Pentagon sees big savings in replacing contractors with federal employees
The Defense Department estimates it will save an average of $44,000 a year for every contractor it replaces with full-time federal personnel to perform critical defense jobs, according to the House-Senate conference report on the fiscal 2010 defense appropriation bill.In other words death merchants like Blackwater(Xe) might soon be out of business.
The measure, which passed Congress on Saturday, contains $5 billion to hire replacements for contractors currently performing what have been termed "inherently government functions" both at home and abroad. Those functions include a wide range of activities, from supervising other contractors who provide guard services at forward operating bases, to providing oversight of aid projects overseas.
The Bush administration widely expanded the use of contractors following the invasion of Iraq. At the time, officials argued that the Pentagon and other agencies had to staff up quickly; the war was seen as a limited operation that would end quickly, without the need to either increase the size of the military or the ranks of civilian employees.
The aim was also to save money, but last year Congress reported that contract employees were each costing the government an average of $250,000 annually, an amount far in excess of what federal employees or military personnel were paid.
A recent Congressional Research Service study acknowledged that contractors played an important role in Iraq, but also indicated that they make up more than half of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan. With the number of U.S. troops expected to increase by 30,000 in Afghanistan in the coming months, CRS estimated that the number of contractors there will also increase -- by up to 56,000.
Although the fiscal 2010 defense appropriation bill provides $5 billion to allow defense personnel, rather than contractors, to perform critical department functions, there was no estimate available Wednesday on how many new defense employees will be hired with that money.
The bill includes a number of other important provisions:
It provides $288 million for the Pentagon's inspector general to hire additional investigators for oversight of acquisition and contracting. Congress added about $16 million to the administration request to enable the hiring of additional investigators.
It also reduces contracted advisory and assistance services by $51 million, and includes general provisions to stop further conversions by the Department of Defense from government functions to contractors.
Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions
On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.Listeners and watchers of strictly conservative media tend to be the ones ( tea baggers and conservatives in general) walking around in an ignorant daze in between ranting about death panels that do not exist and complaining about public policies about which they have no knowledge. So its little wonder that tea baggers have no solutions except blame America first. Even the intellectual leaders of the right-wing movement have no real principles.
In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.
FigureThe survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs. The polling does find the expected correlation between how much citizens know and how avidly they watch, read, or listen to news reports. The most knowledgeable third of the public is four times more likely than the least knowledgeable third to say they enjoy keeping up with the news "a lot."
There are substantial differences in the knowledge levels of the audiences for different news outlets. However, there is no clear connection between news formats and what audiences know. Well-informed audiences come from cable (Daily Show/Colbert Report, O'Reilly Factor), the internet (especially major newspaper websites), broadcast TV (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and radio (NPR, Rush Limbaugh's program). The less informed audiences also frequent a mix of formats: broadcast television (network morning news shows, local news), cable (Fox News Channel), and the internet (online blogs where people discuss news events).
