The former Halliburton Co. unit has been one of the key U.S. government contractors in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, providing logistical support for American forces, among other tasks. The company has suffered declining revenue as the U.S., having withdrawn from Iraq and scaled back its presence in Afghanistan, continues to reduce military spending.

Last week KBR said it would review its business strategy as the company continued its run of declining quarterly revenue, now at 19 straight periods.

The second largest contract recipient is PAE Government Services, which will receive $598 million (15 percent of all State reconstruction funds). PAE was a subsidiary of top federal contractor Lockheed Martin from 2006 to 2011. Last year, former PAE program manager Keith Johnson and his wife, Angela Johnson, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the military on vehicle parts purchases in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. The Johnsons were sentenced to prison and ordered to pay $2 million for operating a scheme in which Keith steered millions of dollars in orders to a shell company operated by Angela and to subcontractors who provided kickbacks in return.

The third largest contract recipient is Civilian Police International, LLC (CPI) with $54 million in contracts (slightly more than 1 percent of all State reconstruction aid). CPI was formed in 2004 as a joint venture between L-3 Communications subsidiary MPRI, AECOM, Wackenhut, and KBR specifically to handle law enforcement and criminal justice reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. The track records of Wackenhut and KBR are relatively well-known. You might be less familiar with MPRI, a company founded in 1987 by retired senior military officers that maintains a lucrative relationship with the Pentagon. Earlier this year, MPRI paid $3.2 million to settle allegations that, between 2005 and 2010, it submitted false labor charges on a contract to support the U.S. Army in Afghanistan by billing for employees who had not performed any work. Several years ago, MPRI briefly gained notoriety for its tax avoidance shenanigans (as did KBR).

At this point, you should be wondering why the State Department has entrusted billions of taxpayer dollars to these three particular contractors. The law requires the federal government to award contracts only to responsible vendors—those with satisfactory records of past performance, integrity, and business ethics. Yet the aforementioned incidents certainly reflect poorly on the responsibility of DynCorp, PAE, and three of the four companies that comprise CPI. This is yet another example of the government’s overreliance on contractors and, in the case of MPRI, the influence of the revolving door.

SIGAR requested from all Afghanistan reconstruction agencies comprehensive information about how and where funds have been spent since 2002. We anxiously await future SIGAR analyses, particularly for the two agencies with an even larger role in the reconstruction—the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Defense.