Some criticisms sound meaningful but are really fairly trivial (the incompetence dodge, Dick Cheney’s shriveled, black soul) while others cut a bit deeper. This falls in the second group.
Government auditors said yesterday that the Pentagon relies too much on contractors who often work alongside their government counterparts, cost more and sometimes take on responsibilities they are not supposed to.
The Government Accountability Office said that as the government’s workforce has shrunk, its demand for services has mushroomed and procurement deals have become more complex and hard to manage. That has forced agencies to hire more contractors. Last year, the Defense Department spent $158.3 billion on services — a 76 percent increase over the past decade, and more than what it spends on supplies, equipment and major weapons systems, according to the report.
The Bush years haven’t been kind to olde-timey conservative principles like small, limited government that respects individual freedom or skepticism about casually using force abroad, but the modern GOP hasn’t forgotten all of its roots. The notion of privatizing government functions and eliminating tax revenue have more than persisted, they have become the apotheosis of Republican government, the absolute rigid ideological framework from which no deviation can be tolerated. It is hard to imagine a recent instance when Republican leaders have not taken the most maximalist possible approach to handing over important functions to allies in the private sector.
And yet in almost every case that doctrine has proven a failure. Pick your topic – charter schools, FEMA, The State Department. How about those White House email records? Privatizing Social Security was an absolutely capital idea – imagine the universal happiness if part of the SS portfolio was invested in Wall Street today! Nominating lobbyists to manage departments that regulate their own industry counts as a kind of privatization, and that has proved a disaster.
Sad as that is, the Republican dogma is doing great at home compared with the beating that it’s taking in Iraq. Iraqis hate American troops or they don’t, but they detest the private firms that cowboy around pointing their guns without any meaningful oversight. At least troops who massacre civilians face some nominal consequences through military justice; mercs who shoot up a neighborhood walk without any reckoning at all. That drives Iraqis insane, it adds popular support to people who kill Americans and it makes troops’ lives harder.
And yet the mercs, and Halliburton’s support services, are less outrageous for at least some of the time doing their job. Compare that with the unmitigated disaster of rebuilding in Iraq.
[O]f 2,797 completed projects costing $5.8 billion, Iraq’s national government had, by the spring of this year, accepted only 435 projects valued at $501 million.[…] The United States often promotes the number of rebuilding projects, like power plants and hospitals, that have been completed in Iraq, citing them as signs of progress in a nation otherwise fraught with violence and political stalemate. But closer examination by the inspector general’s office, headed by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has found that a number of individual projects are crumbling, abandoned or otherwise inoperative only months after the United States declared that they had been successfully completed.
When it comes to new construction our contracted help can’t serve their own country any better than they do for the Iraqis. he massive, self-contained embassy complex meant to overlook Baghdad like a shadow government (almost eerily like one) has degenerated into an overdue money pit, unsafe to inhabit and built at least in part with slave labor. Having shown little respect for Iraqis or the Americans it won’t shock to find out that the firms routinely screw their employees out of retirement and health care, or else just rape them.
The doctrine of reflexively privatizing every imaginable service and then skimping on oversight is not some incidental point, it’s the only aspect of Bush Republicanism that is still recognizably conservative. There are few ideas closer to the core of their being, and it’s a fraud.
myiq2xu
I understand that there is a newly identified illness in Iraq caused by drinking contaminated water.
They are calling it “Blackwater”
myiq2xu
What went wrong.
The last frame is the best.
eric
Somewhat related
jenniebee
I spent an afternoon this past year with a naval officer, a cousin of my husband’s, and we talked about this very thing. The idea that contractors save the military money is firmly entrenched in the military. Here’s how the logic works:
The military spends money to train a soldier to perform a job function.
The training is outsourced to Blackwater (really, seriously)
Blackwater looks over trainees and makes offers
Some people leave to make more money at Blackwater
The cost of hiring Blackwater to have the person who the US paid to train do the job he was trained to do is less than the cost of training a new person
So the military pays Blackwater for having done such a good job of pilfering the military’s people.
Rinse, repeat.
Taxpayers are paying Blackwater, Haliburton, etc, for the privilege of having Blackwater and Haliburton rob us blind. I, for one, am proud to live in a country where the opportunities for monetary success are not limited by such notions as “ethics” or “leaders with the sense God gave geese.”
PaulW
But it’s CAPITALISM! With a Capital “C” that spells “Cutbacks” and “Corruption” oh my! If you’re opposed to privitization of everything up to and including the speelcheeker on your blog, then by god you’re a flithy communist who ought to move to Canader yer bum.
myiq2xu
They don’t hire barracks-rats or guard-house troops either.
They skim the cream.
cbear
Look at the bright side…at least when the Chimpus deploys them to guard our borders, we can expect a better than average kill ratio of scary brown people.
skyler
What people fail to understand is that when the government hires private companies, the money still comes from the government. It’s still a government function ultimately and subject to the same limitations of government work as before, except with an additional layer of corruption.
libarbarian
ARGGHHH!
Tim, I like your stuff but I’m going to rip into you on this one :).
In my view the JUST ANOTHER “DODGE” to give these guys a pass on their dumb-ass decision making by dismissing the importance of execution and focusing entirely on the decision to start the war to begin with. It is a fucking “dodge” to ignore the fact that, if they had made better decisions, we probably could have many tens of thousands of additional Iraqis alive today. They should be held accountable for BOTH the decision to wage war AND the willfully incompetent way in which they waged it. BOTH are evidence of serious moral and intellectual failings.
There are important lessons to be learned in this in addition to just “don’t fight wars of choice”. Sadly, some are the same lessons we already learned in Vietnam and then forgot* If this country chooses to ignore the willfully irresponsible decisions made by our leaders, and the lessons they teach us, because of some bullshit and utterly ignorant belief that acknowledging those mistakes and the fact that we REALLY COULD have avoided many thousands of the deaths that have happened, somehow implicitly excuses the initial decision to go to war, then we will not learn these important lessons.
It is horribly irresponsible to tell people that, because the war shouldn’t have been fought to begin with, they should not to pay any attention to the willfully irresponsible execution of the war and “If we had made different choices tens of thousands of people would still be alive” DOES NOT MEAN “It’s ok to launch wars of choice so long as you fight them well”. No matter how much you assert that the former necessarily means the latter, it still isn’t true and never will be true.
“If we had made different choices tens of thousands of people would still be alive” doesn’t mean wars of choice are not immoral. It simply means wars of choice fought responsibly and intelligently are immoral but relatively less immoral than wars of choice fought irresponsibly and idiotically. It means that the decision to go to war, even an immoral and stupid war of choice, does not absolve you of the responsibility to be as conscientious as possible to avoid needless loss of life once during the war itself. Labeling all talk of the foolish execution of this war as a “dodge” sends the opposite message – that things born in original sin are already so terminally tainted that there is no point in doing, and hence no moral imperative to do, anything to lessen the evil.
Down that road lies madness.
* The right forgot them because they bought into the “we didn’t do anything wrong except let the hippies stab us in the back” lie. The left forgot them because they bought into the fatalistic “there no point in studying the way the war was fought because it didn’t matter what we did, the outcome was a foregone conclusion” delusion.
Jay C
But, but, Tim! These private-industry soldiers aren’t “mercs”; “mercs” are rough, violent hired guns, usually foreigners – who fight for money! Our guys in Iraq are “contractors” the noblest of the noble: who have given up – umm, well, given up something, I’m sure – to go over to help bring the benefits of Freedom and Democracy and Market Economics to the benighted Iraqis! And all at a resonable price compared to the cost of having to deploy them in California or Texas to keep the hordes of Islamocommiefascoterrorists from slaughtering us all at swordpoint! C’mon man: all that protection, and you’re worried about the cost? For shame!
[/sarcasm]
LiberalTarian
They’re also calling a particularly virulent strain of malaria “Blackwater.”
Apparently the Iraqis see Blackwater for the plague/pestilence it is.
jcricket
This is a classic “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” thing of conservatism that drives me absolutely batty. Even PJ O’Rourke has that quote where he says “Republicans are the party who campaigns on the promise that government is incompetent and then gets elected and proves it”
Take also Reagan’s famous quote about the scariest words in the English language being “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.
Is it any surprise that people that hate the government, screw it up when they are elected? Or fail to see any circumstance under which the government might do better than the private sector?
What’s even worse is that ye-olde-timey conservatives at least appeared to care about competency, and could be persuaded that there was a place for the government. Now, no matter what the evidence, government’s gotta be shrunk and hopefully the private sector enriched. Or, just chuck the government function all together (see FDA) and who gives a damn about the consequences.
Why do we think conservatives or Republicans have anything valuable to say about governing any longer? Anyone?
jcricket
Hey – one good topic Tim forgot to mention was the IRS (yes, I know, we all hate the IRS). The Republicans have insisted we turn over uncollected IRS debts to collection agencies, despite three major flaws:
1) Hiring IRS agents is far cheaper (= more net revenue)
2) IRS agents do a better job at actually getting the money = even more net revenue)
3) Privacy issues and shady practices of collection agencies.
So, despite no evidence that it’s the right thing to do, and actual evidence that it will net the government less revenue, conservatives/Republicans push this idea.
Why? Probably both out of spite for the government’s role in doing its job and to enrich their buddies in the private collection agency industry.
Again – people who see no place for government have no place in government.
Fledermaus
Why would they bother with oversight? It’s not their money and these are their good friends from business. Besides get too tough and they might not get a job offer once their time in government is done.
Soylent Green
I believe the urge to outsource stems from four principles (and this all I’ve got on the subject):
(1) Federal workers lean Democratic, so getting rid of them is good for the GOP.
(2) Contractors are useful for turning money from the Treasury into campaign contributions.
(3) Weak oversight of functions that have been privatized is a way to get away with mischief that government SOPs and audits might prevent.
(4) Outsourcing is step one in drowning what’s left in a bathtub.
TenguPhule
Corrected.
bootlegger
Policy studies consistently show that privitizing govrnment government functions actually costs taxpayers MORE money than keeping it public, AND private firms don’t deliver a higher quality service (in many cases its lower quality, see prison privatization).
Oversight and accountability cost the taxpayer more than any supposed savings we are supposed to get from the private firms’ low-ball bid. Moreover, the firms then have to make a profit from their low-ball bid and it isn’t from the magical “efficiency” that the free markets are said to produce. No, instead it comes from a reduction in the quality of the product. This then requires more oversight and accounting before the contract with the private firm can be broken and the contract offered to the next lowest bidder. And so on.
The bottom line is that there are some things that simply don’t respond to market elasticity and those services need to be supplied but a not-for-profit entity like the government.