People are asking whether Shoigu is right to propose shutting down Rosoboronzakaz once and for all.
As Kommersant has learned, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed to President Vladimir Putin that the Federal Service for Defense Contracts, which falls under Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, be abolished and its functions distributed among other agencies. Several months ago, Mr. Shoigu had already raised the same issue with the government, but found no support there. The White House (the Russian government headquarters) still maintains that Rosoboronzakaz is effective in its current form. http://kommersant.ru/doc/2485295
My answer: Shoigu is right. Rosoboronzakaz is a useless and opaque agency that duplicates the functions of other government bodies.
Even government agencies themselves are often confused about how this is supposed to work: when RosPil (Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption project) filed a complaint with the FAS, it would be forwarded to Rosoboronzakaz; and when we filed with Rosoboronzakaz, it was often forwarded to the FAS. Our lawyers ran back and forth from one service to the other, yet in practice the complaint review procedure was not significantly different. Both Rosoboronzakaz and the FAS applied Federal Law No. 94 on procurement placement (now Federal Law No. 44 on the contract system).
Of course, defense procurement has its own specifics: secrecy, military acceptance procedures, and all that. But other agencies that are also heavily wrapped up in secrecy—the FSB, the Interior Ministry, the FSO, and the SVR—function perfectly normally like everyone else, and nothing bad has happened to them.
In short, it’s a harmful, unnecessary bureaucratic feeding trough. A textbook example of stupid and inefficient centralization. Shoigu is doing everything right, but I doubt he’ll get his way. “Feeding trough” is the key phrase here, and nobody is going to give it up.