| Even small contractors do this. I once worked on a range safety reporting application, with a budget of 4 hours per month for the developer maintenance. It was not by any means a big-money contract. But the site still had a database behind it, and I was given explicit instructions by management to not give too much of our data to the government customer at once. It's almost like the company was trying to punish the government for not paying them more money. I really had a personal ethical struggle with that one, as I'm a citizen more than I am an employee, but the latter definitely pays better. In the end, I chose to not slip a complete copy of the database onto a delivery CD, and the company shuttered the branch office and fired everyone working in it shortly thereafter. But then I did get to do some consulting work for the successor company as I was looking for a new "permanent" position, which allowed me to pay some bills while otherwise unemployed. Slight win for me, individually, but that government customer got screwed, mainly because a different government customer (that was paying a lot more per month) pulled their big contract and awarded the work to someone else. As I walked out of the customer's office for the last time, the Army officer in charge of the program encouraged me to apply for open government technology positions, and I couldn't help thinking about what a bad deal that would be for me financially. It all boils down to limits on individual direct employee salaries, but no limits on what a contractor company may be paid for hiring exactly the same person to do exactly the same work. So the government can pay me $35/hour directly, or they can pay a company $200/hour, so they can indirectly pay me $50/hour. Oh, and they can then fire me at the drop of a hat. (This was before 18F, by the way.) I have no idea how anyone justifies the argument that outsourcing essential government functions to private companies saves money. It's pants-on-head stupid. It exposes enough flesh for the parasitic military-industrial contractors to dig in their mouth-parts, and then never stop sucking out the blood. It's the same for non-military privatized functions. The agency problem always gets in the way. People insert themselves into the system to become unmovable middlemen, and extract maximum value by standing between work and workers. |