In most cases the same employees did the work but through private for-profit companies usually at lower pay and fewer benefits. Mail delivery, however, was different. In Reston, mail delivery had been terrible for some years and it was contracted to an outfit of mentally challenged people. I thought, "Merciful Heavens. Now we will never get our mail and what we do get probably belongs to someone else." But that was not the case at all. These people knew their route like a clamped iron jaw and when they came down a hallway pushing their cart, you better get out of the way. The Mail Must Get Through.
So mail delivery improved remarkably. It could be scary, however, as once I got on the elevator and one of the mail workers was already there. I mumbled Hello. He was a tall, strong looking guy with arms like tree trunks. and he said to me, "Why do you hate me?" I said, "What?" He replied, "Why do you hate me?" I replied, "I don't hate you." Though I had seen him around, I didn't know him. If this guy swung one of those tree trunks at me, he could have easily knocked me to the floor so the next floor I got off the elevator and waited for another. But don't get me wrong, the mail delivery part was wonderful.
Following are large excerpts from an article from the National Review, that tells you a lot more about how government work is done by outsourcing but you ought to look at the whole article:
In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s
population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal
bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal
workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and
myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection
Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal policy agenda that were
virtually absent in 1960 (health-care insurance, primary- and
secondary-school quality, crime, drug abuse, campaign finance, gun
control, occupational safety, etc.), and with a population of 324
million, there are only about 2 million federal bureaucrats.*
So, since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has
quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but
the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to
approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952.
Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And that by
doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished
prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. DiIulio Jr., of the
University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly.*
........................................................................
Since 1960, the number of state- and local-government employees has
tripled to more than 18 million, a growth driven by federal money:
Between the early 1960s and early 2010s, the inflation-adjusted value of
federal grants for the states increased more than tenfold. For example,
the EPA has fewer than 20,000 employees, but 90 percent of EPA programs
are completely administered by thousands of state-government employees,
largely funded by Washington.*
A quarter of the federal budget is administered by the fewer than
5,000 employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) —
and by the states, at least half of whose administrative costs are paid
by CMS. Various federal crime and homeland security bills help fund
local police departments. “By conservative estimates,” Dilulio writes,
“there are about 3 million state- and local-government workers” — about
50 percent more than the number of federal workers — “funded via federal
grants and contracts.”*
But wait, that is not all:
Then there are for-profit contractors, used, Dilulio says, “by
every federal department, bureau and agency.” For almost a decade, the
Defense Department’s full-time equivalent of 700,000 to 800,000 civilian
workers were supplemented by the full-time equivalent of 620,000 to
770,000 for-profit contract employees. “During the first Gulf War in
1991,” Dilulio says, “American soldiers outnumbered private contractors
in the region by about 60-to-1; but, by 2006, there were nearly as many
private contractors as soldiers in Iraq — about 100,000 contract
employees, not counting subcontractor employees, versus 140,000 troops.”
Today, the government spends more (about $350 billion) on defense
contractors than on all official federal bureaucrats ($250 billion).*
Finally, “employment in the tax-exempt or independent sector more
than doubled between 1977 and 2012 to more than 11 million.”
Approximately a third of the revenues to nonprofits (e.g., Planned
Parenthood) flow in one way or another from government. “If,” Dilulio
calculates, “only one-fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees
owe their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract or fee
funding, that’s 2.2 million workers” — slightly more than the official
federal workforce.*
To which add the estimated 7.5 million for-profit contractors. Plus
the conservative estimate of 3 million federally funded employees of
state and local governments. To this total of more than 12 million, add
the approximately 2 million actual federal employees. This 14 million is
about 10 million more than the estimated 4 million federal employees
and contractors during the Eisenhower administration.* Comment added: Many of these work for companies encircling the Washington, D.C. area called informally "Beltway Bandits."
So, today’s government is indeed big (3.5 times bigger than five and a half decades ago), but dispersed to disguise its size.*
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