Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article on the latest development in FSSA’s so far ill-fated efforts to privatize the eligibility management system for deciding who is entitled to welfare benefits. Gov. Daniels wants to be personally involved with the decision. Typically, contracting decisions don’t go that far up into the executive branch bureaucracy. Instead such decisions are made by the contracting agency and the Dept. of Administration.
In this case the Governor has established an “interagency team” whose members include Deputy Chief of Staff, Earl Goode; Dept. of Administration Commissioner Carrie Henderson, Nate Feltman general counsel and chief of staff for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, Karl Browning of the Office of Technology; State Budget Director Chuck Schalliol; and Debra Minot, director of the State Personnel Department.
The problem with the FSSA privatization so far is that there are only, apparently, two companies willing/able to provide the services. One (ACS) is tainted by conflict of interest involving Mitch Roob who worked for them for 4 years. The other (Accenture) performed poorly when it received a similar contract in Texas.
FSSA has historically been poorly run and a big sink of money. Part of that, I think, has to do with the fact that the agency exists to spend money on something nobody is terribly excited about — the needs of the poor. Partially as a consequence of that, the agency was never well designed. My understanding is that it was cobbled together out of several existing agencies that provided social services of one sort or another and the enacting legislation provided a relatively short duration for the overarching agency (but not the sub-departments of the agency). In any event, the agency is poorly designed and spends money we’d rather not spend, so it has a huge target on its back, and for the most part rightfully so.
But the zeal of the Daniels administration for privatization is an article of faith, not to be shaken by evidence that the private sector is, at times, less efficient than government. So, I expect this privatization to proceed, no matter how many layers of window dressing committee review Governor Daniels puts between here and the inevitable and regardless of whether the private company will be less effective at accurately determining who is entitled to benefits and who is not.
The Gov is following His Leader: “I am the Decider.” The opinions of others may not matter if you are running a big company, but they DO matter in a democratic (small D) government. Of course, MMM isn’t a big fan of people disagreeing with him – easier to silence critics by dismissing them as Luddites and idiots than it is to compete with them in a debate on the merits of the policies. Remember that quaint little “marketplace of ideas” concept, Mitch? Or do you just believe in competition when it suits your ideology?
see, what people who have never worked in government don’t get is that when you hire a contractor to do something that was formerly done by a state employee, you pay more, not less. Government workers are paid crap, and when I say crap, I mean truly no one can live on them kind of wages. Government officials always like to try to get the contract awarded outside, because then there’s none of the messy “I have to pay legislative-mandated benefits to merit positions.” But you still have to pay contracted fees, you still can’t fire a contractor without serious machinations and possible penalties unless it’s for good cause shown, and there is little or no oversight over outside contracts and contractors, because there’s no sunshine in the awarding process or over the contract itself. We only find out about it when the scandal hits the Star.
“Government workers are paid crap, and when I say crap, I mean truly no one can live on them kind of wages.”
Now I know you don’t mean ALL workers, so I assume you mean non-elected workers. I’ve seen Bob Garton’s house and car.
However, I know from seeing the job postings that the IT jobs I was looking at were competitive, so maybe that should be all non-elected and non technology positions.
But then there is a friend of mine that switched from a Indianapolis mutual fund company to a FSSA desk job, and she is living a very nice lifestyle, so I guess either she has 50k in credit card debt or you actually mean “Some government workers are paid crap”.
Contractors can be more expensive or less. They are not “always” more. Sometimes people outsource to save money, sometimes they do it because they are getting kickbacks, and sometimes they do it so the contractor can do the dirty work. (Overworking, laying off and underpaying) I’ve seen all three, and I think that this thing is 1 & 3, saving money by having the contractor do the “dirty work”.
It does depend what level of gov’t you’re talking about, and where. Hamilton County pays translators $50/hour, for instance.