New scrutiny is being given to why the State Department rushed a $48 million non-competitive grant in the waning days of the Obama administration to Tetra Tech, a for-profit company for IED and other bomb removal in Syria, The Washington Free Beacon reported on Tuesday.
At the time the grant was being put together in 2016, a joint effort by Western European non-governmental organizations, local Iraqi groups, and Janus Global Operations worked under State Department funding to clear bombs in Iraq.
At the same time, British company Optima was in the middle of surveying an area in Fallujah littered with IEDs and planning a major clearing operation.
But despite the expertise and experience of these companies and others operating in the region, State Department officials facilitated funding for a non-competitive grant to Tetra Tech, which has much more limited experience in munitions and ordnance clearance.
"There was a mad dash… to get this done by Jan.19," said one source familiar with the internal State Department effort. "They got the grant funded by Dec. 29, 2016, and then got the internal paperwork finished by Jan. 19… to lock this in."
A Defense One report in 2016 noted that the State Department had just secured $86 million from 26 countries for demining efforts over the next three years, and that questions were raised over the awarding of a "no-bid" grant, instead of allowing several companies to compete for a government contract through the paper-intensive and time-consuming government bidding process.
Patrick Kernan, a government contracting attorney, told The Washington Free Beacon that "[It] sounds like a way to circumvent the strict sole-source contracting rules by pushing money into a grant process," which provides far less oversight than the regular contracts.
In fact, spending experts on both the right and left have warned that the U.S. government has improperly been awarding an increasing number of "sole-source grants," which are given out as a way to streamline the process and provide lucrative contracts to a select contractor and avoid subjecting them to the competitive bidding process.
When asked why such a large and important contract for such a crucial mission was given through a grant and not a contract, a State Department official said that "Syria is arguably the most difficult country in the world to conduct these operations in [and] this project was awarded in full compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, and administrative procedures governing grants and cooperative agreements."
However, the official did not explain why other companies with much more extensive de-mining experience were not given a chance to bid on the Syria project.
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