Washington,
December 8, 2015
|
Mary Carpenter
(202-834-0386)
Congressman Earl L. "Buddy" Carter (Ga-01) hammered State Department officials about the continued cost overruns of State Department construction projects.
In a hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Carter questioned Gregory B. Starr, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security. During questioning of Mr. Starr, Carter raised serious concerns about State's wasteful spending, "you appeared here before this full committee in July to review the cost overruns of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, and again in September to discuss both security concerns and cost overruns with the two U.S. Consulates in Mexico...and that’s just two examples. Two examples that you’ve had to answer for this year. Other examples would include the State Department paying a construction company $18.5 million for renovations to a prison in Afghanistan originally slated to cost $16 million. And then the firm completed only half of the work over five years. Now the State Department calculates it’s going to cost another $16 million to finish the project. The State Department has spent $5 million on fancy glassware. Five million dollars on fancy glassware at U.S. embassies. The new embassy in Papua New Guinea had to be entirely scrapped. Entirely scrapped and started over. That resulted in almost quadrupling the cost of the project."
Carter also raised concerns about cost overruns of future construction projects, including the State Department's attempts to build a new, duplicative Foreign Affairs Security Training Center (FASTC) in Virginia instead of utilizing the already functional Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. During questioning, Carter said "you could have renovated and you could have redone the current London embassy for less than a billion dollars if you would have only slowed down and made sure it was done correctly. We’ve established that here today. We’ve established that. You know what bothers me so much about this? Is that we are making the same mistake all over again. All you have to do is look at what you’re trying to do with the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center. It’s all we’ve got to do. You look at what was done. You compared FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, down in Glynco, Georgia. They submitted a bid of $243 million. You went to Fort Pickett. They submitted a bid of $950 million. You went back to Fort Pickett and said ‘aw come on, can’t you do better than that?’ They said, ‘ok, we’ll come down to $450 million. We’ll just eliminate the dormitories and cafeteria. All the things that already exist at FLETC. We’ll eliminate all those and we’ll get the price down.’ You know why don’t we do this, I’ll tell you what we’ll do Mr. Starr. Let’s just go ahead and schedule the next hearing on the cost overruns at FLETC. You wanna go ahead and do that? It would save us a lot of time because we know you’re gonna be right back here. We’ve seen it already. Let me tell ya, when you get back here on the cost overruns on that, if I’m still on that committee, don’t count on my support."
