Koch network, donor reliance on government contracts; Bechtel Corporation, legal problems:
Given the participants' unanimous espousal of antigovernment, free-market self-reliance, the network also included a surprising number of major government contractors, such as Stephen Bechtel Jr., whose personal fortune Forbes estimated at $2.8 billion....Paternalistic and family-owned, Bechtel was the sixth-largest private company the country, and it owed almost its entire existence to government patronage. It had built the Hoover Dam, among other spectacular public projects, and had storied access to the innermost national security circles. Between 2000 and 2009 alone, it had received $39.2 billion in U.S. government contracts. This included $680 million to rebuild Iraq following the U.S. invasion.....Like so many of the other companies owned by the Koch donors, Bechtel had government legal problems. In 2007, a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction accused Bechtel of shoddy work. And in 2008, the company paid a $352 million fine to settle unrelated charges of substandard work in Boston's notorious "Big Dig" tunnel project. The company was facing congressional reproach too for cost overruns in the multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State. (24)