Behind the FDA's Dubious Deal With Qorvis

(MoneyWatch)  Congress is probing the dubious award by the FDA of a $300,000 public relations contract to Qorvis Communications. The legislators will have a lot of reading to do, because the Qorvis name is synonymous with controversy, having been allegedly linked to the Saudi Arabian government, a "foreign agent" investigation, Haiti, and a conflict of interest with drug company lobbyists. In the current ruckus, the FDA is accused of circumventing its competitive bidding process in order to award the contract for PR services to Alaska Newspapers Inc.

Alaska Newspapers did not have to compete on a price basis for the work because it qualified as a "native" minority group. But why would a "newspaper" company in "Alaska" composed of "natives" want to burnish the good name of the FDA, even if it were qualified to do so? Because, the Washington Post reported, Alaska Newspapers was merely a front company for Washington D.C.-based Qorvis, to which the contract ultimately would be funneled.

As if that weren't annoying enough, there's the question of why anyone at the FDA would choose Qorvis to give a contract to in the first place. This is a PR agency whose national reputation is for representing the kind of people most Americans cross the street to avoid.

Consider: After Sept. 11, 2001, Qorvis signed up to represent Saudi Arabia whose good name was -- bizarrely! -- tarnished after 19 Saudi citizens killed 3,000 Americans on that day.

The FBI later raided the offices of Qorvis under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law that is designed to prevent foreign governments from covertly influencing American democracy.

Qorvis has also worked for the government of Haiti and PhRMA, the drug industry lobby group. The human rights record of Haiti needs no comment; but it beggars belief that -- even if the FDA thought this contract would pass as legit -- the agency felt it could get away with hiring the firm that lobbies for the lobbyists of the drug companies it is supposed to be regulating.

Lastly, lest we forget, it was Qorvis which was caught offering $25,000 to "experts" to say bad things about Eliot Spitzer back when he was the New York state attorney general, probing fraud allegations against insurance giant AIG. We now know that Spitzer will go down in history as a man with conflicted law enforcement motives and AIG will go down in history as a company that can't keep its books in the black.

Not to say that Qorvis isn't competely useless. It can still get this kind of glowing coverage in the Washington Post.