The Coalition Provisional Authority reconstituted the Iraqi budgetary process in two significant ways. First, by designing and codifying a budget formulation and approval process that reflected international best practices of democratic governments and, second, by empowering the Ministry of Finance beyond the position it occupied under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Efforts to modernize Iraqi budgeting, however, went deeper into the bureaucracy than positioning the Finance Ministry as the central actor in the budgetary process and instituting new budgetary procedures. Finding the Iraqis’ technical skills seriously lacking, their management of public finance data inadequate and opaque, and their computer systems deficient or nonexistent, Coalition officials planned to introduce a new financial management information system into the Ministry of Finance that would connect it with all other ministries, and eventually with all levels of government. The Coalition’s long struggle to achieve this goal reflects its limitations in realizing institutional transformation in Iraq.

This effort to reconstruct the Finance Ministry depended on the ability of private contractors to modernize the Ministry and train its personnel. No war in American history has been so interlinked and dependent on private contractors in all phases of conflict, from security to reconstruction to training, as in Iraq. The names of the contractors Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root, Bechtel, and Blackwater, and the sometimes noncompetitively bid contracts that enriched them, will always be recounted as part of the Iraq story. By 2008, an estimated 190,000 civilian contractors operated in Iraq, more than the number of military personnel present at that time; the number of military personnel peaked at 160,000 in 2007. By the end of 2009, a reported 1,600 civilian contractors, American and other nationalities, had been killed and more than 35,000 injured. Much of the actual conduct of American foreign policy, particularly American efforts at promoting economic governance and development in Iraq, rested with private contractors. Giant consultancies, such as BearingPoint, Research Triangle Institute International, Adam Smith International, and Maxwell Stamp PLC, dominated the field and received hundreds of millions of dollars in USAID contracts, as well as contracts from Coalition partners. These contractors, not the State Department, USAID, the Treasury Department, or other federal agencies, provided the majority of the civilian person power used to advise and train foreign government officials, build ministries, oversee economic development projects, promote efforts at democratization, and project American interests in Iraq.