Imagine that I had to describe the Bush administration in one paragraph…
The public-private face-off at West Point illustrates just what Bush envisioned when he proposed the “competitive sourcing” initiative in 2001 as part of his management agenda. It turned on a simple idea: Force federal employees to compete for their jobs against private contractors and costs will decrease, even if the work ultimately stays in-house.
[…] “The competitive sourcing initiative did little to improve management, produced a ton of worthless paper, demoralized thousands of workers and cost a bundle, all to prove that federal employees are pretty good after all,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of government at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
If privatization is the Republican god, George Bush is the radical fundamentalist who would sooner lead his followers to ruin than compromise with reality.
PaulW
Everyone knows full well that West Point has a liberal bias.
Like Abstinence-Only, the Far Right will not recognize this study or any like it, and will continue to obsess over the idea of privitization to the point everything falls apart.
Soylent Green
My agency spent thousands of man hours and millions of dollars complying with the requirements of OMB’s A-76 (competitive sourcing) studies, then they all went away. The exercise revealed what we already understood to be true, that outsourcing would compromise our ability to carry out our mission, and that costs would be greater than keeping the work in-house. But for several years many of us went to work thinking our jobs were going to be terminated.
BAJ
If the AI scientists have their way, not even humans will be required on earth:
Building Gods:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1079797626827646234&q=building+gods&ei=N-kQSKHGLZGcqgOojoDOBA
misc
That can’t possibly be true. ‘Federal Employee Incompetence’ is like the second leg of the Republican barstool.
Janet Strange
I read the article – glad overall that the WaPo is at least mentioning that conservatives’ Central Article of Faith (gubmint never does anything right, business and the free market always does everything better!) is a crock that doesn’t stand up to those pesky facts. But really disappointed that they didn’t include the Walter Reed mess:
(Long time lurker here. First comment. Hi guys!)
Chuck Butcher
What every one of these privatization gurus seems to forget is that there is no profit cost involved in govt. programs.
TenguPhule
Or the third leg of Elected Republicans everywhere.
*Badumbum-CRASH*
aartimus aardvark
As a former Department of Defense employee, I can attest to the fact that CA (Commercial Activity) studies, as they were called, are an expensive and disruptive waist of time. The government is virtually always found to be more cost-effective than the private sector. This should not be a surprise to anyone. After decades of outsourcing the functions that are still performed “in house” by the government are so specialized that there is no equivalent source of private sector technology or expertise. TO meet contract requirements, the private sector companies competing in the CA process must design their bids based on hiring the government employees currently doing the work, and that cost money. (Also, most government employees choose either to find other jobs within the government or retire, rather than go to work for a contractor and loose their seniority and pension benefits.) Moreover, the government has no need to generate a profit for its shareholders (before you snark about this, it still had to meet budget requirements), which put the private sector at a substantial disadvantage.
A really destructive, but little discussed, fallout of this process is that the resulting organization — whether the function continues to be performed by the government or is contracted out — must be pared down to the MEO (Minimum Effective Organization). This is the smallest organization that can perform the core function to the level of performance specified in the CA study. This effectively kills all future innovation within the organization by making sure it can only perform the functions specified in the CA study without any flexibility to improve efficiency or develop new technology.
In my opinion the real goal of all this is to make government activities function so inefficient that they will eventually fail. As the the great conservative god Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” The Republicans want to make sure that the government fails, and this is one way of doing it.
Martin
Well, the military guys understand this point, which might be why the current crop of Republicans, chickenshits that they are, don’t.
Efficiency is a wonderful thing, but not at the expense of effectiveness. Government employees aren’t always the most efficient and individually are routinely less than effective (I know – I work for the gov) but the services provided, taken as a whole, tend to be quite effective and reliable.
When levees break, you don’t want some middle manager worrying about cost centers and profit margins and shit when people are drowning. You want them to move and to move fast. The Gov. has a way to get that response out of the private sector, however – it’s the no-bid contract. Essentially, throw so much money at them that there’s no question it’s a good decision to turn your trucks around and send them that way. Of course, the efficiency argument totally goes out the window when you do that and you would have been just as well or better off with well managed public employees.
And that reveals the real issue. It’s not that competitive sourcing makes things more efficient, rather it provides a back door for incompetent management, which the GOP seems increasingly predisposed to.
Thursday
Same thing happened in British Columbia when the current folks got in power:
The new government came in with a vow of “private sector good,no public workers good!” and started firing peole left, right and center. A frind of mine left the Ministry of Highways because he was tired of doing the work of three people (same work, fewer employees) to go into the private sector, and is now working for the company the government had to hire (at a far greater cost, natch) to do the work of the missing employees.
Why is it that free market obsessives are so bad at business, anyway?
Thursday
Martin –
Welcome to the wonderful world of for-profit medical insurance!
Martin
Thurs-
Not just medical insurance but firefighting as well.
Martin
Joy
I run a pure Mac shop. A few years ago we got a new IT director, and he asked me to move over to Windows. I told him no – the security risk for my data was too great. He said that he could keep the servers as secure as mine and I told him that I don’t care how much armor you wear, only a fool walks from a safe neighborhood into a war zone to save a few bucks. Needless to say, they’ve had more than a few security problems since his arrival – I’ve never had one.
Adam
Oddly enough, the person most responsible for streamlining government – “reinventing it,” pace Osborne and Gabler – reducing paperwork and waste – was Bush’s 2000 opponent.
Just sayin.
Added tag suggestion: GOP Crime Syndicate. The private companies are guaranteed profits, then they funnel them back into the Party, the Party gives more work to contractors. Racketeering?
rachel
Martin: Ha-hah! Thanks for the link.
Redhand
Yeah, but private contractor armies have worked out so well in Iraq.
Redhand
Yeah, but private contractor armies have worked out so well in Iraq.
Soylent Green
Right, Martin. The old slander that government employees are lazy or useless is a lie. I find many to be of mediocre talent, but they work as hard as anybody. We could benefit from better management, but what large organization can’t?
I’ve come to see outsourcing efforts as both a way to funnel money from the treasury into private hands and as a way to shrink regulatory agencies to below their capacity to regulate.
jake
You negative nancies just need to redefine your definition of “success.”
This has been an excellent program for BushCo’s pals in terms of providing them another way to raid the Treasury.
Dennis - SGMM
The Federal government has grown 24% under George W. Bush. Far from shrinking the bureaucracy he has presided over the biggest expansion of it since Lyndon Johnson. I suspect that Republicans would be more than happy to see government continue to metastasize as long as privatization ensures that huge chunks of the budget goes into the “right” hands.
Notorious P.A.T.
Does the US Army have to comply with this “competitiveness” initiative? Because it sure looks to me like a handful of warlords and streetfighters have fought our trillion-dollar military to a standstill. Considering we spend more on our military than everyone else on Earth combined, maybe it’s time to reconsider our spending.
calipygian
I think the high tide of ridiculousness was reached a few years ago when there was a move afoot in the Navy to contract out food services on board ship in order to free sailors to do other tasks.
I don’t know what other tasks they had in mind since it seems to me that the primary job of the XO, Department Heads and Command Master Chief is to find enough busy work for the junior people to do in order to keep them out of trouble.
Let me repeat the first rule of government contracting – the primary purpose of outsourcing is not to streamline services and save money but to provide public money to needy private contractors. Period.
It is welfare for the rich.
Hume's Ghost
In Are We Rome?, Collen Murphy pointed out that one of the signals of the decline of Rome was the large scale privatization of gov’t functions to cronies and what not. In his view, such actions break the chain of responsibility to the public good and introduce an alternative motive for action: personal profit.
Hume's Ghost
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/06/07/rome/print.html
Ian Thorpe
Like so much in the modern world, outsourcing is unnecessary. All we need is the guys who do the job and they guys who make sure the job is done. All outsourcing does it add extra layers of administration.
Vast amounts are currently being spent on cloning beef cattle. Same rules apply. Cattle have been making new cattle every year for millions of years. There is no evidence that cattle are losing the ability to make new cattle. So to justify the money spent on research we are told it is more efficient.
The ony efficient thing it does is increase the profits of middlemen.
Bey
Soylent Green:
Several years ago during the heyday of the A-76 feeding frenzy, my organization underwent one. We lost ours (the contractor undercut us by a whopping 2%), dozens of our people were let go and in the first month the contractor submitted a contract mod bringing the contract up and over our MEO cost by $2M over the first 5 years.
Since then we have doubled the size of our infrastructure and our people are so task saturated they are donating their unused leave.
Prospero
Don’t be silly, everyone knows Rome fell cause of teh ghey.
Davis X. Machina
The practical problem is, you can’t refute a theology.
Not in debate, anyways.
jake
I’m sure some wetsuit wearing Theo-Con has already explained why skyrocketing food and oil prices are directly related to equal marriage rights in Massachusetts.
Mike G
Conservatives’ Central Article of Faith (gubmint never does anything right, business and the free market always does everything better!)
And like so much of conservatism, it’s a magical ideology that must be blind-trustingly ‘believed’, impervious to reason, hypothesis testing or reality.
I’ve found that it’s not public versus private that determines inefficiency and waste, but the degree of centralization, bureaucracy and top-down command-and-control mentality.
I was outsourced by my company to an IT firm that bragged about how much more efficient it was (the founder ran for president in 92 so you can probably work out who it is) while presiding over a nightmare of choking bureaucracy, a militaristic intimidation and punishment culture with rotten morale and massive turnover, mendacity toward the client and abysmal incompetence and inefficiency.
I left and now work for a government-funded university that is far a more efficient and capable IT operation because it treats employees well and decentralizes decision-making, utilizing liberal tenets like collaborative decision-making, reason and logical deduction instead of authoritarian demands for conformity and obedience. It was like crossing from East Germany to West Germany, circa 1980.
“Private sector is more efficient”, my ass. More Repig corrupt ideology to justify looting the treasury for contractors who kick back donations to the Grumpy Old Perverts.
Richard Bottoms
A yet even now 49% of the public is still fucking stupid enough to vote Republican.
Go figure.