Are Feds Are Better Than Contractors?

"The government functions better when government employees, not private contractors, perform its tasks," argued Moshe Adler, who teaches economics in the department of urban planning at Columbia University, recently in the Los Angeles Times. When a civil servant supervises a contractor, "the inclination to do an honest job may come into conflict with his personal interests," Adler wrote. So "the taxpayer is better off when the government fulfills its function with government employees instead of private contractors who are supervised by government employees."

This argument that makes sense, but only in a pretty limited way. After all, in the great majority of cases involving contract supervision, the inclination to do an honest job doesn't come into conflict with an employee's interests. Most employees either have integrity, or don't have a conflict of interest--or both. Besides that, just because an employee doesn't have a conflict doesn't mean that he or she will do the best possible job for the taxpayer. Indeed, when most federal employee teams are forced in A-76 competitions to devise "most efficient organizations" to compete against private firms for their jobs, they suddenly find ways to cut costs in their operations.

This is really an academic argument anyway. The horse has long since left the barn on the government performing all of its functions with its own employees. We as a nation have decided on a bipartisan basis that we don't want a large federal workforce to do the government's business.