Better Officials, Not More Rules, Needed in Procurement

Reports of widespread bribery among Defense Department officials, contractors and consultants have prompted charges in Congress and the press that greed and corruption are built into the “culture” of the weapons procurement system. “The whole system of weapons buying,” the New York Times editorialized, “ . . . has sometimes turned into a machine for bilking the public and robbing the nation of effective defenses.”

It’s true that the Pentagon has squandered some of its procurement funds. It’s also true that some bureaucrats, military officers and defense contractors are corrupt. But it would be wrong to conclude that bribery and other criminal acts are commonplace in the defense acquisition system. What’s more, some of the possible “solutions” to the corruption problem--more congressional oversight, for example--would not work and would end up doing more harm than good.

The two-year bribery probe centers on defense consultants who allegedly paid Pentagon officials for classified information that they believed would be useful to their clients, which included McDonnell Douglas Corp., United Technologies and other major defense contractors. This information, according to news accounts, allowed these firms to underbid their competitors for large aircraft procurement contracts. As many as 200 people are reportedly under investigation.

The belief that corruption is rampant among contractors and military officials has a long tradition in American public life. It dates back at least to the Civil War, when unscrupulous merchants sold tainted pork and shoddy clothing to the Union Army. More recently the controversy concerning $436 hammers and $640 toilet-seat lids prompted Congress to investigate “waste, fraud and abuse” in the acquisition of defense equipment. Major reform measures, including legislation calling for the elimination of cozy non-competitive contracts, resulted from these investigations.

It’s right for Congress and the public to be concerned about bribery and other criminal activity in the Pentagon. But it would be a mistake to believe that graft and corruption are widespread among defense officials and private companies. More than 2 million men and women serve in the armed forces, another 1 million civilians work for the Defense Department, and more than 5 million people are employed by 300,000 private firms that do business with the Pentagon. The vast majority of them would never take or offer a bribe. But in a system that large, it would be surprising if some crime didn’t take place. “There is always going to be dishonesty in any large organization,” former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said in a recent interview. “Banks have it, small grocery stores have it.”

If the past is any guide, sweeping new legislation and increased congressional oversight of Defense Department buying practices is one of the likely consequences of the current scandal. But more oversight, however well intentioned, could have the perverse effect of making an inefficient and overregulated system even more complex and overburdened.

The increase in congressional oversight of defense spending during the past 20 years has been staggering. In 1970, for example, 26 congressional committees and subcommittees had some defense oversight role; by 1985, “96 committees and subcommittees wrote defense legislation or heard testimony from defense witnesses, or both,” according to former Assistant Secretary of the Army J. Ronald Fox.

During 1983 alone, Congress held 407 review hearings and listened to more than 5,000 hours of testimony from 1,200 defense officials. Congressional committees also demanded 440 reports and 247 studies from the Pentagon; among them were such arcane topics as military jacket linings and Hawaiian milk.

If such vigorous scrutiny offered the promise of a cheaper, more efficient or less corrupt procurement system, one could argue that more congressional oversight was in order. But there’s no evidence that heightened congressional review of military procurement during the past 20 years has paid off.

In fact, it has been largely counterproductive. Legislative scrutiny of every aspect of Pentagon purchasing costs enormous amounts of money--money that would be better spent on weapons, training and readiness. What’s more, such congressional “micromanagement” contributes to the long lead time for new systems. (It now takes more than a dozen years to develop and produce a new fighter plane, for example.)

This lead time could be even longer if Congress decides to limit or ban outright the informal exchange of information that goes on between contractors and officials. Bribing officials for information is clearly wrong. But the procurement process has become so confoundingly complex that industry officials must develop contacts inside the Pentagon in order to work effectively with the bureaucracy.

This does not mean that Congress should sit on its hands. Given the fact that many of the individuals implicated in the bribery scandal are current or former political appointees, Congress would be well advised to spend more time scrutinizing prospective officials. Making sure that appointees are fit to hold office is a role that Congress has the constitutional responsibility to fulfill.

More rigorous confirmation procedures, not more legislation and procurement oversight, are the best way to stamp out official corruption.