More US government work going to private companies

By Darlene Superville, Associated Press, 2/7/2003

ASHINGTON -- NASA is the boss and brand name but America's shuttle program is largely a private enterprise, and so are many other operations of the federal government.

Increasingly, Washington is turning to contractors to do tasks both menial and major: testing soil, managing national laboratories, supporting troops, running Indian schools, and much more. The privatization of government is sizable and spread across the bureaucracy. Even the decision to send airport security back to the feds after the Sept. 11 attacks has not dimmed the enthusiasm for contracting out federal services.

''It's a sort of shadow work force,'' says Jacqueline Simon of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Last year, President Bush proposed making it easier to turn as many as 850,000 more federal jobs over to the private sector, part of a trend to have others share the government's workload while trimming the federal payroll and ostensibly getting better quality work at less cost. The government now employs more than 1.7 million civilians directly.

But the weekend disaster in which the Columbia shuttle disintegrated minutes from arrival in Florida, killing all seven astronauts on board, is raising questions.

''I would wager that most Americans did not know, and probably still don't know, that Boeing is more responsible for the launch of the space shuttle than NASA,'' says Paul Light, a Brookings Institution specialist on the bureaucracy.

In 1996, NASA awarded a six-year contract worth $9 billion to United Space Alliance, a Houston-based partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to manage day-to-day operations of the shuttle fleet. The contract was extended last year for two years.

Those contractors in turn use more than 120 subcontractors at the Johnson and Kennedy space centers, performing tasks such as strapping astronauts into their seats, laying cement tiles on the shuttle, and positioning the solid rocket boosters for liftoff.

All government departments agencies use outside firms to get some of their work done, and entire industries exist to compete for defense, energy, and transportation department contracts.

More than 54,000 companies held contracts worth more than $25,000 each in 2001, the government says.

This story ran on page E5 of the Boston Globe on 2/7/2003.
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