federal_contractors
People have long complained about porkbarrel spending - and it continues largely unabated. An editorial in the New York Times today describes all the porkbarrel spending included in the $103 billion supplemental appropriations bill that Congress just passed (and Bush is expected to veto).
But this old-fashioned form of porkbarrel spending (roughly $20 billion each in the House and Senate Bills), as much as it needs to be controlled, is now being dwarfed by the new Bush version of patronage: outsourcing. As an article in this month’s Vanity Fair describes, this new form of patronage is not just tens of billions but hundreds of billions. This makes it’s scale totally different from ordinary porkbarrel projects:
To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.
You undoubtedly have heard of Halliburton which, according to Congressman Waxman’s committee, has received contracts valued at an estimated $25.7 billion for its work in Iraq - and which is now moving its headquarters from Houston to Dubai. But have you heard of SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) which has a workforce of 44,000, has been awarded more individual federal government contracts than any other private company in America (currently 9000), and has more than a hundred contracts worth more than 10 million apiece? Prior to the war, SAIC was awarded seven contracts, together worth more than $100 million, without competitive bidding.
But the issue is not simply the waste of money. There is also the danger that the federal government has allowed internal government experience to waste away in the process. As described in an editorical in today’s Wall Street Journal, “the number of private federal contractors has soared to 7.5 million, four times bigger than the federal civilian work force itself . . .” As anyone who has hired a consultant knows, even when consultants are honest and knowledgeable, they cannot make up for a lack of in-house expertise.
