[bsder]

> The real problem is public corruption

The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth combined with pique at government departments that had the temerity to point out that "Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)".

The problem is that you switch from the government doing something possibly inefficiently to private industry who WILL take their cut no matter what which leads to even less efficiency. The contracting companies are the same but they love privatization because the government has far less recourse when they don't deliver properly.

If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.

For the modern strain: see DOGE. And how much money got saved? Yeah, exactly like that.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth

For that to be true it would have to be actually saving money in order to allow lower taxes at a given level of deficit spending.

> Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)

Quoting a satirist isn't a real argument.

> If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.

If you want real competition then you need real competition, i.e. multiple companies that can each supply the thing. And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.

But when the corruption is the outcome desired by the politicians, preventing competing bidders is the name of the game.

[bsder]

> Quoting a satirist isn't a real argument.

Quoting Republican propaganda isn't a real argument, but you did it anyway.

The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).

> And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.

This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that. So, contractors only have to worry about being sued after the fact, if that. In reality, the failures only manifest 10 years down the road and the companies have all rolled up and disappeared with the profits.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Quoting Republican propaganda isn't a real argument, but you did it anyway.

I think you're missing the dichotomy:

> The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).

One of two things has to be true. Either their purpose in doing privatization is to cut government spending in order to cut taxes, which would imply that it actually does save money. Or, their purpose is something else, like diverting the same number of tax dollars to their cronies, in which case "in order to cut taxes" is an erroneous attribution of their purpose.

And by the evidence it's the second one, because they don't actually cut spending and yet they still want to do privatization for some reason. Meanwhile if it was the first one as you claim then we should actually want to do it because then it's more efficient and would provide more government services per tax dollar regardless of whether or not you want to cut taxes.

> This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that.

This doesn't require a large number of personnel and in particular it doesn't require the likes of bus drivers or construction workers to be direct government employees, because they're not going to be tasked with making managerial decisions either way.

The real problem is that the people who are tasked with those decisions get paid off (revolving door etc.) to make sure the government gets locked in to some specific contractor or otherwise takes no effective recourse when they come in late and over budget.