Government Jobs and Me!

Being conservative at heart, I am glad President Bush is wanting to reduce the size of Government. But, I wish it was really a true reduction in size. Being employed by Government for the past 7 years I know what the reduction means; contracting out! I've come to the conclusion that Government will never really be smaller, it'll just be more contractors to Government emplyees. The number of bodies doing the job won't be any less, in fact the total bodies may actually be more, but the full time Government workforce will be reduced.

The advantages are there will be fewer employees to worry about retirement programs, 401k matching, health care, etc... But the budget of the agencies which convert positions to contract will not be reduced, no the budgets will continue to grow and to what effect will the agency benefit from its new contractors? For one thing, the contract workers will not provide any services beyond what is contracted for, whereas the full time Government worker provides many services beyond their position descriptions. Innovation and imagination provided by the full time Government employee are provided to the Agency free of charge, the same fresh ideas and new ways from contractors come at a hefty premium. As the years go by it is not long till the contract employee becomes expensive and burdensome, full time Government employees will slowly and eventually make their way back into the Government positions replacing the contractor's who by their very nature are limiting and unresponsive to the daily changing needs of federal Agencies today.

If you want to know how contrating out services is working, just ask any TSA manager how he likes his IT support. Their contract with Unisys does not put an IT employee into every facility. As a result, TSA managers are still connecting to their networks at Headquarters via dialup modems to pass email and files. LANs (Local Area Networks) are non-exisitant in many facilities and employees are saving files to 3.5" floppies and carrying them to a computer with a printer attached to print hard copies. Computers in facilites are all stand-a-lone and unable to share files without either dialing into their Headquarters network and attaching them to e-mail or doing the floppy shuffle and this after the TSA was formed over 12 months ago.

No contracting out is not the answer! Elimination of Agencies which serve no usefull purpose is the answer. The are many of these with the Rural Electric Administration, Helium Reserves, and Department of Education being just a few of these. Elimination of these Agencies will make a difference in both the size of Government as well as result in a reduction of the budget needed toi support them. Consolidation of redundent functions amoung many similar agencies will also reduce the size of the federal workforce and actually contribute to the reduction in size of the budget needed to support the Government.

Of course this is all predicated on tax reductions to the citizenry for the realized savings and not a shifting of the savings to other federal spending or entitlement programs.

Note: I am a federal IT person who stands a chance of having my position contracted out in the near term. While nothing has been said about my job being subject to A-76 review, I can read the writing on the wall!