed to cover targeted issues over time."
Following the WND report, USAID eliminated all traces of what was officially known as the USAID/Kenya Strategic Communications Plan 2012-2013, candidly admitting that it did not intend to make the document available for public inspection.
The U.S. Navy, in an unrelated matter several years earlier, attached a security document to a solicitation in which it equated journalists with foreign spies. Following the original exposé via the blog The Peacock Report, the Navy scrubbed the contracting action from public view.
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