Following a month of delays and bickering over who can bid for $18.6 billion in rebuilding work in Iraq, the Pentagon is expected to open up bidding on a slew of contracts next week, officials said late Wednesday.
The first wave of formal solicitations is set to be rolled out possibly as early as Monday - a month after first promised - and is likely to cover about $5 billion in construction projects, said a US government official close to the bidding process who asked not to be named.
Another $6 billion in non-construction contracts will likely be rolled out in a second wave of solicitations. All of the work will be advertised via the main US government procurement web site www.fedbizopps.gov.
Funding for the work comes from $18.6 billion appropriated by Congress for Iraq and tenders have been consistently delayed while lawyers and politicians worked out the fine print of the proposals and responded to thousands of queries over drafts.
Aside from the money from Congress, tens of billions of dollars more will be available from US government funds and international donors to rebuild Iraq, and the bulk of this is expected to go to private contractors.
Officials said prime contracts from the $18.6 billion would likely still be limited to firms from countries that helped in the war effort, in line with a Pentagon decision that was met with anger by opponents of the war such as France and Germany.
A spokesman for the Pentagon-run Iraq Program Management Office declined to comment on exactly when bidding could open but the PMO said via its web site, www.rebuilding-iraq.net, that a pre-proposal conference for bidders would be held early in January.
That conference may be attended both by prime contractors and sub-contractors, who may be drawn from companies from nations that did not join in the US-led war effort to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Originally, the Program Management Office set an aggressive timetable for the award of contracts, but a February award date is now expected to be pushed back to give bidders more time.
The first round of contracts to rebuild Iraq came under a barrage of criticism, with allegations by Democrats of cronyism and favouritism over the award of work to well-connected firms such as Halliburton, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.
All of the Iraq contracts, which Congress has stipulated must now be competitively bid, are being closely watched by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Their first report is expected to be issued next month.
The US Agency for International Development is expected to announce a winner early next month to a new infrastructure contract worth more than $1.6 billion to follow one awarded to San Francisco company Bechtel. This funding comes from the $18.6 billion appropriated from Congress.
Two contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil industry, amounting to $2 billion, are expected to be announced by the Army Corps of Engineers by January 17, an Army Corps spokesman said.
These oil reconstruction contracts replace the no-bid contract given last March to Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.
Just under $4 billion will be kept in reserve from the $18.6 billion to cover additional unexpected expenses, said one official, who disputed a newspaper report that this money was being held back for political reasons.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Bush administration would delay about $4 billion in Iraq reconstruction work until the US ceded political control to an interim Iraqi government this summer.
The paper said the decision, reached at a White House meeting on Tuesday after almost a month of infighting, significantly cut the amount of work to be handled by the PMO.
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