David Isenberg
Huffington Post, 9/15/2011
Sometimes it is difficult to decide what to write about in the world of private military and security contracting issues, as there are usually a few different stories in the news on any given day that are relevant.
Today, however, I don't have that problem as there is clearly only one story worth discussing. That is the report issued yesterday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) comparing federal and private sector employee compensation.
Full disclosure alert: back in the eighties I worked a year at POGO's predecessor organization, the Project on Military Procurement, and earlier this year POGO published a report I co-wrote
To appreciate the importance of this report keep in mind that one of the biggest talking points of PMSC advocates is that the virtue of using them is that they are cheaper than using full time government employees and that private sector rates are cheaper than government salaries. That is because they can be hired just for the task/mission, don't have to be paid pensions and other benefits, et cetera. As talking points go it's a good one and seemingly difficult to dispute; although when it comes to using private military and security contractors in the field there has not yet been much in the way of methodologically sound, peer reviewed evidence to support it.
So POGO decided to fill the data gap, or lacuna, as an academic would say. It compared 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.
What its report, Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors, found was:
