Editorial: Investigate Halliburton contracts

Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003 | 8:49 a.m.

A Pentagon audit has found that a subsidiary of Halliburton, the politically connected company that Vice President Dick Cheney once ran, overcharged the U.S. government $61 million for gasoline it delivered to Iraq. The subsidiary -- Kellogg, Brown & Root -- was charging the government an average of $2.64 a gallon, a price that was more than double what it was costing to truck in fuel from Kuwait by other sources.

The New York Times reported that the audit was of "deep concern" to officials in the Pentagon, which has awarded noncompetitive bidding contracts worth as much as $15.6 billion to Kellogg, Brown & Root. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., one of the leading critics of the sole-source gasoline contract, said the audit "confirms what we've known for months: Halliburton has been gouging taxpayers and the White House has been letting them get away with it. It is deplorable and we need to put an immediate end to it."

Waxman is exactly right, but so far the Bush administration has shown little fiscal discipline, especially when it comes to providing subsidies to big corporate interests or offering sweetheart government contracts to well-connected companies. It's not enough that President Bush has said that Halliburton should repay for any overcharging that occurred. What's needed is an investigation along the lines of the Truman Committee from the 1940s. Sen. Harry Truman, before he became vice president and later president, chaired a committee created in 1941 that investigated abuses involving military contractors. As an official Senate history of the Truman Committee notes, the Missouri Democrat uncovered information that some contractors were being paid a fixed profit -- even if their operations weren't efficient -- and that a number of corporations based in the East had received a disproportionate share of the military contracts.

What also should be noted is that Truman was a Democrat, the same party affiliation as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This past week's revelations shouldn't be a partisan issue, either. Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, should show some leadership and conduct extensive hearings into these contracts to see what's really going on.