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Monday, October 23, 2006
Heritage Gets Desperate
The Heritage Foundation blog put an irresponsible bit of nonsense on their blog last week.
Drawing on an unscientific, informal poll of the readers of Federal Times, the author concludes that there is still much waste in federal programs that can only be rooted out with more competition from the private sector.
From a policy perspective, we wonder that competitive sourcing wouldn't address the lax and wasteful budgeting and work procedures behind these poor results. The basic idea is that government workers compete with private-sector entities in submitting bids for the functions that they now perform.
Big surprise, I know- Heritage thinks market forces make everything nice again. But the interesting thing here is that, for the last 6 years, the Bush Administration has been actively pushing an extreme privatization agenda, outsourcing thousands of jobs and effectively doubling the amount of money spent by government contractors.
And guess what? It hasn’t saved a dime. Nobody has documented any actualized savings.
Moreover, privatization has undermined the integrity of several federal agencies. Abuse, fraud and waste are rampant in federal contracting. Just take a look at the news and you'll see what I mean.
Heritage-ies might think that this only means we haven’t gone far enough. Privatize more and better, they’ll say, and the theory will finally bear itself out. That might be true. Who knows? But privatization has gone very far already. Nearly 1 million jobs have been slated to be examined for their potential to be privatized, thousands have been privatized, and government contracting has gotten out of control. Given the sheer scope of privatization over the last 6 years, in the very least, it’s clear that privatization has not made that much of an impact on the cost of government services.
For the last 6 years of failure, though, Heritage has sung the same song, despite mounting counterfactuals. Makes you wonder if they’re really all that interested in solving the problem. Or if the problem of widespread waste and inefficiency by government employees ever really existed in the first place.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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