The Center for Public Integrity

Despite its go-it-alone spirit, sparsely populated Alaska is one of the greatest per-capita beneficiaries of funding from Washington among the 50 states. A major portion of those federal taxpayer dollars in recent years has come from large infusions of homeland security grants and appropriations handed out to the state since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, where she was mayor from 1996 to 2002, has benefited immensely from the anti-terrorism bonanza. Wasilla, with a population of 7,028, has acquired a surveillance system for its water wells, a 150-foot tall communications tower that altered the city’s landscape, a half-million dollar mobile command vehicle with off-road capabilities, and more.

According to an analysis of federal spending figures and additional records obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting from the state of Alaska through open-government laws:

This list was created from data covering contract transactions executed in fiscal years 2004, 2005, and 2006, where the reported place of performance was Iraq or Afghanistan. The data — available from the General Service Administration's Federal Procurement Data System — is limited to the 100 vendors receiving the most obligated funds during this three-year period.

When the Center for Public Integrity published its first "Windfalls of War" investigation, in October 2003, up-to-date data on federal contracting activity was not available. As a result, Center staff gathered contract amounts from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Since then, however, most such contracts for the post-war efforts list Iraq or Afghanistan as their "place of performance," making the contracting process more transparent and the search for data—available from the General Service Administration's Federal Procurement Data System—more methodical.

Contract amounts in the new data represent actual dollars obligated for products or services. Because of variability in how amounts were reported in the 2003 documents, amounts from the original report cannot be accurately combined or compared with dollar amounts in the 2007 update.

The updated data does not include all Iraq reconstruction contracts. For example, contract transactions handled by the Army Joint Contracting Command Iraq/Afghanistan is maintained in a separate system. Though summary information about those contracts is available from various sources, including the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction quarterly reports to Congress, detailed transaction information is not generally available to the public.

The Center has requested information about these contract transactions under the Freedom of Information Act. That information will be added here as it is made available.