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| Border Star Power Point presentation prepared by ALIS |
The call for an official investigation was spurred, according to Rodríguez,
by a February 2012 state
auditor’s report and by “recent media reports on the outsourcing of Texas
border security operations to Abrams Learning & Information Systems (ALIS),
a private consulting firm based in Arlington, VA.”
The journalistic investigation of Governor Rick Perry’s border security
campaign began two years ago when The Nation Institute agreed to support Tom
Barry’s research on this issue.
Barry, a senior analyst at the Center for International Policy, wrote an
investigative report, “At War in Texas,” for the Boston Review that focused on the abuses and misuses of federal
funding by Texas state and local governments.
The funding, including more than a hundred million dollars from the
Obama administration’s economic stimulus initiative, came largely from the
Department of Justice and also from the Department of Homeland Security.
Five days ago the Border Lines
Blog published a three-part series on the Texas outsourcing scandal. Four
days ago Alternet published the second
of two investigative articles by Tom Barry on the lack of accountability and
transparency in Texas border security operations – most of which were
outsourced to ALIS. The first
article, “How Unaccountable Private Contractors Pocket Your Tax Dollars
Militarizing the Texas Border,” was published on Sept. 27, 2011.
The Austin Statesman followed
with a report on the same outsourcing scandal on March 15, 2012, which added
new details to the unaccountable contracting practices of DPS.
As is often the case in Texas with respect to criminal justice issues,
the ACLU and the Grits for
Breakfast blog of Scott Henson have been among the first to point to the
lack of transparency and accountability in DPS and the Governor’s Criminal
Justice Division.
The ACLU’s Laura Martin wrote an excellent report about Operation Border
Star titled Wasted Millions,
which should at the time of the release of the report have alerted the state’s
media and public officials about the public safety implications of the
governor’s border program. Martin wrote the alarming report three years ago in
March 2009.
Senator Rodríguez, the first Texas politician to demand that the shadowy
border security programs be investigated, said that outsourcing “raised
significant concerns about the transparency of DPS' bidding and procurement
processes as well as DPS' management of millions of state and federal taxpayer
dollars.”
Furthermore, the El Paso senator observed. “The issues surrounding these
contracts bring to light a serious public policy consideration of whether the
state of Texas should have outsourced the bulk of border security operations to
a private company with negligible experience in international border
operations.”
Despite its alarming findings, the state auditor’s report went largely
unreported by the state or national media. The Ft.Worth Star-Telegram mentioned the report – in a Feb.
28, 2010 blog post.
This independent report indicates that, on at least three occasions, DPS
was unable to document why "emergency" action was necessary. Not only
was there pervasive abuse of the "emergency" contracting procedures
by DPS, this appears to be part of a larger failure to open contracts to
competitive bidding as required by state law. A startling 83% of the contracts
reviewed by the State Auditor in the cluster of federal grants for homeland and
border security were not bid competitively as required by state law.
Other disturbing findings by the State Auditor include duplicate
payments made by DPS to sub-grantees and that DPS has no process in place to
track federal sub-grants, in some cases paying for one program with federal
funds intended for another.
The outsourcing of Texas border security is, however, much more than
another instance of the misuse of public revenues.
Certainly, it is another example of how accountability and transparency
in government are especially lacking in all spending that involves “security” –
whether national, homeland, or border security.”
But it is a much larger scandal than faulty accounting or even the
bilking of public revenues by private contractors.
This is a scandal that deserves the attention of the oversight
committees of the U.S. Congress and Texas State Legislature.
It merits an official investigation that looks into how ideologically
staunch politicians and government officials, together with consulting firms
closely tied to the U.S. military, are manipulating information and threat
assessments about U.S. security and public safety.
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