Privatized Bureaucracy

A huge part of the DoD budget has nothing to do with the common defense. Filled with waste. One form is privatized bureaucrats. Why many love long war and play on a frightened populace.

One reason that there are few examples of wasteful, expensive weapons being terminated like the A-12, is many acquisition programs no longer use career civil servants who are protected by Title 5 United States Code from retaliation. Program offices are now populated with “non personal services” contractor support who if they raise an issue uncomfortable to the “agenda” are eliminated with one phone call.

Thus few in the government office will side with good decisions when the program manager needs to deliver a bad system, “you want it badly, you get it bad”.

Not so long ago, I received a a request for utterly mundane information from a “dot mil” e-mail account but after the name was “.ctr”, meaning the person sending the e-mail for mundane, senseless data was a contractor, working for a company performing “non personal services”. By the acquisition regulations and terms of the contract that person cannot deliver the service, the company he works for has to deliver it.

So, I received an e-mail from a company using the “dot mil” e-mail system to acquire and send them very insignificant information. Wasting my time and several others.

What should I think of this?

Are services companies making work for other services companies? Are they making work for the few remaining government people who have little interest in telling the folks in DC some insignificant fact about what they are doing?

Seems to me, with a war going on and not being able to send good personal equipment to the soldiers, the government should fire the contracted out bureaucracy.

I won’t even go into how one would put a price on the services provided by the company whom that e-mail originator works for. Was the work to put together the request worthy of the labor rate billed? Were the hours expended spent productively? Were too many hour used to fill an otherwise empty workday? Work year?

“Non personal services” are intangibles, a new code for the waste. An expensive evolution of painting rocks only with profits not privates.

This is not unique to DoD.