Privatizers' Predicament / States face a Congress increasingly hostile to outsourcing.
Source: JONATHAN WALTERS, Governing, September 20007
The current state penchant for contracting out social services -- a subject I discuss at length elsewhere in this issue -- is part of a larger privatization question that may turn out to have a profound impact on federal-state relations in a variety of significant program and policy areas. Sometimes known as the "yellow pages" approach to government, the privatization push at the state level operates on the premise that if the public sector is providing some service that's offered in the phone book by a private company, then that service is a potential candidate for contracting out.
......... Language in the recently passed House farm bill, for example, specifically delegates to public employees the job of determining eligibility for food stamps, language clearly designed to preempt any state's inclination to turn that job over to the private sector.