Government contractors: never too big to fail us
In a recent article that hasn’t gotten much attention, Ron Nixon of the New York Times exposes a major problem with government contractors who get out of line. When a federal agency wants to stop working with them (a process called “debarring”), sometimes they can’t: the contractors are too important and too essential to the agency’s supply chain or service requirements. BP, for example, is such a key supplier of fuel to the government that after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, when EPA officials wanted to make an example of BP by ending their involvement in government contracts government-wide, “the Pentagon objected: BP was its biggest supplier of fuel.
With no way to say no, the government continues to reward bad behavior.