The Political Chase

The root cause of State Dept. contractor problems

I am not convinced the proper message is getting through as the press continues to report on the poor results achieved as a result of the State Department hiring contractors to provide security services. Today the New York Times focuses on Dyncorp, and in a somewhat broader sense, the Bush administration’s use of contractors for various functions and services throughout the government. While none of the allegations made about Dyncorp and the State Department today should be trivialized, they are unquestionably a subset of a systemic issue throughout the Bush administration with respect to privatizing government services. The real issues are privatization policies in general and how efficiently they are managed throughout the administration.

At this late date in the Bush administration, there is relatively little that can be done to address the systemic issues because the root cause is quite simply George Bush’s catastrophic management of bad decisions and policies.

As the Times reported, George Bush has outsourced an incredibly large segment of the government, but has not managed the outsourcing, which always results in failure. That’s a very broad and strong indictment that I cannot possibly support in the confines of a single post; however, many years of successful outsourcing experience qualifies me to render that opinion.

The administration has obviously outsourced government operations and services to contractors such as Dyncorp and Blackwater, and basically walked away from those functions with an expectation they will be properly managed by the contractor simply because a contract exists between the two parties. Successful outsourcing simply does not work that way. These few passages from today’s article support my argument.

State Department contracting officials complain that they do not have nearly enough people to properly oversee the more than 2,500 contractors now under their informal command around the world.

The Bush administration has doubled the amount of government money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion, creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditing contracts has barely grown.

The only real solution is to fire the incompetent president, but since the government is not Acme Corp. firing the incompetent manager is not an option — plain and simple. This is what we get for electing an idiot with a long-standing history of failure after failure. Congress can only approach these issues tactically as they arise, deal with them to the extent possible, and wait for the Decider to go back to Crawford, unless he is impeached otherwise .