Passport Files Snooping Opens Up Questions About Outside Contractors
An article in the Washington Post today about the snooping, security breach of Obama's, Clinton's and McCain's passport files by contract employees offers interesting information.
Such as: "The contract employees who snooped into the passport files of two presidential candidates this year were part of a private workforce that has increasingly assumed responsibility for processing the sensitive documents, State Department and industry officials said yesterday.
"The department began farming out the work to private firms nearly two decades ago, but the ratio of contractors to government employees exploded in the past year when passport applications suddenly began to overwhelm the State Department.
"From 2001 to 2007, 40 to 45 percent of the workers handling passports were contractors, but now 60 percent of the 4,400 passport employees work for private firms, State Department officials said yesterday."
Sounds like the State Department in the Reagan era decided to begin downsizing Civil Service and outsourcing those jobs to make the owners of contract companies wealthy and this process has accelerated during the Bush regime.
There is an interesting article about the problems with government outsourcing to private contractors. Here are some excerpts: "Do agencies rely too much on government contractors? That question, which Federal Computer Week editors put to readers recently on the FCW Forum blog, apparently touched a nerve.
"Our question was prompted by a report from the Government Accountability Office that criticized the Homeland Security Department for its liberal use of contractors. GAO was especially concerned that contractors are carrying out work that is inherently governmental — preparing budgets, developing policies and regulations, and coordinating intelligence — without sufficient agency oversight.
"Asked if they saw similar problems in their own agencies, more than a dozen readers — many of them long-term federal employees — responded, expressing concern or outright alarm about the situation...
The tendency to outsource government jobs to private contractors has increased exponentially under the Bush administration whose goal has been to privatize government to the fullest extent possible.
An American Prospect article focuses on this outsourcing problem when it points out, "...But the tendency to wantonly outsource federal government labor even when it doesn't save money or make the mechanisms of the government more efficient is a product of an economic dogma that holds that a private firm can always -- always -- do a job better than the public sector.
"Private tax collectors for the IRS get to keep about 24 percent of what they collect (sidenote: this arrangement has the added "benefit" of encouraging them to use overly-aggressive tax collecting tactics). The IRS and outside experts agree that private debt collecting doesn't save the government that much. Indeed, Kevin M. Brown, the IRS's acting commissioner, recently told the House Ways and Means Committee that the rationale for using private contractors wasn't necessarily to save money.
"Even if there was an economic advantage to outsourcing tax collection, moreover, putting citizens' financial information in the hands of unregulated, for-profit companies carries with it serious and obvious risks, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research's Heather Boushey points out."
So, after this terrible Bush administration is out the door, the next Democratic president should depoliticize and deBushiteize departments and agencies, decelerate the outsourcing of government jobs and services, and carefully review the entire "privatization" contracting process and have a factual cost benefit analysis finally done comparing corporate contractors versus government and its Civil Service employees.
As Jim Hightower notes, "The official rationale for this privatization surge is that corporations are inherently more efficient than government and save the taxpayer oodles of money. Nice theory, but they aren't…and they haven't. Start with this ideological assertion's most obvious flaw: By their very nature, corporations are loyal to their own bottom line, not to the country or to the common good. Any 'efficiency' that they produce is derived from paying workers less (hardly a morale booster) and by taking shortcuts on the services or products they deliver. These 'savings' are more than eaten up by the high profits, extravagant executive salaries, and other compensation that corporations demand-- costs that are not incurred when government does the job.
"Also, if privatization is so good, why is there no ongoing analysis of the costs and quality of service being delivered? This is an administration that demands a cost-benefit analysis of even the smallest government regulation of business, yet it is throwing trillions of our tax dollars into the coffers of corporate contractors without monitoring whether the outsourcing is costing us more and producing less than if the work were done by government employees."
This country doesn't need government by corporation. Just look at the mess it has created during this Bushite administration's privatizing of government and contracting and outsourcing to corporate cronies.
Such as: "The contract employees who snooped into the passport files of two presidential candidates this year were part of a private workforce that has increasingly assumed responsibility for processing the sensitive documents, State Department and industry officials said yesterday.
"The department began farming out the work to private firms nearly two decades ago, but the ratio of contractors to government employees exploded in the past year when passport applications suddenly began to overwhelm the State Department.
"From 2001 to 2007, 40 to 45 percent of the workers handling passports were contractors, but now 60 percent of the 4,400 passport employees work for private firms, State Department officials said yesterday."
Sounds like the State Department in the Reagan era decided to begin downsizing Civil Service and outsourcing those jobs to make the owners of contract companies wealthy and this process has accelerated during the Bush regime.
There is an interesting article about the problems with government outsourcing to private contractors. Here are some excerpts: "Do agencies rely too much on government contractors? That question, which Federal Computer Week editors put to readers recently on the FCW Forum blog, apparently touched a nerve.
"Our question was prompted by a report from the Government Accountability Office that criticized the Homeland Security Department for its liberal use of contractors. GAO was especially concerned that contractors are carrying out work that is inherently governmental — preparing budgets, developing policies and regulations, and coordinating intelligence — without sufficient agency oversight.
"Asked if they saw similar problems in their own agencies, more than a dozen readers — many of them long-term federal employees — responded, expressing concern or outright alarm about the situation...
1. Loss of in-house expertise
2. Blurred lines in government/contractor relations
3. Who's watching out for the government?
4. Outsourcing's savings are questionable: 'I continue to tell anyone who will listen that the cost of outsourcing has generally been at a cost of two to one: It takes two contractors to fill the position of one dedicated civil servant for double the pay.' ”
The tendency to outsource government jobs to private contractors has increased exponentially under the Bush administration whose goal has been to privatize government to the fullest extent possible.
An American Prospect article focuses on this outsourcing problem when it points out, "...But the tendency to wantonly outsource federal government labor even when it doesn't save money or make the mechanisms of the government more efficient is a product of an economic dogma that holds that a private firm can always -- always -- do a job better than the public sector.
"Private tax collectors for the IRS get to keep about 24 percent of what they collect (sidenote: this arrangement has the added "benefit" of encouraging them to use overly-aggressive tax collecting tactics). The IRS and outside experts agree that private debt collecting doesn't save the government that much. Indeed, Kevin M. Brown, the IRS's acting commissioner, recently told the House Ways and Means Committee that the rationale for using private contractors wasn't necessarily to save money.
"Even if there was an economic advantage to outsourcing tax collection, moreover, putting citizens' financial information in the hands of unregulated, for-profit companies carries with it serious and obvious risks, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research's Heather Boushey points out."
So, after this terrible Bush administration is out the door, the next Democratic president should depoliticize and deBushiteize departments and agencies, decelerate the outsourcing of government jobs and services, and carefully review the entire "privatization" contracting process and have a factual cost benefit analysis finally done comparing corporate contractors versus government and its Civil Service employees.
As Jim Hightower notes, "The official rationale for this privatization surge is that corporations are inherently more efficient than government and save the taxpayer oodles of money. Nice theory, but they aren't…and they haven't. Start with this ideological assertion's most obvious flaw: By their very nature, corporations are loyal to their own bottom line, not to the country or to the common good. Any 'efficiency' that they produce is derived from paying workers less (hardly a morale booster) and by taking shortcuts on the services or products they deliver. These 'savings' are more than eaten up by the high profits, extravagant executive salaries, and other compensation that corporations demand-- costs that are not incurred when government does the job.
"Also, if privatization is so good, why is there no ongoing analysis of the costs and quality of service being delivered? This is an administration that demands a cost-benefit analysis of even the smallest government regulation of business, yet it is throwing trillions of our tax dollars into the coffers of corporate contractors without monitoring whether the outsourcing is costing us more and producing less than if the work were done by government employees."
This country doesn't need government by corporation. Just look at the mess it has created during this Bushite administration's privatizing of government and contracting and outsourcing to corporate cronies.
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