Comparison of environmental remediation contracting approaches between the Department of Defense and the Private sector

摘要

With the price tag for environmental remediation over the past twenty years exceeding $1 trillion dollars and the costs expecting to exceed $500 billion over the next twenty years, there is a tremendous need to study the area of environmental remediation contracting. The concurrent tracts of increasing environmental scrutiny, a down-sizing defense industrial base, and a major effort to reform the Government acquisition system has generated an opportunity to review how the private sector contracts for environmental remediation and apply any applicable best practices to the Department of Defense contracting system. Key findings of this study are (1) there is no readily available process from either the commercial sector or the Department of Defense that will suffice as a template for all environmental remediation efforts, (2) the Department of Defense has no centralized repository of environmental remediation contracting knowledge, (3) Legislative and regulatory hurdles exist which impede assimilation of new initiatives in the remediation of former the Department of Defense facilities, and (4) the utilization of incentive type contracts for environmental remediation is not producing the expected innovation and improvements in contractor performance.