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White House letting private companies run Homeland Security jobs?
From Reuters:
Wed Sep 8, 2004 08:37 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted to stop the Department of Homeland Security opening up sensitive immigration jobs to private companies, ignoring a White House threat to veto the bill if it contained the measure. The Republican-led Senate voted 49-47 to attach the plan to a $32 billion bill to fund homeland security operations in the 2005 fiscal year. In an election-year disappointment for President Bush, several Republicans joined Democrats in support of the measure.The White House said Bush would veto the bill, introduced by Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy, if the amendment stays in the final version.
Leahy said it “would put an end to an ill-advised undertaking … to privatize government jobs over common sense and our obligations to do everything possible to keep Americans safe.”
He said it was inappropriate to privatize jobs of 1,100 immigration information officers who are charged with rooting out immigration fraud including making sure terrorists do not take advantage of the immigration system.
Republicans argue that opening the jobs up to private competition makes the government more efficient.
The House, which has already approved its version of the homeland security spending bill, voted earlier this year to back a measure with similar language.
The Senate hopes to pass its bill next week. Both chambers of Congress will then to meet to iron out any differences before sending it back for final approval and on to Bush for signing.
So far Congress has only passed one of the 13 spending bills needed to fund the federal government. They are rushing to try and approve more before breaking in October ahead of the November election.
We’ve already seen so many times how this administration giving important Government jobs to private companies has ended up putting homeland security in danger and costing the gov’t billions extra – see the transfer of passenger screening control from private to public hands and Halliburton’s inability to explain $1.8 billion in unaccounted-for money paid to them to feed and house US troops that the Pentagon and Congress want an accounting for – and now the White House wants to privatize over a thousand Homeland Security Immigration officers, and has threaten to veto the Senate’s ruling that would stop this from happening.
Keep in mind, this is the same administration that gave the aforementioned Army contract to Halliburton without taking any other bids at all, so I’m a little wary when they say that “opening the jobs up to private competition makes the government more efficient.”
But I’m also a bit concerned that they’re trying to save a buck on jobs important to our security — have you ever seen what happens on low-bid contract jobs that bid too low? They often give shoddy results because they underbid and now have to keep from losing money themselves. Honestly, I am at a loss why the administration would take something so untested in such unsafe times (you’ll have to forgive me, I can never remember what the administration’s top officials are saying, one minute it’s “America is safer” with the implication that it is because of their actions alone, and the next minute it’s “America is in more danger than ever” where the buck stops absolutely nowhere within the city limits of D.C.) and try to do something so risky in terms of national security while simultaneously promising to overwrite the decision of the people as spoken through their elected officials.
I want America to be safer, but is outsourcing really the best way to deal with highly-sensitive security jobs? I cannot see how, it seems like the administration is just inviting errors and security leaks which are in direct antithesis to the notion of “homeland security”.
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