Exposing a Con

Based on the current public debate regarding the salary comparisons of federal and private sector employees, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) decided to take on the task of doing what others have not — comparing total annual compensation for federal and private sector employees with federal contractor billing rates in order to determine whether the current costs of federal service contracting serves the public interest.

The current debate over pay differentials largely relies on the theory that the government pays private sector compensation rates when it outsources services. This report proves otherwise: in fact, it shows that the government actually pays service contractors at rates far exceeding the cost of employing federal employees to perform comparable functions.

POGO’s study analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across 35 occupational classifications covering over 550 service activities. Our findings were shocking — POGO estimates the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services. Specifically, POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates — deemed fair and reasonable — that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.
~ from Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors by POGO ~

For anyone who has read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, this information is nothing new. The whole drive toward privatization has never been about SAVING taxpayer dollars; it's all about shifting those dollars to the already wealthy.

In other words, it's nothing more than a ruse. But it's a damn good one because more and more people accept the lie as being the unvarnished truth.