Outsourcing doesn't work? I'm SHOCKED

David Cloud writes in today's NYT (and there are other stories all over the place:

Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey was forced to resign Friday over the handling of revelations that wounded soldiers were receiving shabby and slow treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center....

Mr. Harvey, the senior civilian official overseeing the Army, joined the Pentagon in 2004 after a long career as an engineer working mainly for defense contractors. He was an executive with the Westinghouse Corporation from 1969 to 1997.

In a speech last year, he said improved efficiency could reduce both the federal work force and the number of contractors.

But the House committee leaders said that at Walter Reed, hiring a contractor had resulted in a steep decline in the number of support personnel like maintenance workers to fewer than 60 last month, from 300 in early 2006.

What?

Outsourcing to the private sector failed?

Look, I am in no way pleased over the Walter Reed outpatient situation, but please. I haven't yet, in 30+ years with the government, seen a situation where sending an essential function to private-sector contractors made things better. And I've lost count of the number times it's actually made things worse.

Oh, maybe not up at the higher levels, where budgets and so on rule. But down where the work gets done - where you can't get IT support in a timely fashion, or you have to buy your own supplies because the ordering process is so cumbersome and you've waited 6 weeks for binders that Staples will bring tomorrow, or you're an outpatient at Walter Reed.

There are things more important than the bottom line. And among them are actually being able to get the job done. Sometimes you have to be willing to spend a little more to keep control over projects. I remember being in a working group to discuss the next phase of the relational database contractors were building for us (because our old "legacy system" is, by definition, no good, despite the fact that it does everything we want, unlike any replacement yet offered). The guys we were used to seeing weren't there; instead, we were offered two new guys, who knew nothing about the project and were starting, basically, from scratch. Why? The other two had "moved on" - clear subtext, they were bored after a year and wanted to do something new and exciting. For us, it meant another six months with no progress. But we had no control over the programmers.

So, yeah. Some things are more important than bottom lines.

And most definitely among them are the lives of people we have put in harm's way, caused to be injured, and now have the moral obligation to care for.