The United States — One nation under contract

Thanks to Scott Horton, we have a good short interview with Professor Allison Stanger, author of the new book, One Nation Under Contract, a book which, in Horton's words, "takes a close look at the outsourcing of national security and foreign policy functions in the last decade."

Here are a few excerpts from that interview — I urge you to read the rest (my emphasis below):

1. You track the growing dependence of the federal government on contractors–from a little more than $200 billion in 2000 to about $440 billion in 2007. What shifts in policy account for this explosive growth in the use of contractors?

The main factor was the privatization of war. Iraq and Afghanistan are America’s first contractors’ wars, with contractors often outnumbering uniformed personnel on the ground in both conflicts. This development is new and unprecedented. At the height of the Vietnam War, contractors represented just 14 percent of the American presence on the ground. Without contractors, we would need a draft to wage these two wars, and with a draft, we would obviously have a very different political situation.

While wartime contracting and successive supplemental appropriations have fueled these dramatic trends, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans alike embraced outsourcing the work of government to the private sector whenever possible, both as a perceived cost-savings measure and as a mechanism for getting things done more efficiently. But the unprecedented explosion of contracting—to use Defense Secretary Gates’s language, “willy-nilly” contracting—to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan was a tale of unprecedented waste, fraud, and abuse (PDF). Taxpayer money obviously cannot be well spent when government is not following the money.

And what about the current president's role in this?

The trends mapped in the book have continued unabated under the Obama Administration, and in many ways our dependence on contractors has grown. When the State Department replaces the U.S. military in Iraq, they will be wholly reliant on contractors to pursue the mission. To make matters worse, Congress is currently poised to slash funding for open government initiatives from $35 million to $8 million on President Obama’s watch.

She goes on to talk about the still-incomplete, invaluable government site USASpending.gov, which was vital to her in her research. The current proposed spending cuts are implemented, she thinks that site would be closed.

Stanger calls that "ironic." To me, that sounds like the goal.

This is one of those topics on which many of us think we know the broad strokes (we do; this is looting on a massive scale), and don't realize or expose ourselves to the wealth of detail that makes those broad strokes broad.

Professor Stanger has the numbers and the analysis. The information is accessible and shocking. For example: "Department of Defense spent $133.2 billion on contracts and by 2008, that figure had grown to $391.9 billion, an almost three-fold increase." And phrases like taxpayer money "flowing through subcontracts into the pockets of the Taliban" come up.

There's more where that came from, and Horton recommends the book highly. Please do click through if government contracting and privatization is on your reading radar.

GP