The Obama Administration’s Youth Workforce Development Program (YWDP) promises to deal with the growing number of “idle, disaffected youth” nationwide—that is, in the nation of Pakistan.
The initiative comes at a time when the U.S. Department of Labor acknowledges that the unemployment rate for American teenagers in March remained about the same as in February: 24.2 percent.
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The Obama administration recently issued warnings to
contractors of potential sequestration-related spending cuts, but in the
meantime federal spending continues unabated, domestically and globally.
Some of the apparently indispensable projects include a environmental public murals in Hebron and Jericho along with similarly themed summer camps and field trips for Palestinian children, alternative energy outings to Turkey, and assistance to mango growers and hotel operators in Pakistan.
The U.S. Agency for International Development said in a public notice that “due to the failure of Congress to reach a deal on balanced deficit reduction to avoid sequestration, the president on March 1, 2013, as required by law, issued a sequestration order canceling approximately $85 billion in budgetary resources across the federal government for the remainder of the federal fiscal year.”
USAID recently advised vendors that the agency “is taking every step to mitigate the effects of these cuts, but … it is likely that your company’s workforce, revenue, and planning processes may be affected.”
But that is not stopping USAID from reaching out to contractors to carry out its new $700 million global “ecological-governance” program.
The primary goal of the agency’s Restoring the Environment through Prosperity, Livelihoods and Conserving Ecosystems, or REPLACE, program is to strengthen the ability of governments and non-governmental organizations around the globe to provide climate-change mitigation and adaptation, seascape and landscape management, and other environmental and economic interventions.
Numerous other federal entities issued similar warnings via the FedBizOpps contractor database.
Despite the advisories, new projects continue to emerge while existing programs undergo expansion, from the seemingly inconsequential – such as a $79,000 U.S. Trade & Development Agency grant to send U.S. railway representatives on an exploratory mission to India – to initiatives on a multi-billion-dollar scale.
Most notable is the Department of Defense’s extended outsourcing of global counter-narcotics functions through its Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office, or CNTPO, a potential $15 billion contract vehicle that has enriched – and will continue to enrich – Blackwater Lodge & Training Center Inc.; Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems; ARINC Engineering Services LLC; Raytheon Technical Service Company; and Northrop Grumman/TASC Inc.
The report "DoD Prepares Follow-Up to $15 Billion Global Counterdrug Contracts" continues to be one of the Monitor's most regulalry visited articles, generating consistent visits and Google search hits nearly twenty months later.
The following list of federal procurement actions represents an additional snapshot of recent contracts, requests for proposals and other solicitations, both large and small. This nation-by-nation compilation is by no means comprehensive but is designed to enlighten U.S. taxpayers about how the federal government is spending – or intends to spend – their money.
GAZA/WEST BANK
The creation of environmental-themed public murals, conducting student field-trips to “environmentally important sites” in Hebron and Jericho and holding environmental summer camps for Palestinian children are among programs that the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service intends to fund. And the USFS is procuring the services of the Palestinian Association for Child Arts and Culture to carry out these tasks for youth in the city of Hebron. The agency did not disclose the estimated cost.
Helping the Palestinian Authority to “build more effective and competent public institutions that are accountable to the public and respond to citizens’ needs” will cost $20.5 million under a contract that USAID awarded to Development Alternatives Inc.
U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor founder Steve Peacock initially broke the story on the project’s unveiling last April for WND.com.
PAKISTAN
Current efforts to improve the competitiveness of small- and medium businesses in Pakistan have been extended another 20 months, now that USAID has raised Chemonics International’s contract ceiling to $93 million. The current contract for the Pakistan Firms Project was slated to end April 15, but with a $2.5 million increase, Chemonics will continue to provide technology upgrades, skill development and other assistance to hotels, mango growers, knitted-garment manufacturers and other Pakistani enterprises through December 31, 2014.
TURKEY
Alternative-energy industry representatives are getting free hotel rooms and airfare to Turkey to explore ways to capitalize on the nation’s energy boom. The U.S. Trade & Development Agency is offering a $537,000 grant to carry out the Smart Grid Upgrades to the Teias Electricity Transmission Network Feasibility Study. According to the agency, “Turkey is facing a rapidly rising demand in the midst of its bustling economic growth. The Turkish government is consequently making a concentrated effort to explore alternative sources of energy, such as wind, hydro and geothermal power as a way of meeting this shortfall.”
Consequently, the Obama administration has decided that U.S. taxpayers should shoulder the burden of that trip to Ankara.
UNITED STATES
Under its Adult Education and Immigrant Integration project, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $1.3 million contract to World Education Inc. of Boston to design an initiative to “reduce linguistic, academic, and employment barriers for skilled and low-skilled immigrants and refugees, and to integrate them into the U.S. workforce and professions.”
A similar version of this article first appeared via WND.com on March 18, 2013. Under agreement with WND, rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.
Less than a week after Hurricane Sandy plunged much of the mid-Atlantic region into darkness, the Obama administration unveiled a new initiative aimed at mitigating the impact of “unreliable grid power.”
Not across ravaged coastal New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, but in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
The direct beneficiary of the administration’s generosity is a publicly traded Pakistani cement and concrete producer, according to a planning document that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor located via routine database research.
The Lahore-based Pioneer Cement Limited, or PCL, requested a grant from the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, or USTDA – an independent White House entity – to fund a feasibility study of its modernization plans.
USTDA agreed, thereby requiring U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for eco-friendly industry representatives needing international flights and hotel accommodations. The agency is offering a $770,000 grant to make it happen, Solicitation Number 2012-31033A shows.
The completed study also may come with recommendations for further financial or technical assistance to PCL, which ultimately wants to build a biomass-fired power plant as well as a waste heat recovery unit “and energy efficiency upgrades to mitigate or reduce dependence on unreliable grid power,” the document says.
Biomass, “as a renewable energy source, is biological material from living, or recently living organisms,” as defined by the Surrey, England-based Biomass Energy Center. PCL, for instance, uses residues from agricultural waste such as rice husks and wheat straw.
USTDA acknowledges that the grant-recipient Pakistani company is thriving. Indeed, the targeted facility “is equipped with two cement production lines with a total production capacity of 6,200 tons” of clinker – the primary component of cement – per day.
The agency laments, however, that “PCL’s production costs are rising, particularly in terms of fuel and power. As a result, PCL is intent on maximizing production capacity utilization, maintaining quality, and reducing its cost of production.”
Implementation of the biomass-fired power plant will help PCL “to meet the cement plant’s internal demand, with any surplus energy being sold to the National Transmission & Despatch Company,” the solicitation says.
USTDA touts itself for helping “companies create U.S. jobs through the export of U.S. goods and services for priority development projects in emerging economies.”
The agency on its website claims that last year it “identified over $2.2 billion in U.S. exports that were directly attributable to USTDA-funded activities.”
But as the Monitor reported earlier this year, sometimes those companies include multi-billion-dollar corporations such as GE, which stands to gain from USTDA-financed energy projects in Kenya and Tanzania.
The agency often pays for feasibility studies and “definitional missions” as the first steps toward the modernization of other nations’ industries – including the oil industry in places such as Libya.
USTDA has since embarked upon a separate Libyan project.
Interestingly, on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks – the very day of the al Qaida-staged attacks resulting in the deaths the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others – USTDA in a Special Notice recognized the “technical merit” of an unsolicited proposal to create Internet access points across Libya.
Benghazi and Tripoli were identified as two target cities to deploy the access points. No action – neither a contract award or project cancellation—has been announced in that particular matter.
Congress this week separately began hearings on the Benghazi attack.
This article originally was published via WND.com Nov. 14. Under agreement with the publisher, rights have reverted back to to the author, Steve Peacock.
Nearly $300 million in contracts could be awarded to help the U.S. provide “technical leadership in the field of electoral and political processes” in foreign nations. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will use private contractors to provide “rapid-response, one-time only” assistance as well as “iterative,” or repeated, goods and services, according to an updated solicitation (#SOL-OAA-11-000037) that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor located via a routine search of the FedBizOpps database.
USAID currently is carrying out such assistance projects under previously awarded contracts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The agency recently extended the contracts of three vendors—Creative Associates (award #DFD-I-00-05-00197-00), Democracy International (award #DFD-I-00-05-00198-00), and IFES (award #DFD-I-00-05-00225-00)—to continue operating in those nations. USAID estimates that that the approx. $40 million extension will bring total expenditures under that initiative to $185 million—far short of the previous $400 million ceiling that it set for such ventures.
The new solicitation once again will open up the process to competitive bidding over a five-year ordering period.
U.S. taxpayers are going to pay for equipment and furniture for 115 schools in Pakistan—and unlike most other federal programs, companies from the United States are not allowed to compete for contracts stemming from this initiative, U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor has discovered.
Data about this project became available almost simultaneously with U.S. Secy. of State Hillary Clinton's warning to Pakistani officials that they could "pay a very big price" for failing to take decisive action against insurgent havens in that nation.
Clinton issued that threat on Oct. 20; similarly, according to a Request for Proposals (see #SOL-391-12-000001), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on that same day called on Pakistani companies to submit bids for the Malakand Reconstruction and Recovery Program (MRRP), as it is known.
That RFP explicitly pointed out that contracts for the initiative are for “Local Pakistani Organizations Only.”
The 115 targeted facilities, all which have undergone reconstruction in the conflict-affected districts in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, “are of various levels including primary, middle, high and higher secondary,” USAID says in the RFP.
Requirements include, but are not limited to:
The project is slated to begin in December and conclude in June 2013. USAID did not disclose the endeavor’s estimated price tag.
FOR ADDITIONAL REGIONAL COVERAGE, SEE THE MONITOR'S PAKISTAN PAGE.
