If like me you work for the federal government, or even if you do not, there is a good chance you have contractors in your workplace. Love or loathe contractors they are a fact of work life for many of us. Arguably, our occupation of Iraq would not have succeeded without lining the pockets of contractors like Halliburton with billions of dollars. The Army gave up making their privates peel potatoes decades ago.
Contractors are often necessary. I would not want to replace my own roof, or make a roofer my employee just to get my roof replaced. The theory of contracting is it allows you to acquire either a specialized skill for a limited period or it allows others to perform routine services that are considered so ordinary that they can be easily replaced if they do not perform. You hire employees for those unique, domain related skills that you will need performed on a continuing basis.
Where I work there are many contractors that are truly disposable. After a couple years, they seem almost like part of the furniture. Then one day they disappear along with their contract. These include what I think of as people in blue (from their blue garments): guards, floor sweepers, restroom cleaners and the people who man the registers in our cafeteria. Then there are others that are technically contractors but sure feel like employees to me.
In my last job, contractors were so pervasive and the downsizing so extreme that federal employees like myself who just happened to be able to program a computer were not allowed to. Computer programming and design, even for large legacy systems that were poorly documented, were treated the same I treat my roof: hire a contractor. Instead, we project managers were tasked to make sure our systems were maintained and modified but having little understanding of how it actually worked. Consequently, keeping the contractors who could actually retrofit the system became key to our own job success. If some of these contractors left, our agency’s mission would have been severely impacted.
After a while, it became clear that the contractors had the vital domain knowledge and project managers never would because it was out of our scope of permitted duties. It was a very curious situation: the federal employees, people who normally hang around an agency for twenty years or more, would hop and skip other agencies where they felt more vested in their work. Meanwhile some of the key contractors had stayed there for twenty years or more and were effectively managing government systems. They were indispensable. The contracting agency changed, but they still sat at the same desks doing the same work, but drawing a salary from a different company. The smarter ones incorporated and sold the services of their “corporation” to the contracting agency for higher sums of money. Some of these people were making in effect GS-15 money for GS-12 work. It is nice work if you can get it because you effectively created your own small monopoly.
Throughout the federal government, contractors are doing work that they should not. The Washington Post today documented yet another example of contracting going awry. The Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services audited medical equipment claims that were charged to the taxpayer. It found an error rate of 29 percent. Who is doing this work? Contractors. Should they? Probably not.
Considering that Medicare costs hundreds of billions of tax dollars a year, an error rate of 29 percent is unacceptable. Some senior bureaucrat, probably to satisfy the current administration in power, which believes in maximum contracting out, decided that it did not want to make actual employees responsible for monetary judgments like what constitutes a valid government expense. This was a boneheaded decision that has since resulted in what appears to be a waste of billions of dollars annually. What incentive does a contractor have to excel when every few years their contract will be re-competed? Why should a contractor’s employee care too much when they are looking at the calendar and are pondering their next contract too? Why in particular should they care when they are making these decisions yet are not held directly accountable for their decisions? They will be paid regardless.
Since contracts are legal instruments, contractors excel and doing precisely what the contract says and typically have little incentive to go beyond it. Many in fact prefer to do less than what is required, on the hope that it will be too much hassle to hold them accountable. This results, coincidentally, in an improvement to their bottom line. That appears to be the case at HHS. This happens because contractors are not necessarily vested in their work, like an employee would be nor is there much fear of accountability. The result can and often does breed mediocrity. Mediocrity is driven by an obsession by the government to get the lowest cost. It operates on the assumption that the work is in essence rote, when it is often specialized, unique and enduring. Yet, year after year, as I look around it sure appears that some contractors are doing this kind of work. If they look like an employee and smell like an employee why are they not treated as an employee? Why not just hire them? You already know the answer: because it is politically incorrect.
My office is big enough where it recently opened its own health club. Plastered on the door is a prominent notice: the club is for employees not contractors. As you might expect, an employee get other perks too such as a generous retirement plan. Occasionally though a contractor gets a perk that an employee does not. In my agency when a contractor travels on official business, the travel time is billable, along with all their travel expenses. Employees are not entitled to overtime for travel on nights or weekends. (Over the last few years, we were allowed to claim travel time outside of our regular hours as compensatory time. In addition, I can keep what small frequent flyer miles I earn.)
Once upon a time, I learned that the relationship between an agency and a contractor was legally considered a “relationship of equals” rather than a supervisor-employee relationship. This makes sense if you are a homeowner and need your roof fixed, but in the workplace, it often makes little sense and is a distinction that is meaningful only to lawyers.
I think contracting rules should be rewritten so they meet the common sense test. Contracting can be kept for jobs that are low-skilled and truly interchangeable, such as pushing a broom. They can be kept for highly specialized jobs that are limited in time and scope, such as a technology assessment. They should not be used to perform judgmental work for which the government is legally responsible. They should not be used as service contracts for work that is domain specific, specialized and amorphous in nature.
Until that time if any when some common sense returns to government, can we at least allow the contractors to use our health club?
August 26th, 2008 at 08:27pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2008 |
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Why do we have governments? I’m serious. It shouldn’t be necessary to even ask this question. It should be obvious. But apparently some members of Congress haven’t grasped the basics. People form governments because there are certain things that can’t or shouldn’t be done by the private sector. It’s right there in the preamble to the United States Constitution. Our federal government exists to:
“… establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
So outsourcing our judiciary is out. We have decided that corporations should not determine if we go to war or how it will be managed. Also our government is empowered through law to promote the general welfare. It’s okay and constitutional for the government to engage in activities that make the country more prosperous and free, as long as it does it generally, i.e. for the public.
So you would think that the National Weather Service (NWS), which meticulously monitors our nation’s weather and provides sound scientific forecasts to the public, would be engaged in an inherently governmental mission. Well, at least in the eyes of some people, you would be wrong. In particular Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (Republican, naturally) thinks the NWS needs to stop being so darn public with its information. Yes, although through your tax dollars we fund the NWS to the tune of about $617M a year, some like Sen. Santorum want you to pay again. He in particular has introduced S. 786, a bill “To clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, and for other purposes.”
Basically Santorum wants the NWS and its parent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to stop releasing those pesky routine forecasts and oh so convenient meteorological information. Instead he wants you to be forced to get the information from private sources like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel. The NWS should restrict itself to issuing “severe weather forecasts and warnings designed for the protection of life and property of the general public” and “hydrometeorological guidance and core forecast information.” Government civil servants would be prohibited from releasing any information “that might influence or affect the market value of any product, service, commodity, tradable, or business.” Whoa! That’s quite a way to stifle a civil servant!
In short, if someone else can make a dime off of it, NOAA and the NWS shouldn’t be doing it. But if some major tropical storm or tornado is headed our way it’s okay. And it’s still okay to put data out there for general use, but God forbid that it should be spun into actual useful information although it sounds like “guidance” is still okay. (”It will be hot in August in Texas.”) And don’t allow those government civil servants to actually use their professional education to turn information into knowledge, like make drought predictions. Save that for Santorum’s buddies at AccuWeather.
Why? Because Santorum claims this will stimulate the private sector innovation. He doesn’t want the government to provide this information in a timelier, cheaper or non-partisan manner. He wants you to cough up additional money to get this knowledge by subscribing to AccuWeather or watching all those annoying ads on Weather.com.
We so often hear that government is wasteful and bloated. But for less than $700M a year we have a National Weather Service that provides accurate and timely forecasts to all comers. (That’s less than $3 per year per person.) So what are the NWS and NOAA real crimes? What it amounts to is they are doing their job too well. All that valuable weather information is available in real time on their web sites. Oh Lord, the NWS has been too innovative. You can even get localized weather information available as an RSS news feed. And the NWS has done this despite flat or shrinking budgets.
So first civil servants get unfairly tarnished for being wasteful, bureaucratic, bloated and not thinking like the private sector. But when civil servants demonstrate extreme competence and entrepreneurial behavior, like apparently the many marvelous employees at the NWS, and do things faster, better and cheaper than the private sector, they are being bad. As a civil servant myself this really irks me. Man, we can’t win for losing! Apparently we aren’t living up to our stereotypes and that really irks some politicians.
Thankfully so far Santorum’s bill has no cosponsors. This means it is likely to die a quick death. But there are no guarantees in the weird Republican controlled times that we live in. You have to wonder what’s next: will the Secret Service be outsourced to Halliburton?
I am envious of my colleagues in NOAA and the NWS because they are doing exactly what I want to do at the U.S. Geological Survey. I manage NWISWeb, the system that puts out in real time water information collected by USGS’s National Water Information System (NWIS). Since I arrived about a year ago I’ve been building the case with management that we too need to make our peer reviewed water science data more broadly and easily available. NWISWeb is a great system but right now it is limited in that it serves our water data to be read by humans in a browser only. That hasn’t stopped lots of clever people in the private sector like the American Whitewater from figuring out ways to get our data and place it inside their products. And that’s fine with us. We make our data available equally to all comers. If the whitewater rafting people can figure out a way to show their members the local stream conditions on their web site more power to them.
I’d like to take the hassle out of getting the data though. I’d like us to offer our data using web services. This new technology would let computers grab and process our data on the fly without necessarily writing a lot of customized code, downloading files or scraping screens for content. I’d love for Weather.com to display our stream flow and groundwater information in their maps. (Of course I’d like them to show the USGS logo too, so the public understands who is really gathering the data.) Particularly during periods of heavy flooding and hurricanes this information served in many places can save lives and reduce property damage.
We already have hydrologists working with NOAA and other organizations like ocean.us. They are working on models that can turn the number of feet a stream is over flood stage into a map that will show the surface area that would be underwater. But wait! It sounds like if a lot of senators think like Senator Santorum then the USGS would be in the data collection business exclusively. No point having your hard earned tax money used to infer any meaning from the data. So what if you live in a trailer next to a rapidly rising creek and are too busy watching Survivor to check stream conditions. If you don’t have your contract with AccuWeather to warn you about approaching floods that’s your problem. As a risk mitigation strategy, consider buying a life vest for every member of your family.
Time will tell whether Santorum’s bill lives or dies. And time will tell whether my idea will fly at the USGS. Like the NWS we work paycheck to paycheck. Since the Bush Administration wants to keep our budget flat money likely won’t be forthcoming for such an endeavor unless it is pulled from somewhere else. But if my executives are to take a clue from Senator Santorum, they might fear to be too innovative. Could be risky.
Instead of whining that the government is doing its job too well, AccuWeather should find ways to add value. Perhaps it could put more of its own sensors out in the field, collect different kinds of data and integrate it with the NWS data they are already getting cost free. AccuWeather is not being innovative. It is being anticompetitive.
I say let’s applaud NOAA and the NWS for their excellence and foresight. There actually is quite a lot of this innovation in the federal government if you look for it. Perhaps instead of giving agencies like these flat budgets they should be rewarded for their innovation with more money so they can do an even better job. They are after all clearly promoting the general welfare. Our founding fathers would be pleased.
May 4th, 2005 at 09:11pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2005 |
no comments
