re: #81 Targetpractice

If anything, they benefit from arguing that contracting out national security provides failure points like Snowden that compromise our ability to keep secrets. That the best thing that can be done is to bring it all in-house and out of the hands of contractors whose loyalty to the government extends as far as their next paycheck.

See now that’s a good point.
But contracting this stuff out is one of the time-honored ways the government cooks the books.

Whenever you get a big move to “shrink government” that’s what happens. The government payrolls shrink, and the private contracts grow. And abracadabra, the ‘government’ shrinks, and the private sector grows. Everyone’s happy.

Of course it’s still our tax money, and even more of it. This guy Snowden was pulling down 200k a year according to accounts I’ve read. If he’d been an NSA employee directly it would have been closer to half that.

You didn’t think they actually make any government programs smaller, did you?
:)