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0 pointsdfc13y ago0 comments

Whenever I read a discussion about "the revolving door problem" I never see any serious discussion of an alternative. Would you prefer an enormous monoculture inside of the government because they cannot hire people from the private sector? Any system that enforced a waiting period between government IT job to private sector IT job would essentially end someone's career.

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_delirium13y ago· 2 in thread

I think it would be more honest and open to have the government working via people actually in the government, yes. That would be more amenable to developing some kind of oversight and some policies. When someone spends their whole career in the NSA, at least you can plan for that. When someone is moving back and forth between the NSA and Booz Allen Hamilton, I think you only complicate any accountability.

Perhaps it does raise the likelihood of defections, as this case indicates, which is one possible safety valve. But those are not supposed to be part of the planned-for strategy.

I have a similar viewpoint on using private military contractors like Blackwater, rather than regular career military staff. I think once you start outsourcing these kinds of security jobs, you are just weakening oversight, both formal oversight and any attempt to develop a culture of rule-following. Not to mention the ethical problems that come from having people who are literally mercenaries working for your armed forces.

mpyne13y ago

There is actually already a lot of law and regulation that deals with what types of functions contractors working for government are allowed to do.

IMHO the government far overstepped those lines during Bush and have failed to come back under Obama, as that would mean taking on civil servant headcount to replace the contractors leaving, which is politically a hot potato.

Unfortunately the people only rarely expect and demand less service from the government; instead they want the government to stop all the stuff that they don't personally use. So of course this means that the government rarely stops with a given function entirely.

The military ended up with the same problem. The draft would not be politically feasible and you only get to go to war with "the Army you've got, not the Army you'd wished you had". What the Army did have was money, and so they farmed out everything they could make even a half-hearted case as being a "generic business function" (e.g. building security) off on private contractors.

And that's even with the Navy drawing down on its already-undermanned force to send sailors to Iraq and Afghanistan to free up even more soldiers to do Army-type things.

dfcOP13y ago

I am confused, I thought we were discussing "the revolving door problem." From the outset your comment seems to be concerned with the government's use of private contractors.

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