Corruption in full bloom as Bush plans to outsource civil service.
President Bush’s new proposal to outsource 850,000 federal jobs has drawn sharp criticism for its likely effect of increasing corruption in government. White House political honcho Karl Rove has compared Bush to Andrew Jackson, though apparently Rove was not intending to allude to Jackson’s corrupt “spoils system” of handing out federal jobs on the basis of party loyalty. (*) Paul Krugman points out that the justification Bush cites, cost savings, is illusory. (†) When government services are privatized, the initial bidding process will show projected cost savings for public services, but once the private contractors start doing the work, they regularly demand more than they bid for the job, saying they cannot do the work at the price they agreed to. Government has nowhere else to turn, having liquidated the prior public agency, and must pay up. The result is that private contractors don’t save the government a lot of money except in some areas of service. In those areas, privatization makes sense. In most areas, it doesn’t. Bush’s plan won’t save much money overall, though the initial projections will make that claim. The larger problem is not the phony cost savings, however. It is the corruption that this system would engender.
Krugman reports that the President’s brother, Jeb Bush, has already undertaken the same policy in Florida where he is governor. Since Jeb Bush’s policy went into effect, privatized government jobs have gone out mostly to the fiercest of Republican loyalists—Republican contributors who contribute exclusively to Republican candidates—and in return those very same loyalists have created a feedback loop by pumping more of their dollars, no doubt earned through the corrupt bidding process, into the coffers of Republican candidates.
At the federal level, it can only get worse. How could the bidding out of 850,000 jobs take place in any reasonable and timely manner? There are just too many bids to manage in an effective way. Instead of an intelligently designed process guided by awarding contracts to the most efficient and serious bidders, the process will devolve into a feeding frenzy where the staunchest of Republican loyalists will get the juiciest of government contracts.
President Bush has evinced the virtue of constancy in his dogged pursuit of terrorists and their state sponsors. He is not dissuaded by those who falsely believe that terrorism is a social condition that can be cured by feeding the hungry or kowtowing to every ludicrous demand. Nevertheless, constancy taken to an extreme ceases to be a virtue. If President Bush pursues this reckless patronage plan that he did not even talk to voters about on the campaign trail, with the same vigor he is pursuing the fleecing of Americans’ hard-earned Social Security dollars by casting them into the over-priced stock market, then the civil service is truly in trouble.
Bush does not believe that government can ever work despite the evidence to the contrary. Thus, instead of proposing badly needed reforms to the civil service system, he apparently intends to toss out the 130-year-old system as if it had no worth at all. The baby is flung out the back window along with the bathwater. The civil service system does have worth. In addition to the many skilled government employees whose only would-be demerit is their inability to get media coverage, the civil service system has remained remarkably free of corruption. In the US, bribery is uncommon. In this, we compare favorably to just about every other country. To replace our bribery-resistant system, the President is proposing a system of institutionalized bribery, albeit in a form that is confusing enough to the masses to create plausible deniability. It is like the police siding with the gangsters.
Thanks to incompetent management by political leaders from both parties, our country is becoming more and more corrupt every day. From stock analyst Jack Grubman’s rating adjustment of AT&T stock for no purpose at all except to forward a bribe so that he could send his twins to a tony, exclusive nursery school (‡); the Enron disaster; the WorldCom disaster; the corporate responsibility mess; the shenanigans of Thomas White; Bush’s own secret backroom deals; the continued de facto bribery allowed by the campaign finance system; and now Bush’s plan to auction off government contracts for ever-increasing campaign contributions, America is indeed “slouching towards Gomorrah,” but not at all in the way that Messers. Bork and Bennett would have the public believe.
Enough is enough. I love my country too much not to speak out when I see us heading into an abyss of wickedness and debasement. Let us all work hard to see that the Bush patronage system never passes Congress. We still have another 719 days until the 2004 elections.
Last updated: 22 November 2002. Jack Grubman’s twins are of age to attend nursery school, not kindergarten.