[acdha]

One factor you’ll see in many areas of government is the second order cost of eliminating civil service positions. It’s most common to talk about how contractors usually end up costing more and being less efficient due to additional overhead and conflicts of interest, but there’s a deeper problem that the government doesn’t have a staff of people with the knowledge and experience to select and manage contractors. That’s how you end up in situations where none of the alternatives are better than eating the cost of a bad plan or accepting a lower project lifetime, and because it’s a managerial failure the blame is often spread between three or more organizations and often has no effective accountability.