Christine Spolar stories from The Center for Public Integrity

DynCorp wins contract dispute over Afghan police training

Afghanistan — 2011-10-12T21:09:30-04:00

Re-tooling the Afghan national police as a counterinsurgency force is a critical part of the military mission in Afghanistan. Now that effort will be delayed because of a misbegotten attempt by the U.S. Army to shortcut the contract process.

The Government Accountability Office Monday told the U.S. Army to start over in its search for bids for a $1.6 billion effort to overhaul police training. The GAO ruled in favor of DynCorp International, the company currently training Afghan police, which had protested that the process was unfairly skewed toward its rivals.

The GAO recommended the Army “conduct a full and open competition” or, under federal regulations, provide justification for a limited competition. The GAO also told the Army to pay DynCorp’s legal costs connected to the protest.

The contract dispute arose during a key transition time in Afghanistan. DynCorp’s contract to train police in Afghanistan — originally overseen by the State Department — was to have ended in January. State’s contract with DynCorp, worth some $440 million since 2004, was extended until August because of the protest.

Hours after the GAO ruling, military sources said that existing contract with DynCorp could be extended again — as late as into December — to ensure that police training continues in Afghanistan. Spokesmen from the State Department and Pentagon declined comment on how the delay would affect training.

The Pentagon wants to nearly double the number of police in Afghanistan by 2013. Improving the police is an imperative in the new strategy laid out by the Obama administration last year. The police are seen as the weak link in the fight against the insurgency. The Defense Department argued persuasively last year that it, rather than the State Department, needed to oversee instruction and to add more robust tactical and counterinsurgency skills.

Once the transition from State to Pentagon was approved, the Army moved quickly to find an existing contract that could be amended to add police training.

The Army eventually added two orders for the training to a three-year-old existing contract, issued under the Space and Missile Defense Command to cover counterterrorism and technological needs. Five companies — including Blackwater, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman — were principals on the contract and were also seen as viable candidates as police trainers.

But DynCorp was not part of that contract and called foul. By December, DynCorp filed a protest to the GAO that police training and mentoring did not rightfully fall under the scope of the contract.

To speed recruits, U.S. cuts Afghan police training to six weeks

United States — 2011-10-12T21:02:59-04:00

The U.S. government’s plan to rapidly grow the ranks of Afghan police officers has run into a shortage of instructors and training camps, prompting U.S. and NATO officials to cut basic training for Afghan recruits from eight weeks to six.

The schedule change — which crams the same hours of training into fewer weeks — underscores the pressures that the Pentagon faces as it tries to transform the police into an effective counterinsurgency force with a higher level of military skills. Afghan police have long been seen as the weak link in that nation’s security forces, suffering a disproportionate number of deadly attacks by the insurgents.

U.S. military officials in Kabul confirmed that the change took effect Saturday. They said the Afghan recruits, most of whom cannot read, write or count, would work longer days to make up for the compressed schedule.

The Afghan police training, contracted to DynCorp International, is now half as long as the 12-week program that DynCorp used to train Iraqi police recruits. DynCorp spokesman Douglas Ebner said the company was told of the change in training regimen in the past week.

The reduction goes against the advice given by some military advisors and contractors to an independent oversight panel late last year. But the quicker turnaround is needed to keep pace with an ambitious schedule of growing the police force to help fight the Taliban, officials familiar with the program told the Investigative Fund.

The U.S. military and NATO commanders hope to double the number of Afghan police and troops by 2013 to pave the way for a withdrawal of U.S. forces. As of January, DynCorp has trained 96,800 Afghan police since 2004 and U.S. officials are pushing at a breakneck pace to have 134,000 total by next year. Military commanders, both U.S. and Afghan, have been deeply and openly critical about the skills and competence of the existing police force.

The decision to compress training was made in Afghanistan three months after contractors and a former military commander were questioned sharply on Capitol Hill about the disparities between U.S. efforts to train police in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a hearing Dec. 18 before the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting established by Congress, trainers from DynCorp and the U.S. military indicated they would not recommend shortening police training in Afghanistan.

Several members of the commission, including co-chairman Christopher Shays, questioned DynCorp International trainer Don Ryder about the quality of Afghan recruits.

Ryder said the training is challenged by the nation’s high illiteracy rate. An average of one in four recruits drops out of the program before finishing, he told the commission.

Ryder resisted the suggestion that the training program could be streamlined, saying that at eight weeks it already was shorter than DynCorp’s program in Iraq.

“Right now the training we provide in the eight-week training program is, in my view, basic training that we should not and cannot walk away from if we are going to leave the Afghans with a law enforcement capability…We should not move away from that,” Ryder testified.

Commission member Grant Green — a former assistant secretary of Defense and a member of the National Security Council under President Reagan — emphasized the new demands of adding counterinsurgency training for police. “It is even more important, I think,” Green said, “that we do not reduce the length of that course.”

Training of police has been one of the costliest bills in the nation-building effort in Afghanistan. As of January, DynCorp had billed the government more than $437 million for its instruction.

In a telephone interview over the weekend, U.S. Army Col. Randall Cheeseborough, deputy commander of the police-training mission in Afghanistan, said the schedule adjustment would get more police out on the streets.

“The good news is that they compressed the basic training course from 8 weeks to 6 weeks with no loss of content. This will significantly increase training throughput and maximize training capacity,” Cheeseborough said.

Cheeseborough could not explain why training, if more efficient in six weeks, had been run for years as an eight-week program.

The debate over how best to train the Afghan police has been further complicated by a recent change in mission and oversight.

The State Department has overseen police training since 2004 when U.S.-based DynCorp, which works in hot spots around the world, won the Afghan contract. Last year, the Pentagon pushed to take over the contract to emphasize counterinsurgency skills over civilian law enforcement.

That effort stumbled in the bidding phase. The Army attempted to amend an ongoing program for technology and equipment — a multibillion contract held by five companies including Blackwater, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman — by just adding an order seeking a new paramilitary training program.

That contracting maneuver essentially prevented DynCorp from participating. The company filed a protest that is under review by the Government Accountability Office. In the meantime, DynCorp’s contract for basic law enforcement training, which was supposed to expire in January, has been extended until August.

As Afghanistan contracting surges, who's following the money?

Afghanistan — 2011-10-12T20:38:14-04:00

In the past eight years, the United States has allocated $51 billion to rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan. But tracking that money sometimes seems as challenging as finding the leaders of the Taliban.

No one keeps an exact count of the number of private contractors working in Afghanistan — even though Congress ordered that be done more than two years ago. There’s no central list of all the contracts now in force. Government auditors cannot determine with confidence if the reconstruction money is being properly spent or meets the stated objectives. And efforts to improve coordination among the key U.S. agencies managing the money — the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development — have lagged at best.

That is the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with auditors, contractors, congressional aides and inspectors general, who echo the findings of independent government reports over the past decade. Without rigorous record-keeping, they say, the contracting process is vulnerable to waste, duplication of effort and fraud.

The oversight task is growing more critical, because as the Obama administration boosts the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan it also is spawning a surge in contractors hired to build schools and government offices, to help farmers grow cash crops other than poppies that fuel heroin production — and, in the most critical nation-building task, to train Afghan police and soldiers.

An estimated 56,000 more contractors — almost double the 30,000 additional troops to be deployed this year — are expected to be working in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service. The number of contractors could top 160,000, exceeding the ranks of U.S. troops fighting the Taliban.

But that’s just an estimate. A key official in the inspector general’s office established to oversee Afghan reconstruction spending said that simply “defining the universe” of contractor spending has been difficult.

“It is a frustration,” said John Brummet, chief auditor in the Office of the Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan. “Everyone assumes the information is there but it just is not. You’d think the [U.S. command in Kabul] could say they have 200 contractors there but…it’s just not there.”

Spending on Afghan reconstruction represents about 20 percent of the total cost of the war, which reached $230 billion by the end of 2009. About half of the reconstruction spending goes toward training Afghan security forces.

Attempts to oversee the billions of dollars flowing to the contractors have been complicated by congressional inattention, severe gaps in manpower and ineffective training for the military officers and bureaucrats shipped off to Afghanistan to monitor reconstruction work, according to agency audits and interviews with auditors.

Even identifying the authority most responsible for managing the rebuilding of Afghanistan is a challenge. Asked for the name of that person, the Defense Department’s public affairs office for procurement named a lieutenant colonel in Virginia, an Army official in San Antonio, a deputy secretary in the Army in Virginia and a general in Afghanistan. No single official would be able to explain all the aspects of a given contract, the office said. A State Department spokesperson also could not provide a central point of contact for reconstruction spending.

One government official long familiar with the contracting process in Iraq and Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity, said all agencies suffer from fractured lines of accountability. “There’s not one person to pin the rose on,” the official said. “And that is exactly what’s wrong with the process.”

The electronic record-keeping systems of the three biggest spenders on reconstruction — Defense, State and USAID —are incompatible, according to the inspectors general for Afghanistan and Iraq. So coordinating spending by the agencies remains beyond the capacity of the inspector general’s office and the government’s chief accountant, the Government Accountability Office.

“It sounds like it should be easy but for so many different reasons, it is challenging,” said John Hutton, the GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management.

On Monday, the Wartime Commission on Contracting, a bipartisan panel formed to oversee reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, asked representatives from State and Defense why the agencies have yet to coordinate their work.

The commission’s chairman, Michael Thibault, sharply questioned Ambassador John Herbst, the State Department’s Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, about a three-month-old overture from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, calling for changes in how the government handles spending on security for reconstruction projects. Gates’ Dec. 15 memo calls for “a new model of shared responsibility.” It was copied to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security adviser and the director of Office of Management and Budget.

As of March, members of the contracting commission said, there was no response from the State Department. “What’s going on?” Thibault asked Herbst at Monday’s hearing.

Herbst responded: “Certainly coordination is a very important issue, but I’m afraid I can just tell you this is being looked at.” Thibault didn’t hide his frustration: “That’s unacceptable.”

On Capitol Hill, the oversight of contract spending in Afghanistan—like the war itself—was long treated as secondary to the challenges in Iraq. Only in 2008 did Congress establish a special inspector general’s office to audit Afghan nation-building.

That inspector general’s office for reconstruction has been working with far fewer staff members than the equivalent office for contract spending in Iraq, run by Stuart W. Bowen. At work since the first year of the Iraq war, Bowen has produced 164 inspections, 160 audits and one book. In his last report, Bowen found that coordination still was lacking in the war zone and recommended a single federal office to oversee reconstruction contracting.

Bowen said in a recent interview that Iraq illuminates the lessons of wartime contracting. Many problems stemmed from the decision to launch a war without long-term plans for battle or rebuilding, he said. In Iraq, millions of dollars spent initially to rebuild electrical grids and power plants and schools were wasted or lost as conflict raged, his reports found.

On his first trip to Baghdad, Bowen said, he saw U.S. officials delivering duffle bags of cash to government ministries, presumably to keep basic services running. “There were simply inadequate controls,” he said.

A key problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been a dearth of people in government and the military who know how to read contracts and assess the contractor’s performance. These people, known as contracting officer representatives, or CORs, are in desperately short supply – and their absence is noted in every audit of agency oversight of contracting in the past few years.

Ironically, the weak link in the current wars can be traced back to the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Defense and State departments cut back on personnel in the 1990s. Contract officer representatives were among the first to go. No one anticipated two far-flung wars would follow. Today, the government is scrambling to train 20,000 contract officers over the next five years.

Meanwhile, efforts to provide better information about contracting sometimes run into trouble on the ground.

In July 2008, State, Defense and USAID agreed to cooperate and compile a common list of contract personnel working in the war zone. But the GAO reported in October that the system still wasn’t working. Among other problems, the agencies could not verify the names of guards hired to protect contractors or U.S. personnel.

One obstacle, the GAO found, was that many Afghans balked at having their names and other data entered into a U.S. computer system. USAID officials said local workers feared for their safety if the system—known as SPOT or the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker – were ever compromised. In response, Defense officials offered to put USAID information into classified computers. But USAID officials resisted because they had little access to classified computers, GAO found.

USAID was only part of the problem. None of the agencies, when questioned, would vouch for the information already entered into the system, the GAO found.

“The agencies could not verify whether the reported data were accurate or complete,” the audit said.

Staff reporter Ben Protess contributed to this story.

Military training of Afghan National Police mired in contract dispute

Afghanistan — 2011-10-12T20:05:14-04:00

As the war in Afghanistan intensifies, a contract dispute in Washington is interfering with the Obama administration’s plan to rebuild the Afghan national police into a military force with skills to fight the Taliban.

The dispute has left the U.S. government continuing to pay millions of dollars a month to a company that primarily trains recruits as civilian police.

Last fall, administration officials shifted oversight of police training from the State Department to the Defense Department. The transition was supposed to take place by February. But the company that holds the State Department contract, DynCorp International, filed a protest.

State Department and DynCorp officials said the civilian police contract has now been extended through the end of July while the Government Accountability Office reviews the company’s appeal.

DynCorp, which for years has trained police in Iraq for the State Department, received an 18-month, $317 million contract in 2008 to do the same work in Afghanistan. The program focused on law enforcement skills. But as the Taliban stepped up its attacks on recruits, U.S. military leaders pushed to include more counterinsurgency and tactical training.

Lawmakers and members of the Commission on Wartime Contracting — an independent bipartisan panel established by Congress — have said that an eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops depends in part on the new strategy for Afghan police training.

Just last week, the State and Defense inspectors general issued a joint audit saying that the State Department program run by DynCorp does not provide the Afghan police “with the necessary skills to successfully fight the insurgency and therefore hampers the ability of [the U.S. military] to fulfill its role in the emerging national strategy.”

State Department spokeswoman Susan Pittman said last week she could not “get into details” about the DynCorp contract because of the protest. A spokesman for the company, Douglas Ebner, said the dispute has not affected how it trains in Afghanistan. “We are working as before,” he said. “We will do nothing to impede the mission.”

Defense officials in Washington referred questions about the Afghan police to the command in Afghanistan. Army Lt. Col. David Hylton, a spokesman in Kabul, said in an e-mail, “The extension of the contract has not affected the rate at which Afghan police are trained to meet current and future requirements.” Hylton added that the recruits have been getting more instruction from military specialists including NATO advisers.

U.S. officials envision a swift expansion of Afghan security forces. The national police numbered 96,800 at the end of last year. They will grow to 134,000 by 2011 and 160,000 by 2013, according to Defense officials. Meantime, the Afghan army is expected to number 134,000 by the end of this year and 240,000 by 2013.

The shift to military training for the police was expected to take place as more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops are deployed. Last November, the U.S. embassy welcomed the transfer of that responsibility to the Pentagon in a memorandum to the inspectors general for State and Defense.

“Expanding and improving the Afghan National Police so it can meet the many security and governance challenges…remains one of the greatest challenges facing the Afghan Government, the United States and our international partners,” wrote Joseph A. Mussomeli, a top embassy official.

“Preparing for a smooth transition” for the police, he added, “has been one of the Embassy’s highest priorities.”

Separate from questions of military strategy, the police training programs in Iraq and Afghanistan also have faced criticism from independent auditors for gaps in supervision and weak controls over how the money is being spent.

The joint inspectors general report released last week focused on how the State Department has been managing the Afghan police-training contract. It found that State had too few contract representatives in Afghanistan to oversee the quality of the work or to track expenses and could “provide no assurance” that the government received value for its money. Contractor invoices were “inappropriately approved” and “oversight was grossly understaffed” beginning in 2005, the audit found.

A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction cited similar flaws in State’s oversight of DynCorp’s police training in Iraq. It suggested that the entire $2.5 billion Iraqi police contract was vulnerable to waste and mismanagement.

The performance of DynCorp was not addressed in the reports. The company has said it is proud of its work.

DynCorp’s protest about the change in the Afghan program was filed in December. The Defense Department had decided to replace DynCorp’s program by adding police training to a contract handled by the Army’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office. But DynCorp argued that police training fell outside the scope of that existing contract, which is supposed to develop technologies to counter drug trafficking and terrorism. Instead, an entirely new police contract should be created, the company said.

Company officials also contend that the rules written by the Defense Department for the revised training program unfairly would exclude DynCorp from bidding on the work. “We favor a full and open competition,” said Ebner, the DynCorp spokesman.

A GAO spokesman said a decision on the company’s appeal would be made by March 24.

Flaws in Iraqi police contract raise questions about Afghan effort

Afghanistan — 2011-10-12T17:35:33-04:00

In a report that offers lessons for the growing war in Afghanistan, the inspector general overseeing Iraqi reconstruction efforts has found major flaws in the State Department’s oversight of a $2.5 billion contract to help build Iraq’s police force.

The State Department does not have enough people in Iraq to monitor the work or track the money being spent by DynCorp International, according to the audit issued Monday by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. One contracting officer in Iraq oversees all receipts and task orders, with no time to visit work sites or to ensure payroll accuracy. At least $1 billion in past invoices have yet to be reconciled, part of a backlog of work that State has promised for years to fix.

“We are questioning what value the government got for $2.5 billion,” Bowen said in an interview.

The report said that the entire contract was “vulnerable to waste and fraud” because of the poor oversight. The State Department, in a written response, said that conclusion was “unfounded” and not substantiated in the report.

DynCorp, which provides services to the U.S. government and military in hot spots around the world, has been under contract since 2004 to support police training in Iraq and Afghanistan. The contract is the single largest in State Department history, according to the inspector general.

The price tag for Afghanistan under the contract so far is $437 million, according to State Department records. The cost of police training there is expected to soar along with the growing American military presence. Training and enlarging the Afghan national police force is a key element of the Obama administration’s plan to shift security to the Kabul government and eventually allow the United States to draw down its troops.

DynCorp spokesman Douglas Ebner stressed that the report addressed only the State Department’s oversight and not the company’s work. “The basic point is the audit did not look at performance,” Ebner said. “We are performing under the contract and we are training Iraqi police.”

The report, one of a series of reviews of U.S. efforts in training foreign security forces, triggered swift criticism of the State Department from lawmakers who oversee wartime contracting.

“They’ve been managing this contract in Iraq since 2004 and, according to this report, they have no idea where any of the money went,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), chair of a Senate subcommittee that monitors contracting. “What’s even worse is that these are the same people responsible for police training in Afghanistan, so I don’t have any confidence that they’re doing a better job there.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), senior Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called the findings “simply outrageous” and illustrated “the need to move quickly and systemically to reform how the government manages federal contracts.”

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs is responsible for overseeing the contract. In a written response to the audit, State officials said invoices were reviewed both in Iraq and Washington to prevent fraud. Nineteen percent of invoices are rejected during the Washington review, the department said.

The department acknowledged that, after a critical audit in 2007, it had promised to increase the number of contract officers in Iraq to 11. But that group remains at three people, State officials said, because of space constraints at the embassy in Baghdad.

The report released Monday is the first of two audits expected to focus on police training in Iraq by the inspector general. A joint State and Defense inspector general report of the DynCorp contract is expected by the end of the month. Multiple audits of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past years have documented waste and flaws in government oversight.

Contractors are expected to surge in number as the U.S. military increases the training of police and army in Afghanistan. According to testimony last month before the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting, the number of U.S. defense contractors in Afghanistan is expected to reach 160,000 this year, more than the number of U.S. troops.

The Defense Department is poised to take over the police training contract in Afghanistan from the State Department, a move that has been portrayed in public hearings as an attempt to accelerate training critical to an anticipated U.S. withdrawal.

The Obama administration has envisioned an Afghan army that would number 134,000 by the end of this year and grow to 240,000 in 2013. The Afghan national police currently stand at 96,800 with a proposal to expand to 160,000 by 2013, according to recent Pentagon testimony.

Training of security forces has been particularly tough in Afghanistan where, unlike Iraq, education is limited and literacy is hard to calculate. Official estimates suggest about 30 percent of the Afghan population is literate. Diplomats and military who have worked in the region believe about 10 to 20 per cent of the population can read, write and count at a sufficient level for security training.

Police recruits are decidedly less proficient than military recruits, they said, and will be particularly challenging to train. “Afghanistan is not Iraq,” one general told the wartime contracting commission during a hearing in December.

Auditors who recently traveled to Iraq described the oversight of DynCorp’s police training support as “extremely weak. ” Invoice review, property control, and lease negotiations were all problematic, they said. Invoices were stuffed in boxes without review, auditors said, and thousands of timesheets were found not signed by supervisors or employees.

One staffer whose job was to approve purchase orders was found in November 2009 to have a backlog of over 700 orders, according to the report.

State’s contract officers also negotiated storage, land and housing facilities at excessive rates, auditors said. In one instance cited in the report, the State representative and DynCorp prepared a lease agreement for land at a cost that was seven times what the U.S. embassy considered the going rate.

As soda tax bubbles up, food lobby mobilizes

Washington,United States — 2011-10-12T14:00:43-04:00

Washington lobbyists have been enjoying a multi-million-dollar sugar rush from the food industry.

Soft drink makers, supermarket companies, agriculture and the fast-food business have poured millions into campaigning against what they fear could be a burgeoning national movement to raise money for health care reform by taxing sweetened beverages.

During the first nine months of 2009, the industry groups stepped up their lobbying in Congress. They have spent more than $24 million on the issue of a national excise tax on sweetened beverages and on other legislative and regulatory issues, according to an examination of lobbying reports filed with the Senate Office of Public Records. The review shows that 21 companies and organizations reported that they lobbied specifically on the proposed tax on sugar-sweetened beverages — which among other things would include sodas, juice drinks and chocolate milk.

About $5 million of the money was spent on a national advertising campaign aimed at Capitol Hill lawmakers and promoting a newly formed coalition called Americans Against Food Taxes. The group bills itself on its website as a coalition of “responsible individuals, financially-strapped families, [and] small and large businesses” but its 400-plus membership list is dominated by industry heavyweights such as Burger King Corporation, Coca Cola, Pepsico and Domino’s Pizza.

Many health officials and advocacy groups have argued for years that sugary drinks, particularly those with high-fructose corn syrup, have been key contributors to a rise in obesity rates in the United States, especially among children. Some argue that the time is right for a soda tax, which they say could not only cut consumption but also generate revenue to close state budget gaps and pay for new health care programs.

A proposal for a national excise tax on soft drinks surfaced in a May funding policy options paper during the Senate Finance Committee’s deliberations on health care reform. Food lobbyists attacked then and continued their efforts in July when President Obama raised the possibility of a soda tax in an interview with Men’s Health magazine. The proposal has not emerged in any of the health care reform bills still in play on Capitol Hill.

But the issue may be gaining traction in some key states. This week, California lawmakers are holding a high-profile hearing in Los Angeles to examine the link between childhood obesity and sugary drinks. In New York, Gov. David Paterson has revived the idea of a sugared beverage tax after a previous proposal was shot down by the legislature earlier this year in the face of industry opposition.

“We are reacting to the situation we find ourselves in,” said Kevin Keane, senior vice president for the American Beverage Association, which alone spent more than $7.3 million on lobbying and advertising in the third quarter of 2009, more than six times what it spent in the previous quarter. "In the fourth quarter we are on target to do as much, if not more," Keane said. “We really don’t know when the threat is over.”

Lobbyists for the industry groups argue that soft drinks cannot be blamed for obesity. A beverage tax, they say, would unfairly single out one type of product and would be a particular burden on low-income people, who can least afford to pay a few cents more per can or bottle.

“To say soda is the only cause of obesity, that’s not correct. Just walk down the street and count the number of White Castles or Burger Kings or Jack in the Box,” said Nelson Eusebio, executive director of the National Supermarket Association. “If we eliminate soda, would people stay away from fried food, hot dogs and all the other junk out there?”

Supporters of a beverage tax make the comparison to tobacco, saying that it makes sense to impose a levy on sugary drinks to offset health care costs. Such beverages now account for 10 to 15 percent of the calories consumed by children and adolescents, according to an April 2009report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“For each extra can or glass of sugared beverage consumed per day, the likelihood of a child becoming obese increases by 60 percent,” said the article, co-authored by Kelly D. Brownell, a professor of psychology at Yale University, and Thomas R. Frieden, a physician who was then New York City health commissioner and now heads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Sugar-sweetened beverages … may be the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic,” wrote the authors, who argued for a federal or state tax.

In the Senate, a federal beverage tax was not perceived as a deep enough well of potential revenue, some congressional aides said in interviews. Others pointed out that the members of the Senate Finance Committee are especially sympathetic to the food industry: Democratic Chairman Max Baucus hails from Montana, a large producer of sugar beets. Iowa, the home state of ranking Republican Chuck Grassley, is the nation’s largest producer of corn.

“It ran into a committee with a lot of farm members,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal policy at the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank in Washington that examines fiscal policies. “Senate Finance is a farm-dominated committee.”

The National Corn Growers Association spent $200,000 to lobby Congress against the tax and other issues through September, records show. Jon Doggett, an association spokesman, said other factions of the sugar lobby pushed hard on Congress, but didn’t describe their work on public filings as specific to the sweetened beverage tax. “They have kind of kept their heads down a little bit," Doggett said. "Nobody plays politics better than the sugar guys."

In state capitals, the financial crisis has sparked more interest from officials scrambling to make up for lost tax revenue. Although 33 states have sales taxes that apply to soda, the taxes are not aimed at raising money for health care and generally are too low to affect consumption, according to another New England Journal of Medicine article. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a health advocacy group, released a study this October that estimated that states could generate as much as $10 billion a year by adding a seven-cent tax to a 12-ounce can.

This week’s hearing in Los Angeles, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Alex Padilla, was prompted by a policy brief on soda consumption called “Bubbling Over,” published in September by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy and UCLA. It found that 41 percent of the state’s children between the ages of two and 11 drink at least one sweetened beverage a day.

One of the speakers will be Yale University’s Brownell, co-founder and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He said he expects to see the beverage tax adopted first by the states.

“It’s just a matter of time,” Brownell said. “If the tobacco tax is any precedent — and I think it is — it will happen first in the states. … If politicians in other states see it happen in California, they will see it as a winning issue.”

Keane, of the beverage association, agrees that the industry has never faced such a political challenge. He said he helped design the television ad campaign for Americans Against Food Taxes to focus on families and to point out how a new tax could squeeze the middle class. One scenario portrayed a family at a campsite as a narrator intoned: “This is no time for Congress to be adding taxes on the simple pleasures we all enjoy, like juice drinks and soda …. We all want to improve health care, but taxes never made anyone healthy.”

In two other 30-second ads that played in prime time in the past few weeks, a young mother says: “They say it’s only pennies. Well, those pennies add up when you’re trying to feed a family. Washington, are you listening? What doesn’t seem like much to you can be a lot to us.”

Keane said the ads were aimed at lawmakers more than consumers. “We found that all the lawmakers in D.C. get their news on satellite, so we had to buy national cable ads to reach them,” Keane said. “It directly targeted the policymakers and staff and those who are directly active and engaged in the process.”

In addition to the producers of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Snapple, Americans Against Food Taxes also counts the U.S. Chamber of Commerce among its many partners and has encouraged Hispanic and African-American interest groups to write letters and send e-mail blasts against the sugar tax as unfair to lower-income families.

Elena Rios, a physician who is president of the National Hispanic Medical Association, said she sided with the beverage industry because a tax on soda wouldn’t be “a comprehensive approach” to health problems in her community.

“I’m not convinced that [a sugared beverage tax] is a positive incentive to make people aware of nutrition,” Rios said. “So instead of sugar, what do they use? Sweetener? I think we have to step back and take a broad approach.”

The National Supermarket Association’s Eusebio, a leader in Americans Against Food Taxes, said his organization is providing grassroots manpower. When New York Gov. Paterson raised the possibility of a soda tax, Eusebio organized petition drives in neighborhoods that would feel the pinch of a few pennies on a can of Coke.

At Key Food Supermarket at 161st Street in New York, shoppers who wanted to protest the tax waited in a line that stretched a city block, Eusebio said.

He has since coordinated with grocer associations in South Florida, Massachusetts and Connecticut — all who see a nickel-a-can tax as prohibitive.

“Unfortunately, these days whenever a state or federal government needs money — and right now the state of New York needs money — this is what happens,” Eusebio said. “They are trying to make this out as something else. This is just a way to raise money.”