For­get the “United States of Tara”. If you want to wit­ness mul­ti­ple per­son­al­ity dis­or­der in action, look no fur­ther than the United States of Amer­ica — the fed­eral gov­ern­ment work­force to be pre­cise, which has become so thor­oughly embed­ded with con­trac­tors that some­times the work­ers them­selves aren’t sure who’s a civil ser­vant and who’s a pri­vate hire. This inter­twin­ing of state and pri­vate power is hap­pen­ing at the low­est level gov­ern­ment pro­cure­ment office all the way up to Cab­i­net and Cabinet-level posi­tions, cre­at­ing not just oper­a­tional ambi­gu­ity, and poten­tial secu­rity lapses, but also con­flicts of inter­est that may be near impos­si­ble to fer­ret out with cur­rent over­sight tools.

A sys­temic trans­for­ma­tion has taken place over the past decade and a half result­ing in a “blended” work­force. Janine stud­ied this devel­op­ment as part of her research for her book Shadow Elite and in a follow-on study (sup­ported by the Ford Foun­da­tion), Sell­ing Out Uncle Sam: How the Myth of Small Gov­ern­ment Under­mines National Secu­rity, which was just released. New forms of gov­ern­ing join together the state and the pri­vate, often most vis­i­bly in intel­li­gence, mil­i­tary, and home­land secu­rity enter­prises, where so much has taken place since 9/11. These forms are the body and soul of fed­eral gov­ern­ing today–the sys­tem as it works in prac­tice and the ground upon which any future changes will occur.

Con­trac­tor offi­cials and employ­ees are involved in all aspects of gov­ern­ing and nego­ti­at­ing “over pol­icy mak­ing, imple­men­ta­tion, and enforce­ment,” as one legal scholar has noted. Yet con­trac­tors’ imper­a­tives are not nec­es­sar­ily the same as the government’s imper­a­tives. Con­trac­tor com­pa­nies are respon­si­ble for mak­ing a profit for their share­hold­ers; gov­ern­ment is sup­pos­edly answer­able to the pub­lic and the nation in a democracy.

Amid this envi­ron­ment com­pli­cated by mixed motives, new insti­tu­tional forms of gov­ern­ing have gath­ered force as gov­ern­ment and con­trac­tor offi­cials inter­act (or don’t) in the course of projects; as chains of com­mand among con­trac­tors and the agen­cies they sup­pos­edly work for have become ever-more con­vo­luted; as con­trac­tors per­form inher­ently gov­ern­men­tal func­tions beyond the capac­ity of gov­ern­ment to man­age them; and, as con­trac­tors stand­ing in for gov­ern­ment are not sub­ject to the same rules that apply to gov­ern­ment officials.

Con­trac­tors not only “work side by side and per­form the same func­tions as their gov­ern­ment coun­ter­parts,” as the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Office put it in a study of defense con­tract­ing, but “the line sep­a­rat­ing con­trac­tor from gov­ern­ment employee is blurry.” And con­trac­tors did not always iden­tify them­selves as such in the doc­u­ments they pre­pared or when deal­ing with the pub­lic, the GAO learned. In some cases con­trac­tors were even spec­i­fied on con­tract doc­u­ments as the government’s point of con­tact. “In sit­u­a­tions such as these,” the GAO con­cluded, “con­trac­tor employ­ees may appear to be speak­ing for the gov­ern­ment, a sit­u­a­tion that could cre­ate the impres­sion in the gen­eral pub­lic that they are gov­ern­ment employees.”

Even more trou­bling is the ambi­gu­ity and identity-blurring that hap­pens fur­ther up the chain.
It is telling that, nowa­days, not only are salaries and perks for com­pa­ra­ble jobs typ­i­cally greater in the pri­vate sec­tor, but, often, so is pres­tige. The land­ing spots that sup­ply the big bucks, and with them influ­ence and stature, are often those held by for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cials now in an indus­try perch.

Although there are rules to address the revolv­ing door syn­drome, com­pa­nies with sig­nif­i­cant gov­ern­ment con­tracts are often headed by for­mer senior offi­cials of intel­li­gence– and defense-related gov­ern­ment agen­cies. For instance, William Stude­man went from being a direc­tor of the National Secu­rity Agency, where out­sourc­ing has grown rapidly, to serv­ing as a vice pres­i­dent of Northrop Grum­man, the defense giant. Sev­eral for­mer vice pres­i­dents of Booz Allen (the com­pany that was called the “shadow intel­li­gence com­mu­nity” by a for­mer CIA deputy direc­tor in the book Spies for Hire, by Tim Shorrock) pre­vi­ously served as intel­li­gence agency direc­tors, includ­ing James Woolsey, who headed the CIA dur­ing the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion. A num­ber of for­mer defense and intel­li­gence offi­cials, includ­ing defense sec­re­taries Melvin R. Laird and William J. Perry, for­mer NSA direc­tor Bobby R. Inman, along with for­mer CIA direc­tor and cur­rent Defense Sec­re­tary Robert M. Gates have either worked for or served on the board of defense con­trac­tor SAIC.

As one intel­li­gence expert puts it, in a Cor­p­Watch piece by Tim Shorrock: “The Intel­li­gence Com­mu­nity and the con­trac­tors are so tightly inter­twined at the lead­er­ship level that their inter­ests, prac­ti­cally speak­ing, are iden­ti­cal.” And what are those inter­ests? The prob­lem with this is that gov­ern­ment lead­ers of course should be oper­at­ing in the pub­lic inter­est, not in their own per­sonal inter­est or that of, say, the con­trac­tor they are so deeply con­nected to. And while conflict-of-interest laws and reg­u­la­tions are well estab­lished, rules and prac­tices that can address “coin­ci­dences of inter­est” are not. A coin­ci­dence of inter­est occurs when a player crafts an array of over­lap­ping roles across orga­ni­za­tions to serve his own agenda–or that of his network–rather than those of the orga­ni­za­tions for which he sup­pos­edly works. Means of account­abil­ity have not evolved accordingly.

When gov­ern­ment con­trac­tors hire for­mer direc­tors of intel­li­gence and defense-related gov­ern­ment agen­cies, they are bank­ing on coin­ci­dences of inter­est between their hires and their hires’ for­mer (gov­ern­ment) employ­ers. As Shorrock observes in Spies For Hire:

What we have today with the intel­li­gence busi­ness is some­thing far more sys­temic: senior offi­cials leav­ing their national secu­rity and coun­tert­er­ror­ism jobs for posi­tions where they are basi­cally doing the same jobs they once held at the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies–but for dou­ble or triple the salary and for profit. It’s a pri­va­ti­za­tion of the high­est order, in which our col­lec­tive mem­ory and expe­ri­ence in intelligence–our crown jew­els of spy­ing, so to speak–are owned by cor­po­rate America.

And it’s not just the crown jew­els of spy­ing owned by cor­po­rate Amer­ica — the col­li­sion of state of pri­vate is now government-wide. Pri­vate play­ers are afforded fresh oppor­tu­ni­ties to make gov­ern­ing and pol­icy deci­sions with­out mean­ing­ful gov­ern­ment involve­ment. Whether for profit or to advance an agenda, they can pri­va­tize pol­icy beyond the reach of tra­di­tional mon­i­tor­ing systems.

It’s a far cry from the pur­ported aims of lead­ers from both par­ties who helped cre­ate this gov­er­nance Franken­stein. Over the past three decades, they insisted they would make gov­ern­ment smaller, more effi­cient. Instead, they just shopped out the work to con­trac­tors and didn’t impose the cru­cial over­sight. At this point, the gov­ern­ing land­scape has been so fun­da­men­tally redrawn that it is not a ques­tion of sim­ply insourc­ing, or reclaim­ing these jobs. Thank­fully, Pres­i­dent Obama has tried to rein in run­away con­tract­ing, and has acknowl­edged the com­plex­ity of the beast, but the task is immense: “Rein­vent­ing Gov­ern­ment” needs noth­ing short of a top-to-bottom reappraisal.

By Janine Wedel and Linda Keenan

Pub­lished in The Huff­in­g­ton Post, August 26, 2010.