More on DHS Personnel Changes

I thought a little bit more today about yesterday’s post on the changes to personnel policy at DHS and the return to the pre-Harding days of yore, and, the more I think about it, the more it seems like a desire to subcontract out everything to consultants.

If people continue to leave the government in droves and no new talent can be attracted because of the poor working conditions, then eventually you’re going to need more people to staff projects, right?. [This is especially true if you’re throwing Liberty ® and Freedom ® around like a drunken national-guard pilot.] So either you're going to have to slow the exodus, or improve working conditions if you want to have employees. Of course, consultants could do the work without having to be Federal employees, so the government wouldn’t have to pay benefits, improve retirement pacakges, promote people, or silly things like that.

So that's all fine and dandy, with one glaring problem: the consultants aren’t necessarily looking out for the client’s best interest. The consultants are in it to get paid. Remember the consultant's creed, "If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem." Besides, why worry about a problem if you're not going to be around long enough to have to deal with it? The obvious solution is to hire more consultants to fix the problem!

Let's leave that discussion aside for now.

So, I took a little trip over to the FEC to look at some of the major organizations that do consulting work, just to take a peek at what they’ve been contributing [Rule #4] to the respective parties since 1997:

Accenture: $20,500 (Dem); $65,512 (GOP)
Deloitte and Deloitte & Touche: $65,725 (Dem); $813,400 (GOP)
SAIC: $95,000 (Dem); $177,500 (GOP)
McDonnell Douglas*: $15,000 (Dem); $30,700 (GOP)
Boeing: $798,000 (Dem); $759,025 (GOP)
* McDonnell Douglas only reported for 1997

Source: http://www.fec.gov

Hmmm... This is interesting. I’ll admit that I’ve only had my lunch hour to work on this, but the preliminary results seem to indicate that several of the large contracting organizations contribute heavily to the GOP, who just happens to be pushing these, so-called, "reforms". Does that seem to suggest that the GOP is creating policies that would encourage the hiring of more contract workers, who happen to be employees of major contributors? Could I be suggesting that the current administration has less than the national interest at heart?

Perish the thought!

A more substantial analysis [which, if anyone would like to assist on, I’d be most grateful] would take a look at who the major consultants are, how many of their consultants the Feds are employing, what the contributions of these firms were from 1997-present, and what the contributions of the executives of these firms were.

To be continued...