The headline above is the tag line for Washington Post radio, and it seems to apply to last week's news story about a contractor error that put the personal information of student loan recipients on a U.S. Department of Education (ED) Web site. ED promised to provide the credit monitoring for all borrowers whose personal information might have been compromised. ED and the contractor probably want the story to fade away, but there may be more to it than we've learned so far.

None of the news reports seems to have looked closely at the contractor, Affiliated Computer Systems (ACS), and the unusual way ACS expanded and renewed a much smaller contract  originally held by another company, which ACS bought. 

Citizens Against Government Waste details the contract's expansion shortly after the Bush administration took office:

In late 2001, the FSA extended a contract it had with Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) through September 2006, with an option for an additional year, without seeking rival bids....But a FFELP provider challenged FSA's effort to provide the extension without going out to bid....FSA relented, conducted a market research study, and stated that at the end of January 2003 it would undertake a competitive bid process to obtain direct loan servicing. In November 2003, FSA announced that it had awarded a $1 billion contract, once again, to ACS to handle services related to its direct student loan program.

So, the contract was first awarded to ACS, then withdrawn after complaints about the process, and then -- no surprise -- awarded again to ACS.  And, given the Bush Administration's fondness for single-source contracting and cronyism, it will surprise no one to learn that ACS has ties to Bush-Cheney fundraising and to the Bush appointee who oversees the billion-dollar contract between the U.S. Department of Education and ACS.  (About $470 million is reported by ED on its current contracts document, which apparently doesn't cover the entire duration of the contract.)

Former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith was, according to Forbes, a senior vice president at ACS from 2001 to 2005.  (Another source has him as a senior VP who later became an advisor.)   It seems clear that ACS got the expanded contract during Goldsmith's tenure.  And Goldsmith is well connected.  He has also served as

• Domestic policy advisor to Candidate George W. Bush, special advisor to the President on faith-based initiatives,
• A "pioneer" for the 2000 Bush-Cheney ticket (meaning he raised more than $100,000)
• A "ranger" for the 2004 Bush-Cheney ticket (more than $200,000), and
• A member of a federal commercial activity panel with a congressional mandate "to study the policies and procedures governing the transfer of commercial activities for the federal government from government personnel to a federal contractor."  (Like, say, ACS?)

Goldsmith is also an author.  Government by Network, which he co-wrote, praises a public official who took over a government agency that "outsourc[ed] more than 82 percent of the department's budget--little of it coordinated."  The official "coordinated" the outsourcing by creating a multibillion-dollar umbrella contract managed by a single vendor.

The government agency was ED's Office of Federal Student Aid, the official praised in Goldsmith's book was Teresa Shaw, and the vendor for the new umbrella contract was ACS. 

The unusual circumstances surrounding the use of so much tax money deserve greater transparency and more scrutiny, though it's entirely possible that there's nothing illegal or improper going on here.  A little digging into this contract could either amount to a waste of a reporter's time or a huge scoop. 

But recent history suggests that asking questions about ED's procurement practices can produce real news.  When People For the American Way used the Freedom of Information Act to learn more about ED's contract with Ketchum PR, it led the AP's Ben Feller reported that the documents included not only the predictable fake TV news stories that Ketchum had produced for HHS, but also EDs ridiculous reporter rating system.  USA Today's Greg Toppo then followed up with another FOIA request, which revealed that the Ketchum contract included payments to Armstrong Williams.  And the Ketchum contract was chump change compared to the ACS contract.