The federal government has, once again, outdone itself in the record-keeping department: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) can’t figure out how many contractors work for the government, or how much they get paid.
The government contracts with private companies to provide a wide range of goods and services. But, according to this month’s CBO report, “Regrettably, CBO is unaware of any comprehensive information about the size of the federal government’s contracted workforce.”
There is one database of information on these contracts–the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). Except they don’t keep complete records, and what they do keep may be erroneous.
The Department of Defense also has some data on its contracts, but has only recently begun drawing up reports and excludes contracts for products and certain other services.
CBO also found that FPDS “makes it difficult” to summarize their spending information, by filing them under thousands of different “product or service codes” with no way to efficiently organize them.
Overall, federal agencies paid more than $500 billion to contractors in 2012. But, given the lack of information, CBO cannot determine what each contractor has been paid on average.
It’s also impossible to calculate the cost of hiring a contractor vs. paying a federal employee for a service. They have no detailed information on contract costs—the cost of equipment and materials, for example—or how they go about their tasks. “[E]ven if a contractor is performing a task similar to that performed by government employees, it may perform the task differently,” the report reads. “For example, a contractor might hire a smaller but more experienced workforce to perform the task (or a larger but less experienced workforce); or the contractor might provide different facilities, equipment, working hours, or training to its employees.”
(h/t Daily Caller)
