excessively time consuming burden on administrative resources. The Office undertook therefore to shift gradually from numerous narrow specific support projects that seldom ran more than a couple of years to broader long-term contracts with organizations having varied resources at their disposal. This new policy was intended to cut the negotiation of new contracts back to manageable proportions, for new projects could be started as old ones were completed by merely issuing new task orders to the contractors. In addition, the time spent by OSI analysts in orienting new contract personnel to intelligence needs would be reduced. This policy change was never fully implemented; Office personnel responsible for arranging for contract support frequently came up with convincing arguments on technical grounds, favoring a new contractor. Nevertheless, several contracts were set up with the aim of concentrating projects among a few contractors.
The problem has ceased to be as important an issue as it once was, however, because the program of contracting for individual state-of-the-art type papers, which was mainly responsible for the proliferation of small contracts, has largely been discontinued
- 46 -