A $30 billion U.S. defense acquisition,one of the modern military’s most lucrative, most needed, and most tinged by delay, controversy, and politics,now comes down to the assessment of a single arbiter: the head of a small, behind-the-scenes, 9-to-5 team of bureaucrats at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of Congress. This anonymous adjudicator is an unassuming, friendly man who travels to and from work at around the same time each day on a Northern Virginia commuter train, BusinessWeek.com reports.
The fortunes of three major contractors,to say nothing of a bevy of hundreds of global subcontractors and suppliers,hinge on the imminent determinations of this man’s tiny secretive group, which has been holed up for weeks in a Washington office perusing thousands of pages of documents and data on numerous disks. Those proprietary documents detail the unexpurgated story of how, on Feb. 29, the U.S. Air Force chose Northrop Grumman (NOC) rather than Boeing (BA) to replace 179 refueling tanker aircraft.
Boeing, stunned by the Air Force decision, protested formally (BusinessWeek.com, 3/18/08) in March, complaining that the Air Force skewed the contest unfairly in favor of Northrop. The GAO, following the first step in any appeal of a federal contracting decision, is expected to say this week whether it finds any merit in Boeing’s position. The announcement, among the business world’s most closely watched developments this week, could be made any time between now and June 19. It might come in the form of a detailed report, or a single summary sentence.
