Pentagon confirms erasure of Project Maven-related contract records
In response to deletion of public record of $142 million 'Project Maven' AI surveillance contract, a defense official cited national security carve-outs in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).
Ten days after being reached for comment, a defense official from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has provided official legal justification for the silent deletion of the public records of roughly $200 million in artificial intelligence surveillance contracts.
As exclusively reported by the author, the deleted records include a $142 million drone and satellite surveillance contract with the high-tech staffing company ECS Federal as part of “Project Maven” under the codename “Pavement,” as well as a related $52.25 million ECS contract involving the aggregation of open source and commercially available data within the U.S. Army’s Secure Unclassified Network (SUNet). Details of these contracts were first reported by the author three years ago, in an article titled “Easy as PAI (Publicly Available Information).”
The OSD spokesperson responded to a request for comment on the records deletion by pointing to two provisions from the voluminous set of regulations governing most U.S. federal procurement, known as the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).
(As discussed in a recent memoir from two founders of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Deloitte senior manager Lauren Dailey is credited with engineering a legal mechanism for avoiding the FAR for even production-level defense contracts, through an expansion of the usage of Other Transaction Authority (OTA). While the user-friendly official U.S. government website USASpending.gov publishes contracts governed by the FAR, only the upstream, outdated Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) website fpds.gov publishes OTA contracts, including the $22 billion ceiling Microsoft augmented reality goggles contract with the U.S. Army, known as IVAS.)
The first of the two FAR provisions pointed to by the OSD spokesperson to justify the Maven contract deletion, FAR 4.606(c), provides a list of eleven types of contract actions which can be withheld from the Federal Procurement Data System and, as a result, USASpending.gov. The fifth and sixth contract types in the list pertain to contract information which “would compromise national security” or “would constitute classified information [emphasis theirs].”
The second FAR justification, FAR 4.606(d), is more concise but equally vague, providing a carve-out for “Agencies not subject to the FAR.” One example of an agency exempt from the FAR is the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani, previously held the same role for the organization which then led Project Maven, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which subsequently primarily merged into the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), albeit with targeting aspects of Maven transferring to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in January 2023.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense refused to clarify which FAR-exempt agency was relevant to the invocation of FAR 4.606(d), as well as to answer whether the national security provisions of FAR 4.606(c) were salient.
Interested readers can browse Tech Inquiry’s cache of the now-censored Project Maven and SUNet contracts by searching for the Procurement Instrument Identifier (PIID) codes of W911QX20C0019 and W911QX19F0086.