The Responsible Contract Manager: Protecting the Public Interest in an Outsourced World

12. Contracting, Representative Democracy, and Public Ethics

203 Chapter 12 Contracting, Representative Democracy, and Public Ethics THIS VOLUME has attempted to explain the contracting phenomenon in modern government, place it in context, assist in its improvement, and discuss the opportunities and problems it presents. The cases in the preceding chapters highlight the difficulties—in Iraq and Atlanta—and the promise— in Philadelphia and Indianapolis. While the cases are filled with stories of contracting advocates and opponents, we reiterate the point that we are neither . While we of course recognize the relationship between public administration and politics, we see contracting as purely instrumental—we see it as a tool. We recognize that ends and means are interconnected and that the design of a policy is never neutral, any more than the design of an administrative process is ever free of politics and values. Still, while ends and means are related, they are not the same thing. Where the bus stops is a matter of political choices, the design of the bus’s engine must remain an issue of engineering . The politicization of contracting is unfortunate and something that, of course, must be dealt with by all public administrators. However, we feel that decisions about contracting should not be ideological but rather should be managerial. We could no more advocate for contracting than we could advocate for the use of hammers. They are useful for driving nails and less useful for cutting wood. Opposition to contracting strikes us as equally silly. Contracting is a fact. It is increasing. It is not going away. It provides both problems and opportunities for representative government and accountability , for public ethics, and for organizational management. Key Lessons from the Case Studies What can we learn from the cases presented in the previous section? These cases were not selected as typical cases, representative of the “average” 204 Chapter 12 contracting experience. Rather, we selected them for the richness of the lessons they could provide to contract managers and governmental policymakers . At the most practical level, the cases provide evidence of both the complexity of contracting and its growth in the public sector here in the United States. In the Iraq war and the attempt at reconstruction we see a case study of overcontracting—in this instance our government needed to make more and buy less. The full range of contract failure is on display: corruption, incompetence, and unethical, unaccountable behavior. If this is what we mean by contracting—let’s just forget about it and try something else. In the Atlanta water case, we see a contractor operating on familiar turf—a privatized water system. This is a service that has been successfully contracted out in other places but failed in Atlanta. The contract provisions were unrealistic, the overall environment was plagued with political corruption, and an effective relationship between the government and the contractor could not be established. This stands in sharp contrast to Indianapolis, where the local government employed the same contractor with far better results. Finally, we have the Transitional Work Corporation in Philadelphia. Here we saw government and contractor learning over time to work together effectively. While the case illustrates many ups and downs, the overall contracted effort to move people from welfare to work succeeded. Both government and contractor learned how to improve their performance in a new environment. Three cases can only provide illustrations and examples, and even if we had sought “representativeness,” one should never generalize from so few data points. We selected these cases for the lessons they could teach us, and they certainly provide an indication that we have a great deal to learn about effective contract management. In our view, we need to get beyond these discussions of the value of contracting and move on to a more robust discussion of effective contract management. We need to develop best practices on the make-or-buy decision. We need to be sensitive to political environments, like Atlanta’s, and learn when to defer privatization. Most important, we must identify a set of government tasks that should never be contracted—like the war in Iraq. Smaller-scale and more prosaic examples of contracting can easily be found throughout government: the cafeteria run by a private food service, the park benches inspected and replaced by a street furniture company, Contracting, Representative Democracy, and Public Ethics 205 the high school teacher training program run by the local teacher’s college. Over the next decade we need...