Edward Snowden - It’s dangerous business when private contractors recruit top government employees and then effectively lease them back to the government.

Government privatization paves the way

 for crony corruption

by Norman J. Ornstein

Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden’s former employer, is a cash cow earning billions from its intelligence work for the U.S. government. Snowden is among thousands of people who used to work for the government who went on to earn far more doing the same things for legions of private contractors. Almost 500,000 private employees held top-secret clearances in 2012, giving them access to the most sensitive secrets of the United States, with much of the clearance process itself done by … the self-same private contractors.

All this raises larger questions, questions that are not new (in fact, they go back to the beginning of the Republic) about privately contracting out public work. Privatization itself goes back to a 1789 statute that said, “It shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to provide for contracts which shall be approved by the President, for building a lighthouse near the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay, and for rebuilding when necessary, and keeping in good repair, the lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers in the several states....”

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