July 28-August 3, 2005

cover story

THE WAR ROOM: Marie deYoung's ideas and plans (as well as a stray dissertation) are scribbled on a sea of Post-It notes affixed to the cabinets and doors of her Lansdowne apartment. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Ms. deYoung Goes to Washington

A Philly native wants Americans to realize how wasting Billions in Iraq is ruining our lives at home.

by Brian Hickey

Welcome to Marie deYoung's war room, a cramped one-bedroom apartment just off Baltimore Pike in Lansdowne. The kitchen fits one person, semi-comfortably; the coffeepot is constantly brewing. The den and dining area share the same tight space, which is to say there's not even room for a couch. A television sits semi-balanced on a wooden chair. Atop an old piano against the wall, a songbook is open to compositions titled "Confidence" and "Consolation."

The lone table is covered with a laptop computer — its mouse set up for a left-handed user — and stacks of papers. Behind the table stands a bookcase holding everything from education theory textbooks to Jane Austen to The Confessions of Nat Turner. It also displays a framed picture of Carrolton (Mass.) Band Day 2002 and one of her younger self accepting an award at a military ceremony from long ago.

This is hardly the type of place one would expect to be the focal point of a campaign that reaches the White House. But covering the back of the front door and a nearby cabinet are pink, blue and yellow Post-It notes. Information, reminiscent of the Hollywood portrayal of John Nash's mathematical theories, is scribbled on each one.

"My dissertation is on the cabinets," says the 51-year-old activist, who's working toward her doctorate in education leadership and public policy analysis from the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Halliburton is on the door."

She then turns her attention back to the laptop, which beeps with the nonstop arrival of new e-mails. "Go, Marie!" reads one. "Good luck today!" DeYoung reads them aloud while gathering everything she'll need for this Monday morning trip down I-95 to the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which is located just behind the U.S. Capitol.

Of primary importance is a red folder containing fliers and homemade business cards reading:

"Adopt a Line Item"
Recoup Halliburton's Overcharges One Line-Item At a Time!
Sponsored by Rev. Marie deYoung
Halliburton Whistleblower

Toting those weapons, she walks down three flights of stairs to the street, prepared for the latest battle in what's become her life's mission, one that's made her indispensable to those federal lawmakers who are trying to bring the issue to national prominence. Her approach is simple: Lobby media outlets for attention and crunch numbers on her home computer so politicians friendly to her cause have the evidence they need to make it a larger issue. By letting Americans see that specific examples of waste in Iraq can equate — dollar for dollar — to a service that's been cut in their own community, she thinks voters might force their elected officials' hands.

Before reaching the door of the used Ford Taurus she bought two weeks ago to "rejoin the real world," she realizes she's forgotten one key ingredient.

"Oops, excuse me for a minute. I think I'll be needing the car keys," says deYoung.

She's the type of nonviolent warrior who can, for hours at a time, rattle off statistics and evidence of every penny of taxpayer money that she says government-paid contractors have extravagantly frittered away under the guise of the United States' occupation of Iraq. She's also an easily distracted, native Philadelphian who doesn't realize 1060 AM is a news station.

"OK," she says, as a wiper-disarming rain begins to fall on the windshield. "Let's get going. I don't want to be late. This is a big, big day."

IT'S A START: Rather than wasting billions overseas, deYoung thinks our tax dollars could be put to better use at underfunded programs like this Head Start in West Philly. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Chances are you've heard very little about deYoung, or her cause. There's a reason for that: She and her fellow advocates — namely U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and the rest of the Democratic Party — have found themselves howling into the winds of war when they call for fiscal accountability in Iraq.

In short, they believe the powers-that-be have ignored the skyrocketing costs involved and, thanks to that lack of oversight, Halliburton, the Texas-based defense contractor that provides support services to soldiers in the field, has delivered bills containing more than $1.4 billion in "questioned" and "unsupported" charges.

Critics have focused on how Halliburton, through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), has received billions in "cost-plus" contracts. (KBR is an engineering and construction firm; Halliburton is its parent company. As such, what KBR earns, Halliburton earns.) In a cost-plus contract, a company gets paid for the work it does and also receives an additional bonus percentage based on the amount of money it spends. Such an arrangement, critics claim, is tailor-made for abuse; the more a company bills, the bigger the bonus check.

Every time they've tried to make a racket, namely through hosting powerless Democratic Policy Committee sessions, along came something like hearings about the 9/11 Commission findings or the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Images of the planes tearing through the World Trade Center and of Lynndie England smirking and pointing, as heart-wrenching and gut-churning as they are, can be much easier to digest than talk of subcontracts, payment schedules and spreadsheets. That goes for both the public and the mainstream media, deYoung maintains, naming the Houston Chronicle and Vanity Fair magazine — which covered her accusations in a March article about another whistleblower — as rare exceptions. "I mean, The New York Times wrote an article about how Halliburton is doing a good job delivering 45 flavors of ice cream to the troops. C'mon!" she says.

Then, consider that the White House and both houses of Congress are controlled by people who have a vested interest in making sure those they've handed billions in work overseas don't get embarrassed. Halliburton is, of course, Dick Cheney's old company, which sparks the inevitable debate about what he knew about the company getting the contracts, and when did he know it?

Partisan discipline has kept the issue out of standing committees, for the most part. There was one hearing in 2004, but in the year since, Republican leaders have vowed never to hold another one. (They say the Democrats are trying to politicize a non-issue and that Halliburton's doing a stand-up job under difficult circumstances.) As a result, the issue remains off C-Span and, for the most part, out of the papers.

It seems today's United States is nothing like it was in the World War II era, when a Democratic senator named Harry Truman forced a Democratic administration to answer allegations of war profiteering. His committee was given an initial budget of $15,000. It saved Americans $15 billion. Now, the party in power would just as soon sweep the issue under Cheney's bunker rug. Not a single Republican lawmaker has broken ranks and said, hey, maybe we ought to take a look at these allegations, embarrassment be damned. This is what the matronly woman who never had children of her own is up against.

If what deYoung claims is true — and she dutifully and exhaustively provides evidence to back up every claim from her five months working as an $8,800-a-month KBR subcontracts administrator — we all should be furious.

The money deYoung says has been wasted would cover, for example, most of the cash-strapped Philadelphia School District's $1.9 billion budget for 2006, educating more than 200,000 students in more than 270 schools.

That cash could also have purchased life-saving body armor for soldiers who've come home maimed or dead. Instead, it's been spent on $85,000 SUVs that are abandoned in the desert when they get flat tires.

It funded the 100 KBR workers who partied at luaus — one, in the wake of the 2004 Good Friday convoy attacks that left several KBR workers dead — and dipped their feet in the "uniquely unpolluted azure waters" of the $10,000-a-night hotel they leased in Kuwait while soldiers huddled in $139 tents during sandstorms.

Now whistleblower deYoung wants to know what taxpayers would think if they knew their tax money allows Halliburton to charge $45 for a case of soda and $100 for a 15-pound bag of laundry. Or that these controversy magnets are reaping billions in profits while soldiers are forced to eat meals that, if they're not a year past their expiration dates, are accented with the delicious seasoning of bullets and shrapnel.

It's thoughts like these that explain why deYoung is navigating a June 27 rainstorm to go glad-handing in D.C., launching the Adopt-a-Line-Item Campaign at a gathering of Beltway Democrats who are hoping somebody, anybody, will listen. They're preaching to the choir, yes. But, says deYoung, at least they're preaching.

"What's happening in Iraq is just wrong. Our taxpayers deserve to have their hard-earned income spent on goods and services that will make our communities healthy," says deYoung who, over the course of several interviews, gave off no indication of a political bias. "Affordable health care, safe streets, affordable housing, real security against real threats, safety nets for our senior citizens and those with disabilities that prevent them from working. Philadelphia is the birthplace of America; we can't let this happen! That's why I'm doing this."

The $13 billion in contracts Halliburton has received in this war is nearly double what the United States spent in the first Gulf War. The alleged overcharge figure would have funded the entire Mexican-American War. Source: Marie deYoung

As deYoung steers south through Delaware and into Maryland, she talks about her previous trips to D.C.

On July 22, 2004, she testified before the House Committee on Government Reform, the session that marked the lone time the issue got a bipartisan airing. There, she says Republican legislators belittled her as "just a dumb chaplain" who didn't know what she was talking about. This, even though she laid out an extensive case that included money wasted on luxury hotels, fancy videophones for company workers who did little to help the troops and patronage on the scale of "all the pay-for-play stuff in Philly."

"I believe that [KBR] defrauded the government by staffing high-paid, high-skilled positions with unskilled personnel … based on family and personal relationships," she testified. "Very often, third [world] nationals from the Balkans, India and Pakistan had stronger literacy, engineering and construction, operations and bookkeeping skills than those who held the high-paying KBR jobs."

She also said that those who refused to play along with the program were threatened with transfers to hot spots like Fallujah. It was, she says, a death sentence for noncompliance.

Though she was rudely dismissed — namely by committee chair Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who's been spending a lot of time lately ensuring that a big-time Democratic donor can't buy the Washington Nationals baseball team — deYoung's background couldn't be. Her attention to detail captured the attention of people like Waxman, who invited her back to testify before the Democrats that September and to work in the background, compiling information to make their case stronger.

"Without whistleblowers like Marie deYoung," Waxman tells City Paper, "no one would know about the egregious rip-offs of the taxpayer. They have shown great courage in stepping forward."

Ironically, today deYoung supports herself with the mad cash Halliburton paid her while working for them in 2003 and 2004. When she's not working on her dissertation, she's an ad hoc lobbyist — "knocking on doors in Congress is one of my favorite things to do" — trying to muster attention.

"The term whistleblower, it's overrated. Is my life in danger? No," says deYoung. "But people should be talking about this because it's taxpayer money, their money, and it's just being thrown away. They're paying for this war three times over."

It takes a lot of prodding to get deYoung to talk about herself. But in going through her personal and professional history, one senses she's a woman in perpetual motion, heavy into her faith and motivated by a desire to educate the nation's youth.

To fully understand what drives her, you need to start decades ago in North Philadelphia.

"I grew up on 12th Street in Logan, in a neighborhood we called 'the United Nations.' We had Ukranians, Irish, Equadorians, Puerto Ricans, Polish, Germans, Brazilians, Filipinos, Italians and the rest of us, all on one block," she says. "This gave me an awareness of different cultures, ways of living and a desire to learn more about other cultures."

A graduate of Holy Child Elementary and Little Flower Catholic High School for girls, deYoung has worked since she was in the eighth grade. First she was a mother's helper, then a cook. At the age of 16, she had herself legally declared an emancipated minor — in part, because her father feared for her safety in a gradually declining industrial neighborhood — and moved north to Boston.

At the time, her high school in Boston was recognized as one of nation's best, which she now says offered a strong contrast to her experience here. Philadelphians, she says, have always had the attitude that their kids would have to go to private schools to get a good education. "But in Boston, and other places where I've worked and taught, public schools were actually good places to prepare for college," she says. That's why her Halliburton conversations often veer back to her belief that the money could save Philly's schools.

Before her 1972 high school graduation, she organized a march to raise money for the homeless. She soon married a fellow folk musician — another one of her eclectic passions — but had no children. The marriage ended in 1983, the same year she enlisted in the U.S. Army, where she ran a child-care center, counseled soldiers and became the first female chaplain for several combat units.

Having trained to serve in rapid deployment forces — those soldiers ready to head anywhere in the world on two hours' notice — she'd later write two books, Women in Combat: Civic Duty or Military Liability and This Woman's Army: The Dynamics of Sex and Violence in the Military. They were noteworthy only for how they angered liberals and feminists alike, since deYoung maintained that the United States' push to have women serve in combat was a mistake, and that they really shouldn't be there at all.

"Once they got into the field, they wanted to get out," says deYoung, who contended that money used to train female soldiers would be better used to prepare women to become teachers and nurses. "And the only way to get out was to get pregnant, or to cry sexual assault." Nevertheless, she served two tours of duty herself, including one during which she worked under Tommy Franks.

An ordained Unitarian minister, she served as a chaplain resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and 1992. There, she ministered to "five or six shooting victims … a night."

She returned to the U.S. Army as a reservist special-projects officer from 2001 to 2002 and soon found herself in Kosovo, working for KBR as it attempted to repair that war-torn territory. The day Saddam Hussein was captured, she took an assignment monitoring subcontracts for KBR at a place called Camp Udari in Kuwait. Her job was to oversee contracts to make sure that not only were they fiscally responsible, but that services were actually being rendered. When she found that most of the money wasn't going to the soldiers, but to make life cozy for the contractors, she got frustrated.

And from there, her life changed forever.

The money could have up-armored 10,000 Humvees, purchased 3.2 million flak jackets or covered the annual salaries of 600,000 soldiers. Source: Marie deYoung

The Taurus passes under the Good Luck Road overpass, a few miles outside D.C. on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. She's a bit more comfortable behind the wheel now as the rains have subsided. (Having been off the road for a few years, she's still relearning that it's hard to steer while making eye contact with a passenger during conversations.) DeYoung reaches for the radio's volume knob. She's been answering questions and offering unsolicited backup evidence for three hours straight. Now, she wants to listen.

"This," she says, as Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" comes over the NPR airwaves, "is a great song. I love this song. I'm going to be quiet for a minute, give your ear a rest."

The passion for music makes sense. DeYoung, who performs with folk musicians in the area once a month, has written a song entitled "KBR Trucker Daddy" to honor friends who've died in Iraq since she left Kuwait in May 2004. And besides, she's already laid out a thorough case explaining why she can't let this issue go.

It's already been a busy summer for her. Before this hearing was scheduled for June 27 — the committee did it last minute in order to keep the Republicans from scheduling votes that would force them to cancel — she had planned to spend the day cornering U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, who was in Center City giving a speech to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and chatting up school district CEO Paul Vallas, who was to attend that evening's Franklin Principles for School Design meeting at the Inquirer building.

Two weeks earlier, she ambushed U.S. Senators Rick Santorum and Arlen Specter when they came to the National Constitution Center to hold a field hearing on youth violence. ("When I told them I was a Halliburton whistleblower," she says, "they quickly brushed me off to their aides.")

That came a couple days after she went to the Lansdowne Borough Council asking them to pass a resolution supporting Adopt-a-Line-Item (she says some were into it, and hopes to hear back soon). The next day, she'll head to New York to try and get the National Council of Churches behind her. If they back her plan to recoup money from Halliburton and dump it back into the federal education budget, it'll make next week's visit to a Southwest Philadelphia Head Start site all the more meaningful, she says. After that, she says, she'll be hard at work on a press release she planned to send out last Friday to update media outlets on the cause, marking the one-year anniversary of her initial testimony.

She's so frantic, in fact, that she says investigators once told her, "We have enough information from you. Don't you have anything better to do?"

"People might think this is airy-fairy but I just think we should be asking what's going on with Halliburton, and then with cutbacks in our schools and for our police. There is a connection," deYoung explains of her nonstop schedule after Chapman has finished crooning. "It's a matter of saying you can engage the system when most people think that you can't."

The U.S. government could have cut a $44.17 check for each citizen, or $573.30 per Iraqi, with the money Halliburton has made off Iraq war contracts. Source: Marie deYoung

"OK, we're looking for a white, marble building," declares deYoung, pulling into a city filled with white marble buildings.

The Washington Monument can now been seen through the driver's side window and deYoung turns off of New York Avenue, heading straight toward the Capitol.

Usually, she doesn't mind getting lost, considering she loves exploring new areas, but when she's running late for her big day, time is of the essence. In a stroke of good luck, signs for Union Station materialize. We'll park there and hop into a cab, she says. Once parked in the garage, she reaches for her battle gear and starts a brisk walk toward the cab line, making small talk with a turbaned driver ("Business," he answers, "isn't that good these days") as she ponders whether she has time to put her contacts in (she does).

The fare paid five blocks later, she makes a beeline through the metal detector and down a long hallway to Room 138 of the Dirksen Senate Building.

With 20 minutes to go before the hearing, an aide places a sign on a seat in the front row. It reads "Reserved for Marie deYoung." She's yet to notice it, though, since the room's starting to fill up with empty hands that need to be filled with press releases and business cards.

On one side of the room, which is surrounded by wood-paneled walls and high ceilings, another aide tinkers with a flat-screen television and a video player. The screen reads: "An Oversight Hearing on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in U.S. Government Contracting in Iraq."

As of yet, nobody knows who will be testifying since the committee kept their names secret. "Otherwise," deYoung says, "the Republicans would try to intimidate them beforehand. Believe me." But there are four seats at a green table, each with a bottle of Deer Park within arm's reach.

It's nearly been a year since deYoung took one of those seats, but today she's content to drive about seven hours to spend about 60 minutes lobbying congressional aides and members of media outlets, including, she says, someone from 60 Minutes.

The secret is soon revealed when a staff member starts distributing press releases titled "Halliburton's Questioned and Unsupported Costs in Iraq Exceed $1.4 Billion." Scheduled to speak are Bunnatine Greenhouse, the former highest ranking civilian for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who will claim insiders tried to sneak Halliburton contracts past her; Rory Mayberry, a former KBR food production manager who'll testify that not only did the company charge for meals it didn't serve but fed the troops food that was "outdated or expired as much as a year"; and two men who lead a KBR competitor who'll announce Halliburton not only charges an inexplicably inflated price for oil, but that the company — and not the military — controls some Iraqi border checkpoints.

DeYoung was right about what she said in Lansdowne. This is a big, big day.

Vice President Dick Cheney received $33 million upon retiring from Halliburton, or 1,750 times a soldier's base pay.

There are 60 seats in the gallery and before long, each will be filled. People will stand two-deep along the walls. For deYoung, it's a target-rich environment. Over the course of the next 20 minutes, she'll approach just about everybody here.

"Hi, are you here from the press? I'd like you to read this."

"Oh, you work for Sen. Carper? Great! Be sure to share this with your staff."

"Hi! How are you? I'm Marie deYoung, Halliburton whistleblower."

Each person gets a flier and a business card. Though one young intern rolls her eyes upon hearing the spiel, most accept her handouts graciously. It's hard not to, the way she's smiling at everybody, looking into their eyes, touching their arms as she speaks. When Sens. Byron Dorgan and Frank Lautenberg walk in, six television cameras circle them. Soon, deYoung goes and sits front-and-center, in her reserved space, just before the 1:30 p.m. session begins.

"It is disgusting to see profiteering during wartime. And nobody seems to care about it," declares committee chair Dorgan, who wants to see a modern-day Truman Committee formed. The upcoming testimony "doesn't just call for congressional oversight, it screams for it. And yet the majority party in the Senate is not willing to call hearings to consider it."

Lautenberg lauds the whistleblowers for having the "courage to speak up and protect their country," before likening Halliburton to the mafia. "Profiteering," he adds, "is traitorous behavior."

He then turns the mic over to Waxman, the California representative who, with deYoung working behind his scenes, has done the most to keep the issue alive.

"The Republicans said she was naive and inexperienced, but they were wrong," he declares, this time for the rolling C-Span cameras. "They derided her, said her skills weren't up to par. Well, we now know Ms. deYoung was right after all, and I'm pleased to see her here today."

That validation motivates deYoung to stick around for a good hour after the testimony is complete. Though many left within the first hour or so, she's still working the room at 4 p.m. Not even cameramen packing up their gear can escape her. When the room finally clears, deYoung walks the half-mile back to the train station.

"Enough damage for one day," she says cheerily.

Not even getting caught in rush-hour traffic, smiling and waving to the leering drivers who want to know how her car got trapped in the middle of a busy intersection, can bring her down. This isn't, she says, about politics.

"I'm not this politically correct Democrat. I really think we need to be progressive, support people who have solutions," she explains. "I don't care if they're right-wing or left-wing. If [a politician wants] to solve the problems, I'll support them."

But with Halliburton offering counterattacks to each and every accusation raised at the hearings, she's been given little indication that the issue will get the attention she thinks it deserves, now or in the future. She mulls this possibility as the car races into the sunset, heading north on I-95.

In two weeks, 28 Senate Democrats will call on Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense to investigate those allegations of troops being forced to eat expired foods and contractors being instructed not to speak to auditors. Their cries for oversight will get little traction, especially since six days later the Beltway's attention will turn toward whether conservative John Roberts will pass muster in his quest for a Supreme Court nomination.

Not even the knowledge that just about everything is stacked against her can phase this tireless woman on a mission. The battle, she says, will rage on.

"I'll get back to having a real life when I feel I accomplished something," she says as the Taurus approaches her Lansdowne war room.

That something, she adds, would be Halliburton withdrawing its overcharges one line-item at a time so the government can use the money to help rebuild institutions like the Philadelphia School District.

"I have to sleep at night," she says. "And, you know what? I sleep very well, thank you."

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Contacted for comment on Marie deYoung's allegations, Halliburton spokeswoman Jennifer W. Dellinger responded via e-mail that "certainly, none of these claims are new and we are puzzled about why you would choose to rehash them a year later." (Our answer: Because even though it's been a year since deYoung first testified, the issue has yet to go away).

Responding politely, and in a timely manner, Dellinger went on to rebuke many of deYoung's allegations about overcharging through subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root:

KBR welcomed the chance to tell our story at the [July 22, 2004 hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform] and we haven't shied away from defending ourselves against these and other unfounded allegations.

KBR is proud to perform this vital mission for the troops, and we are glad that we can play a major role in making them feel a little closer to home. It's also worth noting that [as of July 7] KBR and our subcontractors have lost 68 people since we began performing this work in Iraq, yet we have never wavered from our commitment to supporting the troops. KBR's priority is making certain that troops have the food, shelter and tolerable living conditions they need while fighting in Iraq, and we are proud of our dedicated employees who strive every day to make this a reality.

KBR has thousands of qualified employees whose job it is to ensure that the company's government-approved procurement policies and procedures are followed on each and every transaction. Our procurement employees consistently endeavor to negotiate the best value possible on behalf of the U.S. government. We are constantly seeking opportunities to renegotiate contracts as conditions change in order to provide our customer, the U.S. Army, with the best prices possible. We would also like to point out that, contrary to her claims, Ms. deYoung was not tasked with performing procurement oversight during her brief tenure working for KBR in Kuwait. Instead, she served in an administrative capacity for our logistics team and filled in temporarily as a clerical assistant in our procurement department. In these roles, she had no authority to execute, negotiate or modify contracts.

KBR's profit is primarily based on an award fee pool that is determined by the Army, a large component of which is our demonstrated ability to control costs. We have no incentive to run up costs as this will necessarily reduce our award fee, and any allegations to the contrary are misleading and uninformed. KBR has thousands of qualified employees whose job it is to ensure that the company's government-approved procurement policies and procedures are followed on each and every transaction. Our procurement employees consistently endeavor to negotiate the best value possible on behalf of the U.S. government.

We would also like to point out that Halliburton and KBR take any charges of improper conduct seriously. The Halliburton Code of Business Conduct (COBC) clearly does not allow unethical business practices. Through its COBC, Halliburton provides a toll-free hotline operated by an independent organization that allows any of our employees to report concerns regarding business practices. The phones are answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Interpreters are available and there are four different contacts depending on where an employee works.

This information is made available to every employee, including Ms. deYoung. If she was so concerned about these allegations, we question why she did not raise the issue by means made available to her in the Code of Business Conduct information that she acknowledged receiving when she was hired by KBR.

Marie deYoung responds:

Ordinarily, Halliburton and other companies who subcontract in a war zone depend on constant shifting of personnel to avoid detection of patterns of waste, fraud and abuse. Halliburton's practice of putting people in jobs for short periods of time, and then saying they did not have management responsibilities, is part of their pattern of deception. I spent more time working on Kuwait subcontracts that at least half of their "senior managers."

As I stated in my congressional testimony, it was Halliburton's policy to disaggregate information, to limit the possibility that employees could prove misconduct by assembling reports in fragments, to withhold contract and procurement information from site supervisors/Army officers who rate KBR contracts for "performance bonuses."

If all I wanted to do was to get rich quick, all I had to do was keep my mouth shut (as I was advised to do repeatedly by the few who knowingly tolerated the wrongdoing), twiddle my thumbs and obey the commands to "only give what I tell you to give" to the auditors. My Military Standard of Conduct: To keep quiet is to collude in fraud.

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When it comes to her Adopt-a-Line-Item initiative, Marie deYoung hopes to make a hard-to-grasp issue accessible to ordinary Philadelphians. By way of example, she says that had the city been given the $1.5 million that Halliburton overpaid to have workers' laundry done while she was stationed in Kuwait, Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson would have the money he needed to expand the successful Youth Violence Reduction Partnership program to another police district. Had the company not wasted $600 million on meals that were never delivered to soldiers, school district CEO Paul Vallas would have been able to fund a plan to reform Philadelphia's schools. But while her aim is noble, there are differing opinions on how to garner support.

Peter Singer is a senior fellow of foreign policy studies and director of the Project on U.S. Policy towards the Islamic World at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. There, he's studied the growing trend of wartime privatization and outsourcing, in which Halliburton is a major player.

In a June 2004 piece in The New York Times about the cost-plus contracts on which deYoung has focused, Singer wrote, "With no public or congressional oversight, the Pentagon has paid billions of dollars to companies. … Yet despite the problems and the widespread accusations of overbilling, it appears that the civilian leadership at the Pentagon has learned absolutely nothing from the whole experience."

In a recent phone interview, Singer said this issue has been effectively quashed since Republicans were able to paint Democrats as being on a partisan witch hunt, considering that it came up during the 2004 presidential election, and that they focused on the company's ties to Dick Cheney. Still, he said, it's important to get people to pay attention, but focusing on little items like money wasted on hotel rooms isn't the way to do it.

"Clearly, there are things that have gone wrong with these contracts. The size [of the dollar amounts] is just immense, so it's important to take a step back when looking at these issues," said Singer, who thought increased oversight of war spending might be on the horizon. "You don't need to use anecdotes; people aren't dumb. But if you do use them, instead of talking about [laundry], talk about how many flak jackets you could buy for soldiers, how many Humvees you could up-armor.

"If you get caught up in 'did they overcharge or not,' you miss the big picture. We still haven't wrestled with the big issue of whether it's appropriate to let these private companies have a hand in how we wage war."

Conversely, having appeared at the witness table with deYoung at the Democratic Policy Committeee, Danielle Brian likes what she hears of Adopt-a-Line-Item. As executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), an organization that investigates "systemic government waste, fraud or abuse," Brian says she's happy with anything that'll get more Americans to pay attention. Specifically, she thinks it's important to enable citizens to connect with the financial side of things. Doing so isn't always easy.

"People aren't outraged because they can't relate to it. If you talk about more than $1 million, their eyes glaze over. When you get into hundreds of millions, they stop hearing you," she said on the phone from D.C. earlier this month. "But, they know how much a hammer is supposed to cost, how much a toilet seat is supposed to cost. Put it on that level, and that's how you get them mad.

"Halliburton's excesses are in the macro, not the micro, so any story that [deYoung] can speak to that highlights the human impact, the small vignettes, it'll help."