Outsourcing a Joke?
The Montana Forum discusses Bush Co. plans to privatize many forest service jobs. The illogic of doing so seems beyond dim bulb George. Every move I saw for example in my 29 years working for Child Welfare Services did not result in any measurable efficiency. What it did result in was huge shifts of money from the public sector to private contractors who were in truth “taking home the bacon” with no improved services for clients, and huge increases in needed staffing to manage and monitor the contractors (which for the most part monitoring never happened).
One of the key points to my experience in reading the article was the one about the outsourcing of help desk functions. A quote from the article:
Outsourcing the help desk, she said, did nothing to take the burden off federal employees. Instead, she said, it just added work because now government workers have to follow up on all the help given by the private contractor.
“About 90 percent of the time, (the private contractor) just routes the problems back to Forest Service employees to solve, "O’Rourke said. “It has done nothing but add barriers and time and cost. It’s a total headache.”
In addition, both Martin and O’Rourke agree that outsourcing the work did not eliminate even one federal position.
That fact begs the question of why the agency outsourced the work in the first place. Taxpayers now are paying the private contractor, in addition to paying all the federal salaries they paid prior to privatization.
“Yes,” Martin admits. “One has to wonder whether there was any savings there.”
Ideological decision
The Bush administration has indicated outsourcing is an ideological decision of politics, not so much aimed at saving money as it is at bringing free-market competition to government.
So, there you have it. According to Bush Co. the issue is not to save any tax money but to see if there is any truth to the myth that the private sector is more efficient than the public one.
Of course, there is no way to measure and compare private to public efficiency except to allow the public sector to compete with the private one for the same work. Most public employee unions have been asking for the opportunity to prove themselves against private companies. However, I doubt that this will ever happen. It is too easy to have government employees around as whipping boys for the Republicans to direct the public’s animosity towards.
It does not matter that it is the politicians who create the mess that people have to surmount to obtain government grants or permissions. As I have always said, we need a law that requires our politicians to revoke two laws for every one that they pass until we get back into some kind of equilibrium as far as our body of law goes.
Anyone dare to guess when that will happen?
10:31:14 AM 
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