This is an out of the way article. It’s on A2 in today’s Post. But it may be the important news reported in the paper today. According to the article, under pressure from Congress, the CIA is moving to reduce its dependence private contractors, who now make up roughly one-third of the CIA workforce. There’s a separate and very important question of how the use of such contractors affects the legality and accountability of intelligence work. But purely on a budgetary level the numbers are quite telling. According to the article an investigation revealed that a government civilian employee runs the Agency around $126,500 a year while an outside contractor, doing the same work, runs about $250,000. And the key point is that most of the ‘contractors’ are actually Agency employees who ‘resign’ mid-career and then more or less immediately come back as contractors at twice the cost to the government.
Some of that money likely goes to the analysts and agents who have themselves become contractors. But I’d be confident that the lion’s share goes to the companies they go to work for, building in an unnecessary and costly layer of cost which has the only net result of fattening some CEO’s pocket.
It’s also an invitation to corruption. If you look at the Duke Cunningham and several of the related scandals, they were largely about ex-intel officers leaving government work, setting up a company to do what they were doing on the inside and then hiring their colleagues away from the intel agencies and then hiring them back as contractors. It’s a slow hollowing out of the government’s capacity and these outside companies compete by buttering up corrupt members of Congress for intel earmarks that force the government to buy their services.
The big question in my mind is whether a similar crackdown will take place in the Pentagon where these practices and this sort of waste is at least as prevalent.
