Government By Contractor Is A Disgrace, (Wall Street Journal)…Thomas Frank, Nov 26, 2008.
The irony if not the humor is that the same people who are perceived as not being capable of being “innovative, efficienct and flexible” are the ones that write and/or manage the contractors. The contracting system typically favors the contractors.
When government is “forced” to compete for work via A76/MEO, they win the majority of the times.
We don’t lack solutions that can be applied to continually improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government service (Baldrige critiera comes to mind); Leadership has always been the key.
Many jobs are best left to federal workers.
Back in 1984, the conservative industrialist J. Peter Grace was telling whoever would listen why government was such a wasteful institution.
One reason, which he spelled out in a book chapter on privatization, was that “government-run enterprises lack the driving forces of marketplace competition, which promote tight, efficient operations. This bears repetition,” he wrote, “because it is such a profound and important truth.”
And repetition is what this truth got. Grace trumpeted it in the recommendations of his famous Grace Commission, set up by President Ronald Reagan to scrutinize government operations looking for ways to save money. … Turn government operations over to the private sector and you get innovation, efficiency, flexibility.
What bears repetition today, however, is the tragic irony of it all. To think that our contractor welfare binge was once rationalized as part of an efficiency crusade.
As the George W. Bush presidency grinds to its close, we can say with some finality that the opposite is closer to the truth.
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