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I concur with your correct solution. The military has been the normal source of reliable labor, even for support tasks. The problem is that it's expensive and

by mpyne 13y ago

I concur with your correct solution. The military has been the normal source of reliable labor, even for support tasks. The problem is that it's expensive and much more difficult to administer, but hopefully NSA and DoD in general will realize why mere difficulty of administration should not hold them back now. Honestly the NSA is lucky that the first (known?) insider leak of this type came from a do-gooder instead of something more sinister. I will say that civil servants tend to despise the contractors. I can't say I blame them either, it's literally a case of "dey turk our jeerrbs!". But fixing the rise of contractors would require both a decoupling of the military-industrial complex and possibly an overhaul of the civil service benefits/retirement scheme (as the whole point to hiring a contractor is that their staff are cheaper overall).

rdl 13y ago
I don't think "contractor staff are cheaper overall" applies to IT or other specialty services staff. A Boozer getting $200k/yr is probably billed at...$350k? Assuming you need the position for 10y, that's 3.5mm. You could keep a civil servant for $80k/yr and give him a $60k/yr pension for (say, $120k/yr for his working life) for an entire career of 30 years for that. Spend the first 5-10 on training (much of which is OJT, so he's still doing useful work), and you're still 10-15 years ahead, even today.
- mpyne 13y ago
  That's a great point, but unfortunately there's a real political cost to having civil servant headcount. People already complain all the time about how many people work for the Federal government alone, but if they knew how many civil servants there would be if we limited contractors to actual common business functions I think they'd be stunned.
  - rdl 13y ago
    That's partially the point :) If we had to account for headcount, we'd scale back our missions to things which were essential to national security.

by mpyne 13y ago

rdl 13y ago

I don't think "contractor staff are cheaper overall" applies to IT or other specialty services staff. A Boozer getting $200k/yr is probably billed at...$350k? Assuming you need the position for 10y, that's 3.5mm. You could keep a civil servant for $80k/yr and give him a $60k/yr pension for (say, $120k/yr for his working life) for an entire career of 30 years for that. Spend the first 5-10 on training (much of which is OJT, so he's still doing useful work), and you're still 10-15 years ahead, even today.

mpyne 13y ago
That's a great point, but unfortunately there's a real political cost to having civil servant headcount. People already complain all the time about how many people work for the Federal government alone, but if they knew how many civil servants there would be if we limited contractors to actual common business functions I think they'd be stunned.
- rdl 13y ago
  That's partially the point :) If we had to account for headcount, we'd scale back our missions to things which were essential to national security.