Recently, I quit my job in the federal government to pursue a career with a local software enginering company. A Republican friend of mine emailed me the following:
I commend you on your venture out into private enterprise, reducing your participation/dependancy on government. Do you still think government outsourcing is a bad thing?
Officially, the "government outsourcing" he refers to is Presiden't Bush's Competitive Sourcing Initiative as authorized and described by OMB Circular A-76. When conceived 30 years ago to clean up known government entities running amock, A-76 was a great thing. But today, they are applying it to ALL agencies with the fool's hope that they might make some parts of government more efficient.
A big part of the reason I left the Forest Service was because webmasters, cartographers, and geographic information specialists (my profession) are currently being studied for competitive sourcing. And based on what I've seen so far, the results can only be disastrous.
My response to him on the flip...
Dear Friend,
Yes, government outsourcing, the way it's currently being conducted, is a bad thing. It's being done under the false assumption that government will be made "more efficient." The only thing that has happened is that the targeted agencies have become considerably less productive due to decimated staffs and shredded morale.
First Example:
In the FS, Information Technology infrastructure was targeted for competitive sourcing, forcing them to reorganize into the "most efficient organization" or MEO. They reduced staff from 1600 down to 600 and forced most of the remains to move to a "national service center" in Albuquerque, NM. The cronies on the MEO team allowed IBM to provide high-level consulting, which allowed IBM to profit greatly from the new organization. What the IBM-led team came up with was a national service center, run by IBM, into which all IT support was funnelled. And when a FS employee needed computer support, they would call or email this service center, and IBM would get paid $20 for handling the transaction.
Meanwhile, back at the field offices, which now had no local IT support, people were spending significant parts of their day doing the jobs left behind when their IT staff was uprooted and replanted in ABQ. Printer out of toner? Do it yourself. Can't map your network drives? Pester a co-worker for help. Hard drive crashes? Call the support center and schedule an appointment. Someone from the RO will be there next week. Need to install Photoshop? Damn! Gotta call the service center and be put on hold while they laboriously granted you administrative rights to your PC... a process that worked only about half the time.
Anybody with computer skills became de facto IT support people for the rest of the office, because calling the service center was way too slow and frustrating.
It's truly sad. When I was hired in 1999, OPM had just finished creating a new special class of government worker, the computer specialist. This special class was given a boost in pay and its own series (2210). The intent was to "recruit and retain" a highly skilled force of career civil servants to provide high quality computer support for all agencies.
Then year 2000 happened. Bush took over, declared war on the federal workforce, and began decimating the troops. The Forest Service's budget was frozen. Today it remains at the 2001 funding level. And the advantages of being a computer specialist slowly degraded. The pay increase for being a 2210 has decreased by 40% over the past 5 years, making it almost pointless to be a computer specialist in government.
This has led to increasingly poor morale among computer specialists in general, and those at the new national service center in particular. Turnover rate is very high. Most of the best people left for other jobs elsewhere in government or the private sector (like me). And those left behind gave increasingly worsening service.
The Geospatial Service Center(where I worked) suffered some particularly bad episodes. We went from a highly skilled staff of 6 IT people to just one. We lost our top notch network administrator, who was forced into becoming a radio technician if he wanted to stay in Salt Lake City. Our Oracle and UNIX root passwords were changed, and our Oracle DBA and system administrator could no longer help us. They were converted into bureaucrats in order to stay in Salt Lake. They remained in our office, taking on new roles in the MEO, but could no longer help us.
I would come into work in the morning and find that Oracle was in a state of "imminent shutdown." So, I would call the service center to report it. "Have you tried rebooting your computer?" the ignorant IBM tech would ask. "Uh, no, it's the Oracle SERVER reporting the error," I would reply. "Well, we've found that most problems can be resolved by rebooting your computer," the idiot would insist.
"I'm sorry, which part of 'Imminent shutdown in progress' as reported by the SERVER don't you understand?"
"Are you sure it's not your computer having the problem?"
Arrrgh!
An hour later I would finally get a call from the "Server Team" who had mistakenly received my ticket. I would explain the Oracle problem, and they would re-route the ticket to the "Database Team." An hour later, the Database Team would call me, and I would re-explain the situation to them.
This was exceptionally BAD service, especially when you consider that our whole production line depended on Oracle uptime. None of my web applications would work when Oracle was down. Our geospatial data clearinghouse wouldn't work when Oracle was down. Our Print-on-Demand maps wouldn't work when Oracle was down. Our cartographic production system wouldn't work when Oracle was down. We all sat around twiddling our thumbs when Oracle was down.
Shall I go into the episode when the server was down for 11 days? Perhaps I'll save that rant for another day. What a fucking nightmare that was... and during the final weeks of a major production event, too! Yep, that was 11 fun filled days of government efficiency at its best!!!
Second example:
While IT was reorganizing, uprooting, and replanting in beautiful Albuquerque, NM, our Human Resources folks were going thru the same nightmare. Same scenario: massive staff cuts, new service center in ABQ, ridiculous reduction in services and responsiveness.
It got so bad that travel authorizations could not be processed in time for people to make reservations and go on their trips. Here's the situation. Your boss says you're going on a trip next month. So, you fill out the paperwork and fax it to the service center. You log into the travel system and make reservations, but you cannot pay for them, because you don't have an authorization number. So you wait, and you call, and you wait some more, and you call them again. And the travel date is getting closer and closer. But no authorization. So, you complain to your boss and he gives you permission to make your own reservations outside of the system, and you go on your trip. And then you return and there's still no authorization number. And your credit card bill comes, but you can't pay it because you can't file your travel voucher because you don't have an authorization yet. So, you pay for it with your own money!
Let's put this into perspective.
The reorganized IT group said it could save the government $150 million over the next 5 years. That's wonderful! What could we do with $150 million? Well, we could pay for 3 DAYS of the Iraq war. Oh, but then we'd be out of cash. Three fucking days of war in exchange for decimating IT services and uprooting hundreds of families and moving them to the armpit of the country! No offense to our Lobo friends, but Albuquerque sucks.
They are applying OMB Circular A-76 it to all these civilian service agencies with limited budgets that are already running about as efficiently as they can. But it's totally lost on the administration that the Forest Service WINS the bids for their own jobs 95% of the time, proving that they are already organized efficiently. Yet they keep doing it?
Why?
Why do they keep doing it? Here's why. The intent was never to make government more efficient. The intent has always been to unravel the New Deal and make private contractors more money in the process. Replacing career civil servants with corporate yes men has the side effect of removing one of the barriers that helps keep the executive in check.
When you have unremovable civil servants refusing to do things they consider unethical or illegal, then you as the executive have a problem. But if you can replace them with contractors who can be fired for refusing to do something, then score one for yourself. Cha ching!
Bottom line is replacing civil servants with yes men in the agencies that protect the environment (EPA), natural and recreational resources (NPS, USFS, BLM, USGS), your money and investments (SEC), and food and drug quality (FDA, USDA), can be disastrous.
We've already seen them run roughshod across many of these agencies by placing industry lobbyists, political cronies, and corporate executives in charge of many of these agencies. The term "conflict of interest" means nothing to them. They have degraded many protections thru Orwellian-sounding legislation like the 'Healthy Forests Act' that calls for clear-cutting forests as a means to prevent forest fires. There is the 'Clear Skies Act' that removes mandatory factory immision standards and makes them voluntary. They wrote our national energy policy behind closed doors with top energy executives, and then followed up with $8 billion in corporate welfare for Big Oil, and stood by while Enron manufactured an artificial energy shortage in California.
The more federal employees you get rid of, the easier this stuff is to pull off. The more yes men you have fearing for their jobs, the better. So, no, I don't think government outsourcing--as it is currently done--is good. I think it's quite harmful actually.
So, when The Decider says that he's "making government more efficient" I say, Take your 'efficient' gubbmint and shove it.
Special thanks to all my Republican friends and family for voting with their guts (or was it fears?) instead of their heads!!! I appreciate it.
Living in the reddest of red states (Utah) is frustrating at times. But I suppose the good news is that Utah is no longer the most Bush-loving state in the union. The latest SurveyUSA poll has Idaho (52%) just one point ahead of Utah (51%) in redness factor. If his approval rating dips below 50% I may just throw a party.