Defense punts on Iraq contractor census

A Defense effort to count the number of contractors working or living in Iraq has foundered, and a spokesman acknowledged that the census, when complete, will not meet the standards set out when it was requested.

The Office of Management and Budget in May forwarded agencies a call for data from the Army Central Command and the international forces in Iraq. It asked that they collect survey information on contractor personnel based in Iraq, including data on the camp or base at which contractors are located; the company and agreement under which work is performed; services such as mail, emergency medical care or meals obtained from the military; and whether the contractors carry weapons.

The initial data request gave a June 1 deadline. But since then, the Pentagon has repeatedly said the data was not yet available, and on Friday, a spokesman for the military Central Command acknowledged that the information is not likely to be reported as originally requested. No timeline is available for when any data might be available, he said.

"The report, in one form or another -- because it doesn't look like it will come out in the format that's being asked for -- is not ready," said Capt. Gary Arasin, a spokesman for Central Command.

Arasin said CENTCOM has had trouble getting information from the various services' contracting offices, and collecting and analyzing data from operating locations. "The issue is still being looked at," he said. "The folks who work in contracting are all forward right now."

Similar efforts to measure the size of the contractor workforce have failed in the past, including an initiative to tally Army contractors in 2000 that got bogged down by procedural hurdles.

Paul Light, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University who specializes in federal workforce issues, said industry typically has resisted head counts because they reveal how many more people work for government than are reported in federal employee figures.

"It raises questions about why there are so many contractor personnel and is easily understood by the American public," Light said. "The public may not be able to grasp the money issue -- how much is being spent -- because it is always so large, but they can get the number of employees, and that's dynamite."

In a recent report, Light analyzed what he calls "the true size of government," which he said includes civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors and grantees, including state and local government officials working on federal mandates. He said his research methods produced an estimate for the contractor contribution to federal work worldwide, but did not lend themselves to the type of detailed country-by-country assessment that would be necessary to isolate the type of information CENTCOM is seeking on Iraq contractors.

Light recognized the "many good reasons" for the government's use of contracts and grants to buy goods and services, including a legal restriction that the government not compete with private business for commercially available work. But he said the use of contractors hides the real size of the federal workforce while allowing officials to advertise their success in shrinking government.

"Not only does the federal government's largely hidden workforce of contractors and grantees encourage the public into believing that it truly can get more for less, it diffuses accountability about just who might be in charge" when a program fails, Light wrote.

He reported that data for 2005 -- the most recent year available -- suggest that roughly 14.6 million people worked, directly or indirectly, for the federal government. That would represent about five and a half contractors and grantees for every federal civil servant, Light said. This is a significant jump from 1999, when Light's estimates suggested that about 11 million people worked for the government at a ratio of almost four contractors and grantees per civil servant.

"One can … argue that the lack of hard headcounts from the hidden workforce prevent the kind of labor-cost comparisons that might drive some jobs back into the civil service," Light wrote. He said a contractor workforce offers benefits such as competition and greater responsiveness to changing demands, but the competitive advantage can be weakened over time as agencies become dependent on their contractors.