The NSA outsourced background and security checks to a company that failed to complete thousands and then lied and said they had, and was able to avoid detection for years because of insufficient oversight. That was a failure, albeit not just the NSA’s.

The NSA failed to be paranoid enough about their own employees and contractors’ employees. They didn’t establish procedures and checks to raise a flag if someone was accessing data beyond their job needs, and they didn’t train people to resist and report the very basic social engineering Snowden did to steal what he stole. That was a failure.

Tempting to say outsourcing/privatization is at the root of all these failures. It resulted in confused and diluted lines of authority and stymied oversight. While, of course, costing extra.