Outsourcer in Chief - New York Times
The New York Times

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December 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Outsourcer in Chief
By
PAUL KRUGMAN

According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he
won't respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group's report because he doesn't
want to "outsource" the role of commander in chief.

That's pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government's
responsibilities - not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private
companies with the
right connections - has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And
privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has
failed
on so many fronts.

For example, an article in Saturday's New York Times describes how the Coast
Guard has run a $17 billion modernization program: "Instead of managing the
project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman,
two of the nation's largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and
deliver
the new vessels and helicopters."

The result? Expensive ships that aren't seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored
"repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were
poorly
designed and perhaps unsafe," while "the contractors failed to fulfill their
obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently
steering
work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors."

In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to
DynCorp International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision:
when
conducting a recent review, auditors couldn't even find a copy of DynCorp's
contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan
still
doesn't have an effective police training program.

In July 2004, Government Executive magazine published an article titled
"Outsourcing Iraq," documenting how the U.S. occupation authorities had
transferred
responsibility for reconstruction to private contractors, with hardly any
oversight. "The only plan," it said, "appears to have been to let the
private
sector manage nation-building, mostly on their own." We all know how that
turned out.

On the home front, the Bush administration outsourced many responsibilities
of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For example, the job of
evacuating
people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar
Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn't even know
where
to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired,
Landstar "found us on the Web site."

It's now clear that there's a fundamental error in the antigovernment
ideology embraced by today's conservative movement. Conservatives look at
the virtues
of market competition and leap to the conclusion that private ownership, in
itself, is some kind of magic elixir. But there's no reason to assume that
a private company hired to perform a public service will do better than
people employed directly by the government.

In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its
political connections insulate it from accountability - which has, of
course, consistently
been the case under Mr. Bush. The inspectors' report on Afghanistan's police
conspicuously avoided assessing DynCorp's performance; even as government
auditors found fault with Landstar, the company received a plaque from the
Department of Transportation honoring its hurricane relief efforts.

Underlying this lack of accountability are the real motives for turning
government functions over to private companies, which have little to do with
efficiency.
To say the obvious: when you see a story about failed outsourcing, you can
be sure that the company in question is a major contributor to the
Republican
Party, is run by people with strong G.O.P. connections, or both.

So what happens now? The failure of privatization under the Bush
administration offers a target-rich environment to newly empowered
Congressional Democrats
- and I say, let the subpoenas fly. Bear in mind that we're not talking just
about wasted money: contracting failures in Iraq helped us lose one war,
similar
failures in Afghanistan may help us lose another, and FEMA's failures helped
us lose a great American city.

And maybe, just maybe, the abject failure of this administration's efforts
to outsource essential functions to the private sector will diminish the
antigovernment
prejudice created by decades of right-wing propaganda.

That's important, because the presumption that the private sector can do no
wrong and the government can do nothing right prevents us from coming to
grips
with some of America's biggest problems - in particular, our wildly
dysfunctional health care system. More on that in future columns.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.