| > There’s consensus in this thread that this process reinforces corruption There is no such consensus, and the idea that it reinforces corruption is contrary to common sense -- it's self-evident that maximum corruption bypasses specifications and public bidding altogether and just hands a contract to a politician's friend. > If you want to prevent corruption, hire engineers directly at market rate It's not feasible for a government to accomplish all its tasks by hiring and never by contracting. It would be incredibly wasteful because many projects are one-off, whether building a new suspension bridge or a huge new IT project. It's like saying a company should have no suppliers and write all its own software from scratch. > just study history. The US government used to work this way I've studied quite a bit of history thanks, and government in the US used to be quite corrupt compared to today -- just look up Tammany Hall [1] if you'd like a quick introduction. Corruption in the US has very much decreased over the past 150 years. Outsourcing has existed as long as government has existed. I think you're confusing outsourcing as a general concept with privatization as a specific issue, which is about one-off decisions to choose to start outsourcing things that were previously done in-house. Which has its own set of pros and cons. But no government can in-house everything. So hiring in-house is not the answer to corruption. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall |