This has been all over the news, but The Washington Post has compiled a lengthy report of Top Secret Clearances and Projects across the US Government and published the results as a collection of interactive visualization tools on their site. Their purpose is to show how use of the Top Secret Clearance has ballooned out of control of oversight groups since the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, and the government has begun to ignore the old regulation that such work be done by government personnel and instead hire contractors.
“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.
The visuals are a bit complicated, but effectively you can see the quantity of clearances involved, various corporate involvements, and specific functional areas (IT, Weapons, etc). No details on the actual projects (of course), but a lot of useful information nonetheless.
Lots of people seem to be in an uproar at how many ‘Top Secret’ government functions are in the hands of ocntractors, but I don’t see it as such a big deal. Several reasons, actually:
- Hiring Government Personnel is a ‘lifetime’ gig. While officially it’s just urban legend that government employees can’t be fired, it’s a pretty accurate one. Hiring a government employee means planning for a 30-year gig, with full benefits and pension afterwards. It’s not cheap.
- Most of these are short-term gigs, meaning you’ld then have to make up work for said government employee to do. Weapons systems come and go, IT functions balloon and merge, it’s all very fluctuating.
- The US Government typically won’t pay competitive wages for such expertise for people in very high-end technical areas, particularly not for 30+ years.
All in all it’s just cheaper to hire contractors. They’re held to the same security clearance constraints as government people, and the same oversight.
But it makes for nice graphs.
Agreed! People hear “government contractor” and they immediately see dollar signs. Contractors MUST perform, or they lose the contract. Government employees can (and many do) goof off most of the day, and still won’t get fired. In my experience working with the government, its the contractors that do the quality work. In the end, they are less expensive and harder working that most government employees.