Government Accountability and Efficiency

In a recent talk about cyber security, NSA Director Mike Rogers claimed:

As it stands, Rogers explained, we’re losing somewhere between $100 billion and $400 billion worth of intellectual property to theft each year. This, he said, is of particular concern to the Department of Defense, which watches as its contractors networks are regularly compromised by adversaries.

To the extent that his statement reflects how US tax dollars are spent, the situation is to a considerable extent the result of military downsizing under President Clinton, which wasn’t really downsizing, but outsourcing.  Issued on May 21, 1996, Executive Order 13005 – Empowerment Contracting states its objectives as follows:

In order to promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement, it is necessary to secure broad-based competition for Federal contracts. This broad competition is best achieved where there is an expansive pool of potential contractors capable of producing quality goods and services at competitive prices. A great and largely untapped opportunity for expanding the pool of such contractors can be found in this Nation’s economically distressed communities.

The problem is, this way of approaching “efficiency” leads directly to reduced accountability. Those who rail against government inefficiency don’t understand that accountability is not efficient: it is not efficient to justify your actions at every step. So the push to make government more lean and “efficient” by outsourcing government functions to the private sector leads directly to an erosion of accountability. You can’t have both accountability and efficiency as policy goals.

Pulitzer prize winning historian Gary Wills suggested that, for example, part of why the Manhattan Project was conducted with such extraordinary secrecy was specifically to evade accountability. The Russians knew what we were up to, the Germans probably knew too, it was the American people kept in the dark. Wills argues this was probably to avoid potential opposition to the development of nuclear weapons in light of the 1925 Geneva Protocols against chemical and biological weapons. Around the globe, people were shocked by the destructiveness of mechanized warfare during World War I and by the use of chemical weapons.  The First World War and the technological horrors is brought were still very much in public memory by the time World War II came around.

Wills also points out that this use of secrecy to evade accountability was no isolated instance. When the US bombed Cambodia, the Cambodians knew it, it was US citizens kept in the dark. When the US invaded Cuba, the Cubans knew what was happening and the Soviets knew, it was US citizens kept in the dark.

Today we have active drone campaigns in at least eight foreign countries responsible for the deaths of thousands in what is essentially an undeclared global war. Insofar as the targets are terrorists, the terrorists know they’re being targeted. Again, it’s US citizens kept in the dark.

The origin of the “state secrets” doctrine derives not from any law that Congress passed, but from efforts by the US military to evade accountability over flaws in the engine design of a new aircraft, which led to the deaths of several citizens.

Accountability is not efficient. To increase accountability with surveillance matters, there needs to be a reduction in contracting, which means, the government needs to get bigger. Edward Snowden — a contractor himself — would seem to be a clear cut example in support of this view.