Five Months Later, USAID Puts Da Nang Documents Online

Back in May, U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor obtained documents detailing the federal government's environmental cleanup of the Da Nang Airport in Vietnam, which remains tainted by dioxin stemming from the U.S. government's use of the Agent Orange defoliant during the conflict of the 1960s and 1970s; the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating the cleanup, initially would not put the documents online because the files supposedly were too large. The Monitor, in turn, made a  simple e-mail request for the documents (without making any misrepresentation of itself), and a Thailand-based USAID contracting specialist subsequently delivered, via international mail, a CD-ROM containing all the requested information. The Monitor, to the delight of several Vietnam veteran's groups, immediately made that data available online.

Well, yesterday USAID, for reasons unexplained, suddenly made all those documents accessible via the FedBizOpps database. ***(UPDATE: The agency made the documents available Oct. 5, then modified them Oct. 21)

We ask just one question in the context of the Digital Age (and in the context of a blogger accomplishing a simple task that the federal government could not or would not perform): Why the wait?

Comments

[Steve Peacock]

For the record, it also should be noted that USAID first had formally sought contractor involvement in the project on April 1, 2011, under Solicitation #486-11-028. It later issued a Request for Proposals via a separate announcement, this time under Solicitation #486-12-001. I'm not suggesting anything insidious or sneaky, but -- and I say this after sorting through many thousands of FedBizOpps listings over the course of a more than a decade -- typically such follow-up documents and announcements are listed jointly on the same solicitation page. There's no clear reason that USAID did it differently this time; however, if a person were to search the database using the original solicitation number, that person would not come across the updated listing and accompanying documents.