What's a Little Inefficiency Between Cronies Friends?

Another very busy day with less blogging than I intended. But one good thing about Sundays is that there's a new Frank Rich essay in The New York Times. He's writing about privatization and the winning ways it has had with the Bush administration:

[Former lobbyist David Safavian] arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called "competitive sourcing." Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative's objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver "high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost."

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.) Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.

. . .
But the Bush brand of competitive sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and do-little jobs for administration pals, spread like a cancer throughout the executive branch. It explains why tens of thousands of displaced victims of Katrina are still living in trailer shantytowns all these months later. It explains why New York City and Washington just lost 40 percent of their counterterrorism funds. It helps explain why American troops are more likely to be slaughtered than greeted with flowers more than three years after the American invasion of Iraq.

In terms of privatization, we haven't even sold out to the highest bidder. Contracts to Halliburton and others have had no bids at all. We've farmed out our government, and we don't even know if we got a good price for it.

Last week, it seemed like very few other bloggers were picking Frank Rich's column up, but this week, potential links to the full column are coming out our ears. I'm linking through a new source, Wealthy Frenchman (I like to spread my links around when I can).