Privatizing? Maybe Not All Bad.
Very interesting story a couple of days ago about Lockheed getting the contract for providing flight services that were the territory of the FAA. Almost $2 billion over ten years, not exactly chump-change.
There’s a knee-jerk reaction on most of our parts about privatizing governmental services. Either we’re for or against, but the track record has been mixed. Most Brits think Margaret Thatcher ruined the service industries in England and much of what Reagan spun off turned to spun straw instead of spun gold.
But President Bush’s competitive sourcing initiative has a different focus. Encouraging federal agencies to determine whether some of their more commercialized activities could be better and more cheaply bought in the private sector, the initiative allows the agency to bid on the services in-house as well as taking outside proposals.
Hard to find fault with that. An agency bidding on work it has traditionally done brings fresh thinking to the process; in all likelihood weeds out the…