Locally there are often conservatives who want to outsource governmental functions - the highway department, the school bus fleets (charter schools are just another form of outsourcing) and virtually any form of government employment. I have long opposed these attempts to put our tax dollars under the control of private vendors.
Sure, when a company comes in and offers to run your school bus fleet for less than you're paying now, or offers to repair and build roads at a cheaper rate, it sounds tempting. But the long-term costs can be staggering. They are going to low-ball you to get the bid. But, they need to make a profit so gradually they cut staffing, cut pay for staff, cut benefits for staff, (lowering the quality of the people they are able to attract) and in a year or two they ask for increases in the price that drive your government costs higher. And now the government is in a fix - they can't control what they have created - they've sold off their assets and to take over the school bus fleet or to take over the road crews would come at an extraordinary cost - virtually impossible.
On top of the cost factors, you've also lost control over quality and screw-ups that can turn into public relations issues.
This was the legacy left by the Great King Ronnie (see article below) who outsourced thousands of federal government jobs which paid reasonable wages to companies that now charge $400 per hour and up for doing the same work. It was a blunder that will haunt this nation for centuries unless something is done to control it.
EBT Shutdown Illustrates Stupidity of Outsourcing Government (Click on this headline to read more)
Friday, October 18, 2013, 6:15 pm
More costly, less effective. For more than 20 years, I've been writing about the insanity of "running government like a business." Outsourcing government has never been about cost savings or efficiency. As a Republican official gleefully explained to me, back when I was still a naive young reporter, it's only about one thing: Having big fat contracts you can parcel out to political donors. Witness the outsourced clusterf*ck that is the national Obamacare portal (the vendor list reads like a Who's Who of big-ticket campaign contributors and, as Jamie pointed out this week, the procurement process is a nightmare).
Which makes this Truthout story predictable:
Over the weekend, low-income shoppers in 17 states were unable to use their electronic food stamp debit cards. In this reporter's neighborhood in downtown New Orleans Saturday evening, rumors swirled around grocery store cash registers and street corners. Was the government shutdown to blame? Did the deadlock in Washington mean nutritional assistance was gone for good?
The public soon learned that government shutdown was not to blame. Xerox, a private company that state welfare agencies had contracted for computing services, admitted that a "routine test" caused a computer glitch that temporarily shut down the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system in Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan and 14 other states.
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