Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post on Monday that the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill includes a requirement that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell produce a report by March concerning the "activities performed by contractors" in all 16 intelligence agencies and how the outsourcing process at those agencies is overseen.

Apparently Congress is concerned the intelligence community does not understand which functions can appropriately be outsourced and which should be handled by government employees. Perhaps they are also concerned about one estimate showing a core government worker, on average, costs about half as much ($126,500) as a average contracted employee ($250,000). That fact alone is cause for concern. How are contractors supposed to be saving the government money when they are charging twice as much as it would cost the government?

Tom Shoop, who blogs over at Government Executive magazine, quoted another blogger who focuses on the intelligence community who correctly points out the funding structure Congress has implemented has lead to increased levels of outsourcing:

By limiting the number of positions within the Intelligence Community while adding funds for services, Congress set the stage for the wide scale outsourcing we see today, with some 70% of the de facto workforce of the CIA's National Clandestine Service made up of contractors. After years of contributing to the increasing reliance upon contractors, Congress is now providing a framework for the conversion of contractors into federal government employees--more or less.

An interesting aspect to this issue is that Congress has allowed Mr. McConnell the leeway to automatically change positions held by contractors into full-time government positions. McConnell has the authority to increase the size of the intelligence agencies by up to 10 percent.

This approach might be one way to fight back against the raft of outsourcing that has accelerated during the Bush presidency - by giving executive branch personnel the authority to expand government positions automatically rather than having to pound a higher appropriations number through Congress every year for staff increases. I'm curious to see if this tactic will work, and if so, if it will be tried elsewhere in the Federal government. Stay tuned...

The omnibus appropriations bill passed by the House last night contains 3,500 pages and over $516 billion in spending. Yet with all that space (and money), Congress could not find enough room for even their own priorities from earlier this year for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Specifics of the IRS's funding take from the omnibus show the House has included $2.15 billion for taxpayer services, down slightly from the $2.155 proposed earlier this year, $4.78 billion for enforcement (down from $4.93 billion) and $3.68 billion for operations (down from $3.77 billion). What's more, the House has backed away from a requirement for the IRS to develop a strategic plan to address the tax gap. The total IRS budget request ($10.89 billion) is $203 million below even President Bush's request!. What is going on here?

So, just to review, despite a year in which congressional hearings revealed that the IRS is underfunded, runs a dangerous and wasteful privatization program, and has no strategic plan for addressing the tax gap, Congress decided to give it less money, allow the privatization program to continue, and let the IRS off the hook for developing a strategic plan.

And I wonder why people don't believe in government...

More news is emerging from the budget deal reached over the weekend, and this tidbit is not good. The omnibus appropriations bills does not contain any language that would kill or restrict the private tax collection program run by the IRS. The version of the Financial Services Appropriations bill included language that would have stopped the IRS from outsourcing tax collection that was removed from the omnibus.