-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: February 20, 2007 10:29:35 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: The Green-Zoning of America
"The civil service system is more than a century old. In just 6
years the Bush Administration has managed to dismantle it,
restoring the spoils system, and Bush still has two years ahead of
him."
*The Green-Zoning of America*
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 5, 2007
One of the best of the many recent books about the Iraq debacle is
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." The
book tells a tale of hopes squandered in the name of politicization
and privatization: key jobs in Baghdad's Green Zone were assigned
on the basis of loyalty rather than know-how, while key functions
were outsourced to private contractors.
Two recent reports in The New York Times serve as a reminder that
the Bush
administration has brought the same corruption of governance to the
home front. Call it the Green-Zoning of America.
In the first article, The Times reported that a new executive order
requires that each agency contain a "regulatory policy office run
by a political appointee," a change that ''strengthens the hand of
the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been
generated by civil servants and scientific experts." Yesterday, The
Times turned to the rapid growth of federal contracting, fed "by a
philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government
does.''
These are two different pieces of the same story: under the guise
of promoting a conservative agenda, the Bush administration has
created a supersized version of the 19th-century spoils system.
The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January
2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled "Taking Charge
of Federal Personnel." The manifesto's message, in brief, was that
the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of
the new administration's conservative agenda. And there's no
question that Heritage's thinking reflected that of many people on
the Bush team.
How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost,
Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the
new administration "must make appointment decisions based on
loyalty first and expertise second."
Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing --
"contracting out as a management strategy." This would supposedly
reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of
reducing the total number of civil servants.
The Bush administration energetically put these recommendations
into effect. Political loyalists were installed throughout the
government, regardless of qualifications. And the administration
outsourced many government functions previously considered too
sensitive to privatize: yesterday's Times article begins with the
case of C.A.C.I. International, a private contractor hired, in
spite of the obvious conflict of interest, to process cases of
incompetence and fraud by private contractors. A few years earlier,
C.A.C.I. provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib.
The ostensible reason for politicizing and privatizing was to
promote the conservative ideal of smaller, more efficient
government. But the small-government rhetoric was never sincere:
from Day 1, the administration set out to create a vast new
patronage machine.
Those political appointees chosen for their loyalty, not their
expertise, aren't very good at doing their proper jobs -- as all
the world learned after Hurricane Katrina struck. But they have
been very good at rewarding campaign contributors, from energy
companies that benefit from lax regulation of pollution to
pharmaceutical companies that got a Medicare program systematically
designed to protect their profits.
And the executive order described by The Times will make it even
easier for political appointees to overrule the professionals,
tailoring government regulations to suit the interests of companies
that support the G.O.P. -- or to give lucrative contracts to people
with the right connections.
Meanwhile, never mind the idea that outsourcing of government
functions should be used to promote competition and save money. The
Times reports that ''fewer than half of all 'contract actions' --
new contracts and payments against existing contracts -- are now
subject to full and open competition,'' down from 79 percent in
2001. And many contractors are paid far more than it would cost to
do the job with government employees: those C.A.C.I. workers
processing claims against other contractors cost the government
$104 an hour.
What's truly amazing is how far back we've slid in such a short
time. The modern civil service system dates back more than a
century; in just six years the Bush administration has managed to
undo many of that system's achievements. And the administration
still has two years to go.
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