Outsourcing Government: Under Bush, contractors deposit campaign contributions, use state as ATM

LAT op-ed: Outsourcing government
The administration's overuse of contractors -- abroad and at home -- is leaving the public sector unable to perform its most basic functions.
By Naomi Klein
October 20, 2007

....According to this radical vision, contractors treat the state as an ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions like securing borders and interrogating prisoners, and making deposits in the form of campaign contributions. As President Bush's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, put it: "The general idea -- that the business of government is not to provide services but to make sure that they are provided -- seems self-evident to me."

The flip side of the Daniels directive is that the public sector is rapidly losing the ability to fulfill its most basic responsibilities -- and nowhere more so than in the Department of Homeland Security, which, as a Bush creation, has followed the ATM model since its inception.....And as one former top Homeland Security official put it: "If it doesn't come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it." Put simply, if any given job can't be outsourced, it can't be done.

This philosophy, so central to the Bush years, explains statistics like this one: In 2003, the U.S. government handed out 3,512 contracts to companies to perform domestic security functions, from bomb detection to data mining. In the 22-month period ending in August 2006, the Homeland Security Department had issued more than 115,000 security-related contracts.

If government is now an ATM, perhaps the war on terror is best understood not as a war but as a A SPRAWLING NEW ECONOMY, ONE BASED ON CONTINUED DISASTER AND INSTABILITY. In this economy, the Bush team doesn't run the venture exactly; rather, it plays the role of deep-pocketed venture capitalist, always on the lookout for new security start-ups (overwhelmingly headed by former employees of the Pentagon and Homeland Security). Roger Novak, whose firm invests in homeland security companies, explains it like this: "Every fund is seeing how big the (government) trough is and asking, how do I get a piece of that action?"...

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It still looks like a government -- with impressive buildings, presidential news briefings, policy battles. But pull back the curtain and there is nobody home....

(Naomi Klein is the author, most recently, of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.")

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-klein20oct20,0,3131093.story