Claire McCaskill

I think it played a major role in providing the space for the other programs to work.

It is not a contract if you do not have a scope of work.

We have to figure out how we do a better job on the complexity of hiring and the time of contracting because it is costing us much more money than the problem we tried to solve by making it so complex.

How can you do performance measures--I do not care how many contractors you hire. How can you do performance measures if you cannot get the commands to even use the database you have?

I wanted three kinds of ice cream. I wanted it in the mess. I wanted it yesterday, and I did not care how much it cost.

Can you imagine the amount of money we are spending on the middleman cut in this government? I mean, in the Pentagon alone, it is billions of dollars.

We believe that it has substantially worked.

According to the reports to Congress that our staff has reviewed, the Department has not fully transferred any of those activities in Colombia.

Don't misunderstand the view that I hold about contracting. It is not the number of contractors that bothers me.

either we are going to get the right contracting oversight in place, or we are going to have to reduce the contracting, one or the other, because the current situation I think is untenable.

I have an uneasy feeling that if we get all the information, there is going to be a lot more work that needs to be done on contracting oversight at the State Department.

There is going to be a continuing role for aerial eradication well into the future.

I think that we will be devoting more and more of our effort to supporting the Colombians in manual eradication programs.

Well, the bottom line is that it does not appear--are you confident that you have evaluations on all these contractors and that there are audits that have been done on any of the contractors?

I am determined to ferret out every opportunity I can to point out that ANCs are getting non-compete contracts across the Federal Government for no good reason.

the notion they can be as big as they want, they do not have to compete, and they can front is offensive to me.

It is just a weird system that has evolved, that you have got these big companies that essentially are providing inherently government functions by subbing out quickly to other people.

the law required you to do that.

In the President's national drug control budget for fiscal year 2007, there is a discussion of an improvement underway to establish a comprehensive Performance Reporting System.

But why do we need somebody to take a cut? I mean, why is Lockheed getting a cut of this contract?

I am concerned that you have to estimate that figure.

This hearing will now come to order. The purpose of this morning's hearing is to examine how the U.S. Government is using contractors to fight the drug war in Latin America.

We are buying them through the Army Command, and we are using their contract.

we want to stay with this because I do not want to move from this topic until everyone is aware, especially the contractor community, that there is no place you can be in the Federal Government that we are not going to be trying to look…

Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport (KGL) killed a soldier of ours in Iraq through their negligence.