The Daily Background

The New York Times has begun a series which it says will examine government contracting with the critical eye that it is rarely subjected to. The first article in their series, published yesterday by Scott Shane (one of the Times’ really good reporters), is a lengthy piece about what it calls the practice “that has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem”- hiring private contractors for jobs traditionally done by government employees. Writes Shane:

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government. Even the government’s online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced (and is famously difficult to use).

This type of outsource waste has to stop, and I think if its played as an issue of wasting tax money, I think it’s an issue that fiscal conservatives can agree with progressives on. The whole concept of this type of extreme government outsourcing was begun by the Bush Administration because they love big business, and they buy into the ideology that the government is inefficient and that private corporations can do things better.

But they’ve botched what they were trying to do and are ending up costing American taxpayers dramatically more money than they would have had they let the government do this type of work in the first place. Now we’re paying contractors 22 bucks for supplying ice trays to American units in Iraq, and other ridiculous stuff like that.

Brave New Films, the production studio that made OutFoxed and Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price finished an excellent 2006 documentary I recently saw, titled Iraq for Sale. The subject was the extreme waste that hiring private contractors has created in the Iraq war. Check out the trailer below.

Filed under: Tax Money, Z-TDB Blog