Balancing the Checkbook

“With all human activities there are errors that are made and, uh, this is no different.”
- Mark Gilmore from the Congressional Budget Office on $19 billion in unaccounted for spending on Iraq contractors.

A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released Tuesday shows that about $100 billion is being spent on contractors in the Iraq war. To be fair, the report never used the term “Iraq war”, that’s my description. Instead they reported on the “current military, reconstruction, and diplomatic efforts” related to the “Iraq Theatre.”

But when Mark Gilmore from the CBO appeared on C-SPAN yesterday it wasn’t the price tag or the historic numbers of U.S private vendors during a war that most irked viewers. What rattled many viewers was the revelation – underscored by C-SPAN Washington Journal host Greta Brawner – that the CBO could not account for nearly $20 billion in spending.

It’s not exactly breaking news. In May the BBC and others reported that $8 billion worth of payments to Iraq-war related contractors “failed to comply with US laws aimed at preventing fraud”. The May news coverage even pointed as evidence to a $5.6 million check paid by the U.S. to an Iraqi contractor with zero records to show what had been purchased.

Oddly, the CBO seemed unprepared for questions about the mysterious money. They hadn’t included mention of the mysterious money in their press alerts, and the Associated Press declined to mention that part of the story (the BBC picked it up). Gilmore offered a variety of answers, ranging from its not his job to pointing at difficulties in simultaneously managing fiscal control and dealing with the violence in Iraq. Though, isn’t violence what the Pentagon would have planned for in wartime? Here’s the C-SPAN exchange:

Brawner: “Why is there $20 billion where we don’t know where it’s going and who its going to?”

Gilmore: “Well, actually, we don’t know, that would be more of an auditing function and something that the Government Accountability Office among others, for example the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, they would be looking into that kind of issue I would assume, um, it’s hard to collect some of these data, not to excuse this or offer excuses for the Department of Defense but sometimes its hard to collect the data on exactly what’s being done, um, and, the databases are only as good as the people who are supplying the information, so with all human activities there are errors that are made and, uh, this is no different.”

In response to viewer questions he offers up other explanations, including “not our expertise,” and “the legal status of contractors is ambiguous,” and “…it’s not necessarily fair to say its not accounted for….we cannot say exactly what the $20 billion was spent for,” and “yes indeed there are a number of problems that have been noted…” and “the Department of Defense [doesn’t] have sufficient manpower to perform oversight of its financial transactions,” and finally, “Iraq [is] even more difficult because of the insurgency that is going on there and the violence which thankfully is recently declined.”

This is a man without a message. Callers on all three lines – Republican, Democrat, and Independent – ranged from frustrated to hostile. They started out concerned about money management and ended up focused on his apparent lack of concern for the issue.

Finally a caller said, “You made the statement earlier that we are all human and we make mistakes. Granted. But [we] have a judicial system and prisons that take care of people that make certain types of mistakes. My question to you again is how would you characterize this type of financial mgmt were it regard to your personal finances, and what would you expect to happen to those money managers of your personal finances?”

Quite aside from the seriousness of the subject matter, from a public relations perspective this interview is a classic example of bungled communications. A bureaucrat treated the subject with dispassionate fact sharing and the public needed to experience authentic regard for their concern. After all, when faced with a mysterious $20 billion expenditure, the core concern really can’t be whether Mark Gilmore expresses personal alarm. But for many of the viewers, Gilmore wasn’t just speaking on behalf of a non-partisan auditing wing of the government; he was speaking on behalf of the government. And they wanted their government to be outraged.

The questions continued to get personal until finally one caller demanded to know how much Gilmore was being paid to report to the public that he had no idea how our money was being spent. Gilmore declined to answer. But his performance tracks the tone of the report. Even the letter of introduction in the CBO report reveals a dispassionate attitude about the enormous emotional impact of bloated government spending in the midst of an economic meltdown. The report cover memo acknowledges the 14 people who researched, analyzed and wrote the findings and also informs Congress members that Maureen pasted the map on the cover, Lenny made copies, Linda mailed the copies, and Simone saved the document as a PDF.