America needs more "bureaucrats," not fewer

https://www.slowboring.com/p/america-needs-more-bureaucrats-not

The problem is that contracting-out core government functions is really bad.

To be clear, it’s not universally bad. There are many situations in which the government really should just to go buy something. The government uses a lot of computers, for example, but it doesn’t make computers. Because generally speaking, the best time to contract something out is when a robust private market exists for the thing you need — the government buys lots of computers, but so do companies and private individuals all across America. In these cases, it’s easy to verify whether the price is fair, and buying things that private buyers also buy to some extent guarantees the quality of goods.

But over the past generation, there’s been a strong trend toward contracting-out basic government functions.

At worst you end up with, as Alon Levy observes in mass transit construction, “consultants supervising consultants” because even the ability to manage contractors has been lost. The more common problem, as John Gravois wrote way back in his 2011 Washington Monthly article “More Bureaucrats Please” is that the contracting paradigm leads to ripoffs. Indeed, government contractors arguably have an obligation to their shareholders to rip the public off. [...]

Over the longer-run, though, this dynamic leads to selective exit of a lot of the best civil service employees to higher-paid contracting roles, and eventually the loss of the ability to supervise the contracts effectively. And because there’s no private market for what you’re buying, there are no checks on quality or price. I think this all mostly starts from a well-intentioned place of sincere frustration with civil service rules that create real problems. But there is a serious time-consistency issue around state capacity. In the moment, it’s always easier to work around the lack of capacity rather than try to address it. The longer that goes on, though, the more state capacity decays and the greater the reliance on hacks and workarounds, until one day someone tosses out the idea of arbitrarily firing half the civil service with no regard to quality or job role. What we need to do is actually fix the problem.