I’m sorry to be inappropriate, but I find it hard not to laugh when someone uses the words “Bush” and “efficiency” in the same sentence:
Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.
Wassmann, 40, was among a group of information management employees at West Point who had to prove that they could do their jobs better and more cheaply than a private contractor. If they could not, they were told, the work would be outsourced. It was all part of President Bush’s government-wide plan to reduce costs by inviting contractors to bid on about 425,000 federal jobs that could be considered “commercial” in nature.
The West Point competition dragged on for more than two years. In the end, Wassmann and most of his co-workers won, but only by agreeing to downsize from 119 employees to 88. And the mood has never been worse, he said.
“Tensions are at an all-time high,” he said. “We have to cut ourselves to the bone to win these bids. . . . And morale is just destroyed afterward.
But of course, it’s never been about efficiency, it’s about steering profits to political contributors. You’d have to be Rip Van Winkle to think otherwise.
Bush is very efficient in his true goal (as you noted) of steering profits to political contributors. Screwing up government agencies and keeping them from helping the general public is also a feature, not a bug.
I tried to get some notice of this in the past. At my agency, all IM (computer, communications, etc) is being outsourced to Lockheed of all places. In just a couple of weeks, if paper jams in the photocopier, I’ll have to file a ‘help desk ticket’ with Lockheed in Alabama (I’m in New Mexico). Depending on how much someone (it was never well explained who) rated (platinum, gold, silver) the importance of my activities for the organization, someone at Lockheed will eventually place a call to a contractor here in New Mexico (perhaps even located in my building, perhaps even on the same floor) to go unjam the paper block. If you’re rated ’silver’ response may be as long as two days (may be? yeah right). I am absolutely prohibited from opening the machine and removing the jammed paper myself (they are considering locking all doors to the IM area so that workers can’t circumvent their ‘efficient’ system and contact a human being directly).
A requirement by Lockheed before they’d take the contract? The agency had to replace ALL computers, monitors, scanners, phones, servers, copiers . . . everything digital for 35,000 employees in hundreds of locations worldwide. Who are we buying the replacements from? Why Lockheed, of course.