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Bush Spends Record Amount for Corporate Contracting |
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Early in his tenure, President Bush announced plans to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and hand them over to private corporations.
Bush’s goal to turn over the work of the government to corporate contractors “has made history,” according a recent two-part-series by NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling, who reports:
“Since President Bush took office, the government has doubled the amount of contracts with industry. The administration paid corporations more than $400 billion last year to work for everybody from the Forest Service to the CIA.
“The administration has given the majority of that contract money to companies that didn’t have to compete to get it—or faced only limited competition.”
Since 2001, according to Zwerdling, the Bush administration has spent more than $2.2 trillion on contracts with private industry for
…corporations to perform the kinds of services that federal employees normally do.
Zwerdling says that in some federal departments, corporate contracting has reached almost absurd levels.
The Department of Homeland Security depends so much on contractors, the GAO [Government Accountability Office] reports, that officials there have hired contractors to supervise other contractors.
AFGE, the largest federal workers union, has fought hard to stop Bush’s outsourcing efforts. In April, The Washington Post reported that in head-to-head competition, federal workers won bids over private contractors more than 80 percent of the time. But as the NPR series notes, most of the money Bush has spent on corporate contracting went to firms, like Halliburton, that did not have to bid on the work.
Outsourcing advocates claim private companies do the work cheaper and more efficiently. But as the Post reported, the GAO found the Bush administration has overstated the savings of privatization.
As far as efficiency, Zwerdling says that when the Internal Revenue Service hired private collection companies to go after overdue tax payments:
The IRS’s own calculations even show that government employees are more efficient. For every dollar spent trying to collect taxes, government workers collect three times as much as the collection companies do.
Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2 of the NPR report.
2 Comments
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What do you expect from an ideology that thinks government is always the problem and that private enterprise is always more efficient, even for services in which there is NO MARKET! To these Washington conservatives, government is just another way to make money, another market to be opened up and exploited to its fullest potential. Public service? That’s just airy-fairy nonsense. If it can’t make money, it must be unnatural and against the “will” of the market.
For a really good expose of the history of how this theory of government got its stranglehold on Washington, read Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. (http://tcfrank.com/)
One particularly alarming fact in the book - Although BushCo gave us the largest budgets (and deficits) in history, the number of federal employees is the lowest it’s been since 1950. So much for “small” government…
This doesn’t surprise me at all! Corporate America and the Right is doing the same thing to just about all Labor in this country. That’s why we needed the change that I believe the new administration will bring. We also have to change the thinking in our International Unions because I feel they don’t have the fight left in them! They are giving in to this concept! We have to say enough is enough and bring back the fight! Our Union for Fathers are rolling over in their graves do to lack of fight!