Today’s Must Read: The Senate is expected to hold a symbolic vote of no-confidence against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tonight, if Democrats can get enough Republican support to bring the resolution to the floor.
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.
Missed the Sunday chat shows? Not to worry. We survey the state of the war (and Joe Lieberman’s call for war with Iran) through the prism of the Sunday morning talk shows in todayâs Sunday Show Roundup edition of TPMtv …
Remember this?
“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
This week at TPMCafe, we’ve got the inside story of how these sixteen words went from a forged Italian letter to the President of the United States’ State of the Union. Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, co-authors of The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, are joining us at TPMCafe’s Table for One to share the story.
Near as I can tell the DOJ and the White House are still refusing any comment on Karl Rove’s alleged role in siccing the DOJ on former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL).
If you see any press reports of other journalists posing the questions, let us know.
Judge Robert Bork: torts for me but not for thee.
Bork, after a career advocating tort reform, is suing the Yale Club of New York City for $1 million plus punitive damages for failing to provide adequate staging for the dais he had to mount to give a speech at the club.
He slipped and fell, injuring his head and leg.
Horror Davidowitz decries anti-SUV bias in the Sopranos finale.
Todd Gitlin and Jo-Ann Mort remember philosopher Richard Rorty, 1931-2007.
CNN does Rudy Giuliani a favor by sprucing up his anti-terrorism resume for him.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) makes the no-confidence vote simple.