Blame Bureaucracy, Pay Off Friends
Alec Dubro
April 03, 2007
Alec Dubro is senior editor at TomPaine.com.When President Bush toured the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Friday, he immediately pounced on the cause of the horrid conditions in some of the facilities for wounded veterans. “The problems at Walter Reed,” he said, “were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures…and we're going to fix it.”
Bush mentioned the word “bureaucracy” four more times, eventually pointing out the underlying obstacle to good care. “This military system of ours,” he said, “when you really think about it, just across the country, it's very complex and it's large.”
And to penetrate that large, complex mass of bureaucracy, Bush had just the solution: Brigadier General Michael S. Tucker. Bush told the health care workers attending his speech that Tucker was just the man for the job because, “Tucker is not a doc…he is a bureaucracy buster. His job is to make sure that the bureaucracy does not get in the way of making sure every soldier, Marine, and their families get the best possible care.”
So now, in addition to waging a war on one inchoate evil, terrorism, Bush is engaged in a war on another—bureaucracy. But as many people have noticed, you can no more wage a war on terrorism than you can wage a war on amphibious assaults — and waging a war on “bureaucracy” is just as nonsensical.
...(snip)...
The process of privatization, even in the military, certainly began before Bush. Legions of litter-bearers, camp-followers, dishwashers, clerks and others make sure that no soldier wastes his or her time peeling potatoes, except as punishment. Instead, companies like Sodexho USA, ESS Compass, KBR Halliburton and others make sure that whether it’s in the mess hall, in the lounge, or even in the field, some company is making plenty of money off the military.
Walter Reed has been in the process of privatization since Bush took office. That process, as we noted three weeks ago, is called A-76, and it means that public workers and managers must compete for their jobs against private contractors. Under any circumstances, A-76 is an ideologically-driven agenda, and there is scant evidence that it results in either significant savings or better services to the public. At Walter Reed, though, the process itself was more than a little suspect.
Beginning in 2000, the base began the process of essentially auctioning off support services to the lowest bidder. In 2004, following an excruciatingly long procedure involving 16 bid solicitations, the in-house “bureaucracy” beat the lowest private-sector contractor by $7 million. Then, in January of 2006, the base commander announced that the contractor had revised its bid and now beat out the in-house unit, also by $7 million. The Army then turned down an appeal by the public workers. A subsequent congressional action to nullify the reversal, spearheaded by Maryland legislators, was defeated in the Republican Senate by 50-48. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/03/blame_bureaucracy_pay_off_friends.php
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