In the spirit of The Smoking Gun, I went looking for the Halliburton contract that was announced this week. What I found answered a few of the wilder conspiracy claims floating around, but still raises additional questions about disclosure and future business prospects for Halliburton. (Why are we interested in Halliburton? Remember, it’s all about the Harken-Halliburton Presidency.)

Summary:

1. The “contract” that was let this week is a task order under Halliburton’s existing indefinite delivery contract vehicle, contract DAAA09-02-D-0007.
2. The scope of this task order is the development of a contingency plan to extinguish the oil well fires in Iraq; execution of that plan will be under another contract.
3. The value of the contingency plan task order is almost certainly less than $5 million, probably less than $100,000.
4. The real value will be in the follow-on work to this award.

Details, including a discussion of how I found this data, are here.

As a former contractor on the DOD’s standard procurement system, I’m very curious to see how this particular contract award was explained on the official Congressional contract reporting form, the DD-350. Particularly Blocks C8 (how the contract was solicited to vendors), C3 (the extent to which it was competed), and C9 (authority for other than full and open competition).