Speaker Menin on DOE contract transparency delays

Great, thank you.

I'm passing it off to Speaker Menon to ask her questions.

Okay, thank you so much, Chancer.

So I've got a number of questions, and I know my colleagues do as well.

So thank you very much for your testimony.

So I want to begin with some questions around contracts.

So since we had the first preliminary budget hearing in March, the council has repeatedly requested additional information about DOE contract spending, as you know.

We didn't receive a reply to our questions until late last week, and the limited analysis that DOE provided was very short on detail and not responsive to all the questions that the council had.

So my first question is, why is it taking so long for the council to get answers on this, and when can the council expect answers to our remaining questions about the contracts?

First of all, thank you so much for this question, and I deeply understand and hear your frustration.

So the initial read of the question was, you know, we were looking at what it would take to supply, you know, more than 600 contracts in detail to the council.

It was initially set up as a very laborious process that, you know, our team was looking into and didn't necessarily have the resources to get to right away.

So I'm going to turn it over to Alishaba to talk a little bit more about that.

And then I'll come back to actually talk about some of the plans we have going forward.

Thank you, Chancellor, and good morning, Speaker.

So as the Chancellor stated, I think there were about 600-plus contracts that were requested, and each of those contracts are like hundreds of pages long.

And the challenge that we have in a very resource-constrained environment is that it would require dedicated resources.

It would take months for us to pull it because we're pulling it from a secure system that very few people have access to.

So as an alternative, we offered up to provide requests for authorizations because they are pretty much a concise summarization of each of the contracts.

It includes the pertinent contract terms, including the contract value.

And we were hoping that the council would accept that and choose a subset of those of contracts from that that we could pull and we would be able to turn it around much quickly.

I mean, I just find this troubling that of the 600, we're not asking for a printed copy.

We're asking for a file of the contracts.

I mean, this should take like an hour of work to do.

And it's been since March that we've asked this to get a copy of the, like an online file that has the contracts in it.

This should not, I mean, I just find it astounding that this has taken months and that we still don't have these answers.

I completely understand, but it actually does take, we have to download.

the contracts from a secure system and not very many people have access to that system so it wouldn't take hours it would actually take months but the fact that not a lot of people have access to the system in and of itself also raises a concern as i mentioned in the march hearing i

asked if there had been any auditing of these contracts and i know your response was there had not

And that is, I guess, what is concerning me.

That is why it's very hard for us to do our charter-mandated oversight function if we can't even have access to this data.

Yeah.

And one of the things that I am completely committed to doing as we've offered is really making sure that we have consistent briefings with you on this and rolling over time so that we can do

sections of the big ask that you have.

And that's where I am committed to ensuring that we have an ongoing conversation, that we have a rolling conversation with all of the, eventually all of the data that you've requested.

And that's in addition to the briefing that we offered earlier.

Okay.

With all due respect, Chancellor, we're not interested sort of in the rolling conversation.

We're specifically asking for the contract data, which numerous councils have asked for data about other contracts in the past.

This is not...

You know, some kind of new idea.

This is, again, based

sick rudimentary data that DOE should be providing to the council and I'm not sure why we're getting stonewalled.

Well, I can assure you we're not stonewalling.

I think that, as you said, we did provide more recently a summary of a lot of the terms of those contracts.

And if that doesn't suffice, we'll definitely, and it sounds like it doesn't.

It does not suffice.

I mean, again, we're asking, as we asked in March for the contracts, I don't think this is in no way unreasonable.

This is a very reasonable ask, and it's just concerning that we're not getting this data.

We don't want a summary of what the terms say.

We actually want the contracts.

Okay.

Okay, thank you very much.

So DOE's contract budget, as you know, totals $12.9 billion.

And that's one of the reasons why we're interested in this.

It's a very significant number.

So we want to be able to see some of these contracts so we can understand what is happening.

We know that $3.7 billion in contract spending for charter schools, $1.4 billion in contract spending for due process cases.