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26 - Procurement in times of crisis: lessons from US government procurement in three episodes of ‘crisis’ in the twenty-first century

from PART VIII - Challenges and new directions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2011

Joshua I. Schwartz
Affiliation:
George Washington University
Sue Arrowsmith
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
Robert D. Anderson
Affiliation:
World Trade Organization
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Summary

‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’

Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff, to President Barack Obama, 21 November 2008

Introduction

The notion – which now approaches the status of conventional wisdom – that policy breakthroughs can be achieved in times of crisis, finds an academic echo in the common-sense idea that something particularly useful can be learned about a significant socio-economic phenomenon, such as government procurement, by studying its performance in times of crisis. Indeed, that insight drives both this chapter and the previous one. This chapter proceeds by examining and comparing the lessons that emerge – or which are believed to emerge – from three recent episodes of political or economic crisis in the US, each of which had significant consequences for the procurement system of the US national (‘federal’) government. The three episodes examined are: (i) the procurement response to Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast of the US in the summer of 2005; (ii) the procurement issues that emerged in response to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing US military engagements in Iraq and in Afghanistan; and (iii) the procurement aspects of the federal government's stimulus response to the current ‘Great Recession’.

This contribution is not offered as a piece of primary empirical research but as a vehicle for meta-analysis. There are several reasons for choosing this approach. First, with respect to some of these crisis episodes, the primary work has already been done elsewhere.

Type
Chapter
Information
The WTO Regime on Government Procurement
Challenge and Reform
, pp. 803 - 829
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Stanger, A., One Nation under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of American Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar
Freeman, J. and Minow, M. (eds.), Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Verkuil, P. R., Outsourcing Sovereignty: Why Privatization of Government Functions Threatens Democracy and What We Can Do About It (Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schooner, S. L., ‘Contractor Atrocities at Abu Ghraib: Compromised Accountability in a Streamlined, Outsourced Government’, Stanford Law & Policy Review, 16 (2005), 549Google Scholar
Tiefer, C., ‘The Iraq Debacle: The Rise and Fall of Procurement-Aided Unilateralism as a Paradigm of Foreign War’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, 29 (2007), 1Google Scholar
Singer, P. W., ‘War, Profits, and the Vacuum of Law: Privatized Military Firms and International Law’, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 42 (2004), 521Google Scholar
Vernon, R. R., ‘Battlefield Contractors: Facing the Tough Issues’, Public Contract Law Journal, 33 (2004), 369Google Scholar

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