Federal and state governments make almost nothing. They push paper, contract with the private sector for what needs making, doing, and delivering. This is appropriate, but leads to two bad habits: ever more paper pushers, and contractors getting very cozy with them. Sometimes, a government leader has to break glass, crack the whip, break the party, and corral the contractors.
Interestingly, having led oversight investigations for five years, founded a company helping law enforcement, drug prevention, and military operations improve strategy, I one day got called back into government to set up police in Iraq, do counternarcotics, and clean up a contractor snake pit.
The place, of course, was the U.S. State Department. The operations overseen by me included the nation’s largest civilian air wing, 250 armed and unarmed Blackhawks, Huey IIs, C-130s, OV-10s, “the works,” plus global police training, Iraq, Afghanistan, Thailand, Jordan, Colombia, Peru, etc.
Like walking into a house hit by a hurricane, that assignment – like being on orders in the military – was operational and, at times, highly frustrating. They say in the Navy, “Always ask for the worst ship,” since you will be the greatest value, and can make her the best, with high purpose. That was this.
What did I find? First, government contractors can hold themselves to a certain standard, or not. Those who have been let go, follow, with no oversight, are hard to get back in the corral, wild and feral.
You may laugh, but it is true, like a dog or cat that knows neither love nor discipline, that thinks it sets all the rules, believes in no higher authority than itself, contractors can get cozy with midlevel bureaucrats and politicians, then call the shots, thinking they are beyond reach. I changed that.
You may be curious how, for reasons historical and current. There is a process. President Trump – and Elon Musk – have been waging a battle against this same accountable bureaucracy. We see these artificial, dark money “No King” protests, but the real “king” has been the bureaucracy.
The same was true, on a smaller scale, when I got called up to dismantle, remake, and deliver results from the remade bureaucracy at State. The mission involved the largest collection of operational programs run abroad, outside the Pentagon, with federal contractors everywhere.
The hurricane I found involved countless non-competed, barely papered, cozy contracts with perpetual contractors; delivery delays for months, no accountability for failure; invoices for loosely documented performance, no crosschecks; trips by bureaucrats on contractor nickel; new task orders suggested by contractors, signed without oversight, more money to contractors; money tucked away by ambassadors to spend later, back ten years, no one challenging it, slush funds.
Guess what I did? Ended it all. You could call me a caveman, too brutal, uncaring about the longstanding habits, practices of allowing non-competed contracts, no penalties for endless delivery delays, free trips to government folks, instant task order approval, slush funds, nod, wink, and carry on. You would be right.
Specifically, with legal means, I took the bureaucracy apart, fired contractors, rescinded contracts, forced immediate recompetes, broke big contracts open for small businesses, imposed $20,000-a-day penalties on major contractors, Fortune 100s, for delays. They winced, but changed their ways.
That was not all. Internally, I reassigned people, so the cozy became less so, in faraway places they had never heard of, then put real CPAs in place to manage the process. I put the inspector general on my own operation, then rode herd on him – to assure all aspects of global operations got investigated. I sent a CPA around the world to breathe fire on each embassy in turn, make it real.
To make clear the message came from where it mattered, I went to the ends of the earth to find out where money was going, Laos, which had never seen an Assistant Secretary before, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia – over and over – and gradually changed the culture. It worked.
In time, promotions and renewed contracts followed higher efficiency. Dead wood bureaucrats and contractors floated away. Those high in the saddle when no one was leading were suddenly gone.
In a nutshell, corrupt contractors are as much a problem – federal and state – as bureaucrats. They must be confronted, corralled, and kept true – or disposed of. That is another reason Maine is in big trouble, like other blue states. There is no whip cracking. Corrupt contractors need to be corralled.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
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