It's time to stop relying on federal contractors to cover the problems of dysfunctional government. Outsourcing is failing America,
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein asserts.
The two biggest news events of the past year were the Edward Snowden leaks and the disastrous roll-out of Obamacare. In both stories, federal contractors played a central role in embarrassing Washington.
Sure, people were upset about the National Security Agency's spying, Pearlstein notes in the Post article. But many were more disturbed about Snowden's access to some of the nation's most sensitive secrets, and his ability to download millions of pages of information without triggering any red flags, just two years after Army private Bradley Manning did the same thing.
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Snowden's security clearance was approved by a private contractor, and the computer system that he stole the information from was designed and managed by private contractors, notes the Post.
As if that incident wasn't shameful enough, then came the botched roll-out of Healthcare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace.
Federal contractors let Washington down again, as several failed to perform as promised. But the government also made a crucial mistake by relying on the IT staff at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to manage the contractors and oversee the final integration of the new system, says the Post columnist.
Both stories are manifestations that the federal government has outsourced too much of what it does while allowing the quality of its own workforce to atrophy, the article adds.
Outdated civil service rules and ill-conceived caps on the size and pay of the federal workforce have eroded the government’s ability to perform even essential government tasks, Pearlstein argues.
Democrats and Republicans are to blame as members from both parties have jumped on the bandwagon to shrink the federal government despite growth in the economy, the size of the federal budget and demand for government services, he notes.
“This obsession with small government is a sham,” Daniel Gordon, who headed the Office of Procurement Policy in the first Obama term before joining the law faculty at George Washington University, told the Post.
The nation now has fewer government workers but a booming community of federal contractors, who were supposed to do a better job for less money.
Instead, Americans are footing the bill to employ contractors with high salaries that they refuse to pay to government employees, the Post column explains.
And taxpayers are bankrolling the contracting companies' massive profits. These companies charge the government for management pay and perks – like corporate golf outings and executive retreats—and their overhead, including the costs of managing contracts, renting space and operating their own properties, notes
Newsweek.
Politicians claim they want to address the bulging budget. They're in Washington debating over more drones or fewer food stamps but are doing nothing to curtail wasteful spending on federal contractors, some the nation's richest, most powerful companies, Newsweek says.
Given what's happened over the past year, maybe it's time to recalculate the costs, says Post columnist Pearlstein.
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