The Center for Public Integrity

Raytheon Aerospace, which changed its name to Vertex Aerospace in June 2003, and its related companies have received more than $2.7 billion in U.S. government contracts since 1990, and the company is currently in Afghanistan with a contract from the Defense Department worth at least $7.4 million involving aircraft repair and maintenance.

If Raytheon had its way, that might be all that is known about its work for the Pentagon.

Under a presidential directive signed by Ronald Reagan on June 23, 1987, known as Executive Order 12600, companies have potential veto power over Freedom of Information Act requests for copies of their contracts with the U.S. government.

To comply with the Executive Order, before releasing any contract, a FOIA officer must contact the company to ask whether there is any information that should be withheld because it constitutes confidential commercial information that could cause competitive harm if released. Withholding this information is allowed under Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act, which states that records cannot be obtained if they contain "trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and (are) privileged or confidential."

In trying to determine which U.S. companies received government contracts for work in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan, the Center for Public Integrity filed 73 FOIA requests and appeals with the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Pentagon and its related uniformed services.

In an initial response in May, the Pentagon listed a $7,382,194 contract with Raytheon for work in Afghanistan. But requests for a copy of the actual taxpayer-funded contract remain pending.

Government contracting has always been a complex matter, thick with legal wrangling and bureaucracy, but the last decade has seen a radical change in how the U.S. government purchases goods and services.

At one time, federal agencies constructed buildings, built machines and cleaned offices themselves, or found another agency to do it. Today, the U.S. government spends some $200 billion a year buying everything from information technology services to pencils to advanced weapons systems from the private sector.

The Defense Department alone accounts for 75 percent of that spending. Following a series of scandals in the 1980s, where the Pentagon was revealed to have paid outrageous sums for commercially available products, Congress decided to overhaul government procurement. The result was the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which simplified the maze of procurement regulations to make it easier for federal agencies to buy products from the private sector.

The new law dovetailed with former Vice President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiative, which aimed to trim the federal workforce, and matched the realities of the Pentagon's shrinking budget. As a result, where the federal workforce has shrunk, the contractor workforce has grown. Paul Light, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, calls this workforce the "shadow government," and estimated its size in 1999 at 5.6 million.

More than half of all government contracting today is spent on services—an increase of about 24 percent since 1990—making it the largest spending category. "Twenty years ago, (the government) contracted for supplies, construction and services, in that order. Now it's services, supplies and construction, but services are what's driving the train," says Steven Schooner, associate professor and co-director of the government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University.

On May 22, the U.N. Security Council gathered in New York to approve a resolution lifting sanctions on Iraq, creating a Development Fund for the country and providing limited immunity to corporations involved in oil and gas deals there for the next four years. The resolution directed that proceeds from future sales of Iraqi oil and gas be placed in the development fund and allowed the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to disburse the funds in consultation with the interim Iraqi administration.

That same day at the White House, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13303, which appears to give immunity from any judicial process to every entity with direct or indirect interests in Iraqi petroleum and related products. "The threat of attachment or judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein ... constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States," reads the executive order. It continues, "… any … judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void."

Executive Order 13303 went unnoticed outside the government until July, when it was spotted by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank.

Since then, accusations have been flying over whether or not the Bush administration has given blanket immunity to the oil industry in Iraq. "The Executive Order is a blank check for corporate anarchy," Tom Devine, legal director of the non-profit Government Accountability Project, wrote in a July 2003 assessment of the order for the Institute. "Its sweeping, unqualified language places industry above domestic and international law for anything related to commerce in Iraqi oil."

"Translated from the legalese, this is a license for corporations to loot Iraq and its citizens," Devine added.