From POGO on Government Waste

Next time you hear someone trying to sell you on smaller government - think again.  When we privatize, when we shrink government resulting in reduced services like fewer teachers, fewer police, less infrastructure or poorly maintaining infrastructure......remember that privatizing services costs more, not less.  Civil service employees are not the enemy.  Politicians who transfer government provided services to more expensive private providers ARE the enemy of frugal and responsive, responsible government. I would encourage our readers not only to check out the POGO web site and their studies and reports, but also to follow up with other independent studies as well as the reports available online from the respective Inspectors General.

Project On Government Oversight

Bad Business: True or false? 
The U.S. government relies on contractors to do work because the private industry is cheaper than in-house staff.
If you guessed true, think again. POGO’s latest investigation busts this myth by showing that using contractors actually increases costs to taxpayers.

In fact, on average, contractors charge the government almost twice as much as the annual compensation of comparable federal employees. 

Tell your Member of Congress we can’t afford to pay twice as much for service contracting.

Of the 35 types of jobs that POGO looked at in its new report—the first report to compare contractor billing rates to the salaries and benefits of federal workers—it was cheaper to hire federal workers in all but just 2 cases.

Given that Congress’s special “Super Committee” has the goal of cutting $1.5 trillion from the deficit by December 2, we can’t let this kind of government waste continue. Tell your Member of Congress that it’s time to take a closer look at what service contracting costs taxpayers.

In some occupations, POGO found that the difference in price was so dramatic that anyone could easily see the government was getting ripped off. When the government hired a claims examiner for example, it paid contractors nearly five times more than if it had gone with a federal employee.

Even worse, the government doesn’t have the mechanisms in place to do basic price checks. Would you spend $320 billion a year without doing a cost analysis of the services you were paying for? Probably not.

You can help the government stop paying too much for contractors by bringing this problem to the attention of your Member of Congress. We simply can’t afford to be paying double if we don’t have to.