By ANDRE FRANCISCO
In our latest video, POGO Investigator Paul Chassy and POGO General Counsel Scott Amey discuss their new report: Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors. Chassy and Amey debunk the myth that private contractors are cheaper than using federal workers.
For more on what others are saying about the the report, read after the jump.
Ron Nixon wrote about the study in The New York Times
Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University who has studied the contractor work force, said he found the POGO study interesting. “Contracting out to the private sector is often oversold as the answer to better services, better performance and better cost,” Mr. Light said. “But doing this type of analysis shows that it’s not the case.”
Reihan Salam, writing in National Review, sees the waste in federal contracting as a problem of procurement officers and compensation structure.
...The federal government should be headhunting the best procurement officers from around the world, offering bounties, citizenship, and a large plot of land in scenic Maine or Montana or both to skilled procurement officers from Singapore or Switzerland or private industry and paying them a competitive salary.
Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum saw the report as somewhat of a vindication of the often-demonized federal worker.
So how about those overpaid government workers? We should probably just can the whole unionized lot of them and contract out their jobs to the lean-n-mean private sector. That'd save the taxpayers some serious dough, wouldn't it? Maybe not. There's a reason that private contractors are called Beltway Bandits, after all.
Stephanie Condon on the CBS News website,
The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees seized on the report to argue that the government should stop privatizing services.
"In the wake of the worst recession in our lifetime, federal, state and local governments should not be doling out billions of dollars to private contractors to perform services that can be done more efficiently and at lower cost by public workers," AFSCME President Gerald McEntee said in a statement.
Sarah Chacko in Federal Times,
Decisions to do work in-house or outsource to a private contractor often involve a comparison of federal employee compensation to private-sector rates. But the government often pays contractors more than what the market dictates, the report shows.
Andre Francisco is a POGO Communications Associate.
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