Coast Guard acquisition in smoother waters

The Washington Technology article can be found here

http://washingtontechnology.com/Articles/2009/08/31/Policy-Coast-Guard.aspx?Page=4

My response

“Even so, there are lapses, and as of March, the Coast Guard had not met the goal of complete adherence to the acquisitions manual for all Deepwater assets, according to a July GAO report. Coast Guard officials agreed with GAO’s recommendations to follow the manual and raised no objection to those findings.”

In english this said that the CG didn’t used the MSAM as it should have and promised to on the EXACT program it was meant for – Deepwater.

“Congress is stepping up its oversight. The House passed legislation in July that would bar the Coast Guard from using private lead systems integrators. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed a separate authorization bill.”

This is misleading. The congress passed a bill sating that the CG could waive the reforms in the bill if it chose to do so and those waivers could be used on the Deepwater program – the same program that drove reforms. And the CG has stated the LSI’s would not go away until 2011. That is after all of the NSC contracts and I would imagine the OPC contracts are let. Basically this is all a smoke screen. There have been some worthwhile changes but most are only skin deep – there is no root cause fix here. (The NSC still have major security issues – issues that will be propagated on to the FRCs and OPCs unless the root causes are addressed) Lastly let me mention again that ICGS, LM and NG have not only not paid the $100M refund for the 123s but they blame the CG for the problems with the hulls and have suggested they may actually seek damages from the CG for canceling the 123 effort. The contractors still run this program from behind the scenes.