Gov't Lifts Contract Work Force To Save Money, Add Flexibility
Source: By JED GRAHAM, Investors Business Daily, December 10, 2007
The era of big government has made a strong comeback since the late 1990s, but federal payrolls have barely budged. The real growth has come in the hiring of contractors. Sen. Hillary Clinton says she would end that as president. She has proposed cutting 500,000 government contractors, claiming it would save $10 billion to $18 billion a year.
But independent analyses suggest the plan could hurt mission-critical work or boost costs if the government does the work. In Iraq alone, contractors -- many of them Iraqi -- outnumber troops by about 180,000 to 160,000.
........ "Her appeal is much less to the public and much more to labor organizations such as AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees)," he [Paul Light] said. Indeed, at an AFSCME-sponsored debate earlier this year, Clinton made a strong pitch. "I stood with AFSCME against the privatization of Social Security," she said, "and now I want to stand with you against the privatization of our government."