On Tuesday, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) introduced and successfully shepherded through debate a meaningful contracting reform amendment to the FY 2010 Defense Appropriations bill. The amendment will defund contractors that block their employees from bringing workplace sexual assault cases to court, forcing contractors to amend their policies or face losing tons of money.

As pointed out this afternoon by the Project on Government Oversight's (POGO) Scott Amey, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan released a special report yesterday summarizing their review of inadequate contractor business systems. The report follows up on work the commission did over the summer when it held a hearing on contractors' deficient internal control systems. Based on testimony and evidence from the hearing, the special report lays out five recommendations for the Department of Defense (DOD) to improve oversight of and encourage better business systems from contractors.

The recently coordinated Southwest Asia Joint Planning Group, comprised of several Inspectors General and a representative of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), came before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing last week to testify on the oversight of U.S. resources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To the chagrin of the subcommittee, though, the assembly of government overseers provided no overarching strategy to combat waste, fraud, and abuse, and little in the way of proactive solutions to help prevent the future squandering of U.S. resources. It is debatable, of course, whether it was fair for the subcommittee to expect as much.

The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that as part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's effort to turn around the fight in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is planning to replace between 6,000 and 14,000 non-combat troops with contractors. This would allow the Army and Marines Corps to bring in more "trigger-pullers" without increasing the overall number of troops in theater, currently a contentious issue with the American public. With the military having experienced so many issues of waste, fraud, and abuse with contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan, however, some analysts – including this one – are questioning whether increasing their numbers will not produce more problems than solutions, including the prospect of increasingly jeopardizing soldiers' safety.