The Budget Brigade would like to wish you all a great holiday season and a super New Year.

We would also like to thank all of our readers for following our work supporting us in 2008. We will be on vacation until January, but will return in 2009 to continue keeping an eye on things.

Image by Flickr user wan · der · lust used under a Creative Commons license.

Thomas Frank wrote an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal before Thanksgiving that is a great overview of the problems of a government contracting system run amok. The entire column is worth reading, but here's a key passage:

Instead the [federal spending] expansion went, largely, to private contractors, whose employees by 2005 outnumbered traditional civil servants by four to one, according to estimates by Paul Light of New York University. Consider that in just one category of the federal budget -- spending on intelligence -- apparently 70% now goes to private contractors, according to investigative reporter Tim Shorrock, author of "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing."

Today contractors work alongside government employees all across Washington, often for much better pay. There are seminars you can attend where you will learn how to game the contracting system, reduce your competition, and maximize your haul from good ol' open-handed Uncle Sam. ("Why not become an insider and share in this huge pot of gold?" asks an email ad for one that I got yesterday.) There are even, as Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, D.C., told me, "contractor employees -- lots of them -- whose sole responsibility is to dream up things the government needs to buy from them. The pathetic part is that often the government listens -- kind of like a kid watching a cereal commercial."

Frank calls for a bold vision at the end - a massive government investigation to bring accountability to federal contracting systems and reconstitute the process. Might not be a bad idea.

Buried in this article on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates staying in office for the incoming Obama Administration, is this mention of the next war funding request from the current administration:

And Gates said that the next request for emergency war funding, an estimated $83 billion, would be delivered to Congress in a matter of weeks. If approved, it would bring the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to about $947 billion.

I guess this news is competing emergency financial rescue sums with the word "trillion" attached to their numbers. Anyway, $83 billion is still a lot of cheddar, so this is something to keep an eye on.

An F/A-18C Hornet assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 113 refuels from a U.S. Air Force KC-135R Stratotanker aircraft while two F/A-18E Super Hornets assigned to VFA 115 fly alongside during flight operations above Afghanistan Aug. 28, 2008. VFA 113 and VFA 115 are attached to Carrier Air Wing 14 aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76). (DoD photo by Cmdr. Erik Etz, U.S. Navy/Released)