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Bringing back non-Christmas memories
With a big grin. 2-3 years ago I interviewed for a legal job here in Arizona -- didn't get the job. The operation sounded strange as heck, but after nearly 10 years of government work, you get used to strange things. It was an office operated by Interior Dept on a military base that did procurement work for the Dept of Defense. Some strange arrangement whereby a portion of the procurement contracts went to Interior. Why DoD wasn't doing its own procurement I could not figure out, let alone why they went to Interior, which is mainly a land management agency, to get it done.
Today's WaPo has a big article on the operation. Apparently the Inspector General had a few problems with it. Such as half a billion bucks awarded without competitive bidding.
I heard of a similar situation recently, wherein DoD uses another cabinet-level department to procure for them. DoD budgets hit a hard wall at end of fiscal year, DoD asks other department to procure some things for it (contracts for services such as "white" courses, in my instance) that will pass from one FY to the next.
A big furball was thrown into my unit's training schedule when all of the contracts let by Interior on behalf of DoD were suddenly suspended at the end of FY06, because there was an ethics probe launched in Interior.