Free Republic

The founder of the Blackwater private security firm and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is pitching a risky plan to “privatize” the war in Afghanistan, and officials are increasingly worried that POTUS Donald Trump will embrace the plan. After 17-odd years, and following surges and withdrawals — and surges and withdrawals — of U.S. troops through the years, Blackwater founder Erik Prince says the president is “frustrated” by the lack of progress to date, even as he’s given the Pentagon what it has requested to ‘win’ the war there. As such, he has been shopping a new operation to...

- Russian military veterans urged the government on Thursday to acknowledge it sends private military contractors to fight in Syria, in a bid to secure financial and medical benefits for the fighters and their families. The statement breaks years of public silence about a secret operation involving thousands of Russian civilians fighting in Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad whom Moscow has been helping militarily since September 2015. “For three years already, we have been receiving complaints and appeals from Russian citizens who were injured in Syria and cannot undergo medical treatment in Russia,” said the statement, signed...

The Illinois tollway contends its no-bid process that uses a selection committee to makes recommendations to the board on expensive engineering contracts is independent and transparent. But when asked to provide meeting minutes, the agency blacked out the names of committee members in a majority of cases, making it impossible to see who is voting -- a response criticized by attorney and public access expert Don Craven as improper under Illinois open records law. When the names did surface they included tollway board Director Corey Brooks, who like all directors is appointed by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, countering claims the...

As the nation’s opioid epidemic rages on, the federal agency charged with leading the government’s response to substance abuse is changing the way it helps local communities. But critics say the move risks leaving programs with fewer resources until the new plan is in place. The controversy began in January with a low-key announcement by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Rather than continue hiring contractors to pair experts with communities, as has been done for years, SAMHSA’s new approach will “utilize local expertise” to provide technical assistance and training. This effort will “focus on the specific needs...

In this 99 page document that was used as the basis of the Nunes memo, interesting finding on page 87:The improper access granted to the ______ contractors was apparently in place ________________ and seems to have been the result of deliberate decision making. Despite the existence of an interagency memorandum of understanding (presumably reviewed by FBI Lawyers), no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016.

After just viewing the excellent video by Joe diGenova, I was struck with his comment about a FISA Opinion Report issued in April, 2016, or to quote deGenova: "In April, 2016, the FISA court issues this 99 page opinion which I'll bet you didn't even know about until I talked about it this morning. This opinion describes illegal activity by the FBI, illegal activity by contractors, and it calls it the improper disclosure of raw intelligence about Americans to unauthorized individuals. All of those things the bureau did and the contractors were crimes. Now, this is a public document, it's...

... Fontanka reported that about 3,000 Russians under contract to the Wagner group have fought in Syria since 2015, months before Russia’s two-year military campaign helped to turn the tide of the civil war in favor of Syrian President Assad... ... The Russian Defense Ministry has said 41 of its troops have died in Syria. But according to Fontanka, another 73 private contractors have been killed there. ... Russia has used such proxies before — in the conflict to help pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014. One Russian commander boasted of working alongside Russian troops who said they were...

Change your name, change your past. That’s the theory a bevy of government contractors with questionable pasts are using to get back into the game – and it’s working. President Trump’s term has consisted of cleaning up messes from the previous administration and draining the swamp, but in this case, he’s only halfway there. The State Department is signing contracts to upgrade security at buildings and other facilities around the world – in part in response to the Obama administration’s neglect that led to the death of four Americans at Benghazi. This is good. But of the $10 billion authorized for the increased security,...

AMESBURY — A recent quality inspection of the $300 million John Greenleaf Whittier Bridge replacement project turned up evidence of substandard work – for the second time – that could push back the project’s estimated late summer/early fall completion date. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation began work to demolish the 62-year-old Interstate 95 bridge over the Merrimack River and replace it with separate northbound and southbound bridges in 2013. While the northbound bridge was completed in 2015, quality inspectors for MassDOT recently found that concrete poured for a pier cap on the southbound bridge by an unnamed contractor did not...

Illinois tollway directors agreed Thursday to spend up to $4 million to assist minority-, women- and veteran-owned construction companies that are seeking work with the agency. The funds will be distributed among seven entities including the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce, Illinois State Black Chamber of Commerce and Chicago Minority Supplier Development Council. Training ranges from basics such as explaining the technicalities of bidding for a contract and obtaining financing to advanced classes in estimating the cost of a job or managing a business. The program will be evaluated based on the number of businesses served and successful bids, among other...

While many of the targeted federal agencies have offices outside Washington, Trump's dream budget would hit the region disproportionately, with tens of thousands of jobs at risk. The cuts would be felt throughout the city, with fewer people riding the already-beleaguered Metro subway or eating at restaurants. It would also hurt Washington's already-shaky market for office space. Economist Stephen Fuller of George Mason University, who has studied the regional economy for decades, estimated 20,000-24,000 federal employees and 10,000 federal contractors would lose their jobs under Trump's proposal. That equates to 5 percent of federal workers in the region. With those...

So, since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And that by doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. Dilulio Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly. Since 1960, the number of state and local government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth...

Private contractors at the Oroville Dam have had to fire some of their workforce because of issues ranging from positive drug tests to violating the state's Department of Water Resources' social media policy. There has also been turnover because of unqualified workers. Private contractors hired to work on the dam have to vet their own employees, according to DWR spokesman Chris Orrock, who noted that no state employees have been let go because of these reasons. Crews are being brought in as needed, as space is tight, DWR Acting Director Bill Croyle said.

I don't want to quote the Slimes, in part because of excerpt rules but also because it's just fake news. Click the link if you must but wash up afterwards. In the linked article, every single "Christian Leader" is nothing more than a paid "refugee" resettlement contractor. They make lots of money by bringing in immigrants. The government funded United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who received almost eighty million tax dollars in 2014. Church World Service, who according to Charity watch receives over 50% of their funding from the government. Finally, they cite World Relief which is also listed...

Booz Allen Hamilton said on Thursday it had hired a former FBI chief to conduct an external review of its security practices, after the consulting firm learned for the second time in three years that an employee working under contract with the National Security Agency had been charged with stealing classified information. Booz Allen, which earns billions of dollars a year contracting with U.S. intelligence agencies, has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after authorities took Harold Thomas Martin into custody. The firm also employed Edward Snowden, who leaked a trove of secret files to news organizations in 2013...

Getting lucrative government contracts is easy – if you know the right people.  And in the case of former ambassador Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA officer Valerie Plame, it was Hillary Clinton who greased the skids so that government contracts could go to business associates and friends. Is this really in the job description of the secretary of state? Daily Caller: Wilson’s requests for help — on behalf of an American engineering contractor he consulted for called Symbion Power — is a recurring theme in each monthly Clinton email dump. The latest two batches of records are no different....

Clinton's secret arms dealing -- and how it led to disaster in Libya. Hillary Clinton led the charge in the Obama administration to go to war in Libya. Her objective was to overthrow the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Not one to be deterred by opponents in the Pentagon and Congress to her reckless interventionist plans, Hillary decided to end-run them. Her State Department helped facilitate what Andrew P. Napolitano in his scathing article has called “Hillary’s secret war.” When the secret war began to backfire, as arms ended up in the hands of anti-American jihadists, Hillary Clinton and other...

The current news, reported in the Journal and elsewhere, is that her server contained information at the highest level of classification, known as SAP, or Special Access Program. This is a level so high that even the inspector general for the intelligence community who reported the discovery did not initially have clearance to examine it. The server also contained messages showing her contempt for classification procedures. This was bred at least in part by obvious familiarity with exactly "how it works"--such as when, an email shows, she directed a staff member simply to erase the heading on a classified document,...

(CBS) — A Chicago man is suing the state of Indiana and its road building contractors blaming them for a fiery accident on the Cline Avenue Bridge that killed his wife 14 months ago. It was March of last year when Iftikhar Hussain and his wife were driving from Chicago to West Lafayette, Indiana. Hussain’s attorney Timothy Schafer says the couple took the Indiana Toll Road and then the Cline Avenue exit, following the GPS in their Nissan Sentra. Schafer says even though the road was closed because the bridge ahead was demolished, the barricades had been removed and the...

The 2016 presidential election will determine the fate of the sharing economy. Donald Trump has yet to voice his opinion, but other candidates have made their positions clear. Hillary Clinton promises a regulatory shake down and GOP candidate Ted Cruz promises to leave it alone. Hillary thinks the sharing economy is “raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.” In her economic policy address, she said she will “crack down” on independent contractors. That would be a big mistake. The independent contractor designation is the backbone of the sharing economy. It...