Government waste and inefficiency that the Left actually cares about?
The defense and intelligence sections of our government rely on the assistance of private contractors for a lot of their work. Part of this was explained to me by an acquaintance in the military as an artifact of the weird budgeting hoops these agencies constantly have to jump through. It’s cheaper for agencies to hire a contractor than a civil servant.
I suspect part of it is a market force as well–someone with a clearance and particular expertise can make more money doing basically the same work with an outside contractor than they can as a civil servant. When that’s the case, I don’t mind paying smart people what they’re worth to defend the country.
So that’s inefficient, but it’s also not exactly breaking news. But I saw where USA Today had reviewed a new book about this situation, which claims to “expose”
…how private corporations employ former high-ranking federal government and military officials to generate huge profits from secret contracts with the CIA, NSA and various baronies in the Defense Department.
In Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, Shorrock penetrates the covert world of corporations such as CACI International, ManTech International and Booz Allen Hamilton, while simultaneously penetrating the covert world of government agencies spending billions of taxpayer dollars unaccountably.
Could be a useful book if you like spy stuff, and I’m all for tightening up government money-leaks. But USA Today’s review of it sounds like a lefty whine-fest, revving up the old Blackwater cliches about private contractors:
Spies for Hire is a sterling example of why investigative journalists are valuable during an era of deep, broad and unconscionable government secrecy.
“Unconscionable” secrecy? Intelligence agencies being a bit circumspect about sensitive national security matters? That’s never happened before. There’s also Cheney-bashing (his friend worked for a defense contractor!) and a reworking of the old bumper-sticker line about how great it will be when the schools have all the money they need and the Defense Department needs to hold a bake sale:
[Contractor]SAIC has received millions of dollars (that arguably could be used instead to improve public schools or feed the hungry) that paid for failed systems. Shorrock relates the saga of Project Trailblazer, “designed to capture communications traveling on cellphones, fiber optics and across the Internet.”
Groan. Or we could just put the whole wad into carbon offsets and fight the real threat facing our country!
Silly stuff, but a great example of media bias. Hey, I’d like to see tax dollars used efficiently–but it doesn’t follow that we need to take money out of defense and put it into giveaway programs.
P.S. One interesting thing I picked up from this review: some of the contractors I saw mentioned (CACI, SAIC, Booz-Allen) looked familiar to me. The reason is that they used to show up in the sitemeters of some of the smaller blogs I’ve guest-blogged for. Intel contractors would occasionally cruise by, looking at entries about foreign-policy or terrorism analysis. (Michelle’s traffic is high enough that I can’t track visitors as easily.)
Now, there’s absolutely no reason to think that those posts were the slightest bit influential. All the same, blogs may have a greater reach than we give them credit for.
Why not start one? You never know who’ll end up reading you…
P.P.S. There’s more to this story–the Center for Constitutional Rights (that is, the Gitmo Lawyer agency) is suing one of these contractors over abuses at Abu Ghraib. The company’s defense is here.
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Categories: Blogosphere, Homeland Security, Media Bias
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USA TODAY America bashing and anti-patriotic dribble…. and loving it!
Guess what, many inventions fail until you keep testing why it fails and come up with a solution. in the private sector, this is what profits are used for: for testing (and mostly failing – mind you) better ways at doing the same job. since the gov’t wants to own the intellectual property, the gov’t absorbs all of those losses. what’s the issue?
these liberals must think these flawless “systems” just miraculously appear from the “systems” God.
MIC.
It’s true, you should take up writing your thoughts, most of my hits are from South Korea, Australia and somehow Maryland.
And, how does this help Michelle Obama’s children?
Beat ya to it, John!
Not to go down this road, but…
with some knowledge of private contracting, people who contract as such are usually paid a premium rate, but not something out of line with their experience and ability. As CW pointed out, its the market at work. Private contractors (whether its for combat roles such as ground forces in Iraq or for noncombat roles in the areas of intel gathering, translation and so on) wouldnt do the work for the government, when there are private sector businesses that could pay more for their time and talent, unless they were being paid well. Typically, those who are hired for outside work are screened and must have a record of being able to deliver the services they are being hired for in the first place.
It’s not a bad gig, and as pointed out, not anything new. After the Blackwater incident, private contractors were (in some cases rightly, others unjustly) painted as rogue elements and were chastised by Congress as such.
I would point out that if it were not for private contractors, security in places such as Iraq would become infinitely more difficult and costly for our military.
Funny how libs are always arguing that money “wasted” on X in Defense could have been spent more wisely on Y (always some “worthy” social program), never explaining how such a thing could occur.
Yes, you can manage your personal finances that way, and yes, businesses allocate spending based on rational priorities.
But denying some government agency several million $$$ in a TRILLION dollar budget so that the money can specifically be allocated for a totally unrelated purpose by some other government department?
Just who in the Executive or Legislative branches has the power and the omnisicience to do that?
Geddoudaheah!
It ain’t gonna happen – no matter how millions they re-allocate for public education, test scores will not improve because “more money” is not the answer!
Under our former Governor Ernie Fletcher (R), Kentucky increased education spending by nearly twenty-five percent every year for four years – the result? Test scores remained unchanged, hovering near the bottom percentile for the nation on norm based tests.
We need greater education standards and expected outcomes to improve public education, not more money.
You hit the nail on the head. I am a contractor working in Iraq (I am typing from Iraq this very minute) and I was former military. The majority of us contractors are former military who either got out at their end of contract, retired or, like me, were medically discharged. For the most part we would have liked to stay with the military, but seeing that there is a huge pay gap between what the military makes and what you can make as a contractor why not choose to be a contractor. If the liberals really want to see the end of contracting raise the pay of the military to a level much closer to what you pay a contractor. First of all you would never have a problem with recruiting goals being met and secondly you could be even more selective with the men and women you recruit. Of course this will never happen as we all know the liberals hate the military and that is what this story is really about.
thank you for the post, and for your service, sir.
Seems to me that Public Schools are the unproven commodity.
Also, why do we waste money on MEDICAL RESEARCH.
Aids cures are yet to be PROVEN.
The left is stuck in nanny state thinking, by perpetuating the notion that they know what’s best for us. Public schools will change when there are new ideas from smarter people and the same goes for the left.
Why do we need the contractors? Where are all the soldiers who used to do those jobs? Hint most of the cut backs in the 90’s were support roles now being filled by contractors. It saved us 10’s of millions in the 90’s and now those cuts are costing us 100’s of millions.
The only thing the left hates worse than our military is our intelligence community. They believe we should never have any secrets & every shred of information should be available to them at the moment it is discovered. No matter that making the info. public would make is useless or potential harm our intrests, they need to know this because they can better manage it than the professionals.
While i agree that the cuts hurt, look at it in this light…
When the state wants to repave the road in front of your house, normally (as is the case in many places), they subcontract out to a paver in the area. The same holds true in this case.
As far as typical security (and anyone who is over there, like truesoldier can attest and describe), these things including escort duty for VIP’s and other dangerous situations that normally, our military does not cover. Imagine if we had to divert our soldiers for body guard duty. That would be a mess.
However, those with prior military experience are valuable members of the private contracting community. They bring specific training, have verifiable service records, and are paid well for their time and inherent risks and sacrifices (of family, as well as sometimes life and limb)
Those contractors are vital to the success and smooth operation of these situations.
The Air Force is still cutting the force and eventually it will break it. The Squadron I am assigned to has gone from 224 souls down to 148 in less than 2 years. We expect another 40 souls to leave our ranks due to cutbacks this year. Of course the workload doesn’t decrease and you end up doing the same work with a lot less people. We were supposed to receive technology upgrades, but they were never funded due to the funding being transferred to the Army to cover their budget shortfalls. With all the pork being added to the Defense Appropriation you think some additional funding might actually go to the active force now looking at annual reductions in O&M funds from 10% to 18% annually forecast through Fiscal Year 2011. You would hardly know there was a war on due to this mentality except for having to suck up even more of the workload as people are constantly deployed for longer and longer tours overseas.
Outsourcing to private contractors can be more economical and efficient if it is done honestly, but that is a big “if.”
Seems like with Bush/Cheney cronyism and the opportunities for corruption in Iraq that are perhaps unparalleled in history in scale, Washington has been converted into a sort of Chicago, but where corruption is on a national scale now.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_10_24/print/coverprint.html
It probably failed because they couldn’t get a search warrant.
Civil servant = government worker. Government = waste of taxpayer dollar and lack of quality. That is why we subcontract work out to qualified employees.
That quote raised my irony alarm as well. When someone says the words “failed systems,” nothing leaps to mind quite as readily as “public shools”
JDinTX
I have to argue with that statement. I am a civil servant/government worker. I have a PhD in history and work as an historian for the Air Force and have deployed to Southwest Asia as a civilian to write operational histories of units in Southwest Asia. While there are many civil servants who should be fired due to incompetence, there are many of us who are well-qualified and produce quality work.
I think he oversimplified it, but the “lack of quality” referred to doesn’t necessarily connote each and every individual, but it DOES apply to the circumstances of each civil servant’s work, regardless of how qualified you are. Chances are, it took some massive beaurocracy to even get to the point of assigning you the work, and another one to actually use (or ignore) the product of that work, no matter how expertly it was completed. In that way, the lack of quality (in proportion to the total process expenditure) is systemic, and beyond the control of competent contributors.
He did say “Government = waste”, not “worker = waste.”
There is another advantage to using contractors instead of hiring more civil servants/government workers: contractors can be MUCH more easily fired for cause or let go without penalty because the couple of year project is over. Extra risk (of having a job for a long time) implies higher pay, at least for the short term.
On the whole, though, I am inclined to agree with sonofdy (#11) “It saved us 10’s of millions in the 90’s and now those cuts are costing us 100’s of millions.”
What crap! Where was USA Today during the ’90’s, and Algore’s Reinventing Government schemes?
There were many instances in which a position held by a full time federal employee was not filled by a full time federal employee, and a contractor was essentially hired the next day to do the same work…often by the same federal employee who was recently in the position.
It didn’t matter how good of a job the contractor would do, all that mattered was that Algore was then able to claim the size of the federal workforce was being reduced.
At times contractors can do a job better, but as with any employee, federal or otherwise, it comes down to oversight of the work done.
With Algore’s Reinventing Government, it didn’t matter.
USA Today certainly wasn’t concerned with contracting then.
Al Gore’s reinventing government was bad enough. Now his carbon credits based on his demagoguery about Global Warming is even more wasteful. It wastes our basic
freedoms along with our nation’s and our children’s futures.
{^_^}