Tapping the phones:
Posted on 09/20/2017 3:53:49 PM PDT by AndyJackson
Bureaucracies have successfully evaded congressional budget oversight for years by illegally hiring contract labor to take the place of employees, according to a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) report released Tuesday.
Bureaucracies commit thousands of felonies a day, misappropriating funds not approved by Congress and expanding agency influence at a time when government agencies should cut back.
Bureaucracies freeze hiring new employees, ideally to stop expansion and cut costs, when under pressure to reform or adapt to budget cuts. Many agencies continue to grow despite budget cutbacks, however, by illegally hiring outside contract labor.
“While contracting for these services is contrary to the law, this practice has become so ubiquitous in government that it passes without notice,” the CEI report’s author Robert Hanrahan wrote.
Any labor that uses a “skill,” which is nearly every job in the federal government, is classified under “personal services” hiring. With few exceptions, agencies hiring without Congressional approval for the expenditures is illegal under a set of statutes known as the Anti Deficiency Act (ADA).
“Any federal employee who accepts voluntary services or employs personal services may be terminated, fined, and imprisoned for up to two years. But remarkably, the prohibition on personal services is rarely recognized, much less enforced,” Hanrahan wrote.
“The bureaucracy grows ever larger thanks to this bureaucratic ‘dark energy’ — an invisible force that allows government to expand at the discretion of the bureaucracy alone,” he added.
Hanrahan points out his first hand experience working for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
“The NNSA … has no authorization to use program funds for support service contractors, and is under a cap on federal staff explicitly intended to reduce transactional oversight,” Hanrahan’s report states. “Yet, within the NNSA, over $100 million per year are redirected from programs to hire support contractors just in the Washington D.C. area.”
“When the prohibition is flouted, the benefits accrue mostly to the Washington, D.C. region,” Hanrahan wrote.
You bet, I read about this one young lady who was trying to make ends meet, so she joined Uber. Within 1 year she said her car was shot, only after being nickle and dimed for repairs all year.
They used to have company owned and insured fleets that did this kind of thing. Now many people delivering for warehouses, parts houses etc, are expected to use their own vehicles...What a joke.
First, for instance defense contracting dollars get collected by the IRS, go to the Pentagon and are disbursed to contractors in the various 50 states. And Congress watches the distribution like hawks. What they apparently did not realize is that D.C. skims a lot of that money and spends it on contractors inside the Beltway, benefitting, as the article points out, only a couple of districts around D.C.
And these contractors get full benefits and contributions to their pensions, all paid for as part of the contract rate, on top of which you pay management fees, contract award fees and profits to the contracting company. Since they merely perform the bureaucratic functions of a federal employee, there is no competitive drive for efficiencies.
Tapping the phones:
AndyJackson wrote: “As the author points out, there is no private cause of action for this practice, and so the only person with standing is the Department of Justice.”
It is the author’s “opinion” that the ADA is being “misinterpreted”. Others have different “opinions”. It is not a “personal service” for an agency to hire contractors to perform certain tasks as long as those tasks are not within the job description of a government employee. For example, the government frequently hires contractor to design and manufacture military and other equipment.
Thanks AndyJackson.
>>private sector is doing this as well, replacing employees who once had salaries, benefits etc, with contract labor...
Yep. Welcome to 1099 “gig” world.
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