Here's a number that might surprise you: the federal government employs about 2 million civilian workers. But there are roughly 4 million contractors doing government work. That's right—for every person with a government badge, there are two people doing government jobs without one.

We've been told for decades that privatization makes government smaller and more efficient. The reality is stranger. Government didn't shrink; it shapeshifted. The work still happens, the money still flows, but the people doing the work have become invisible in our debates about government size. And this transformation has created problems nobody quite anticipated.

Imagine you hire a plumber to fix your sink. Simple enough. But what if you'd never seen plumbing before? How would you know if they did good work, charged fairly, or even fixed the right thing? This is the paradox of government contracting: to outsource something well, you need to understand it deeply. But agencies often outsource precisely because they lack that expertise.

The pattern is predictable and slightly tragic. An agency decides a function isn't 'core' enough for government employees. They contract it out. The in-house experts retire or leave. New hires never learn the work because contractors handle it. A decade later, nobody at the agency truly understands what they're paying for. They've lost what experts call 'intelligent customer' capability.

The IRS discovered this with its tax processing systems. NASA experienced it with rocket engineering. The Pentagon faces it with weapons procurement. Contractors become the only ones who understand critical government functions—which means they set the terms, estimate the costs, and evaluate their own work. The government becomes a checkbook holder who can't read the invoices.

Takeaway

Outsourcing a capability you don't understand is like hiring a translator for a language you've never heard—you'll never know if they're telling you the truth.

Politicians love announcing workforce reductions. Cutting 10,000 government positions sounds efficient and decisive. What they mention less often: those 10,000 positions frequently become 12,000 contractor positions doing the same work. The jobs don't disappear—they just vanish from the headcount that voters see.

Why would replacing a government worker with a contractor cost more? Simple math, really. The contractor company needs profit margins—typically 10-15%. They have overhead: executives, lawyers, proposal writers, and marketing teams. They carry liability insurance. All of this gets built into the price. Studies consistently find that contractor positions cost 1.5 to 2 times more than equivalent government employees. But here's the accounting magic: contractor costs appear as 'services' rather than 'personnel.'

This creates genuinely absurd situations. Agencies face hiring freezes that prevent them from bringing on a $70,000 government analyst. So they pay a contractor $140,000 for the same work—because that's a different budget line. The restriction on government 'size' gets honored. The taxpayer gets fleeced. Everyone pretends this makes sense.

Takeaway

When you see headlines about 'shrinking government,' ask where the work went—often it just moved to a more expensive line item.

Government employees operate under layers of rules, ethics requirements, and transparency obligations. They can be subpoenaed by Congress. Their emails are subject to Freedom of Information requests. Their mistakes become public record. Contractors? They're private companies with trade secrets and attorney-client privilege. The same work, radically different visibility.

This matters most when things go wrong. When a government computer system crashes, investigators can dig through every decision, meeting, and email. When a contractor's system fails, the investigation often hits a wall of proprietary information. 'We'd love to tell you what happened, but that's commercially sensitive.' The public paid for the work but can't fully examine it.

Even day-to-day accountability suffers. Whistleblower protections that shield government employees don't fully cover contractor workers. Congressional oversight committees struggle to get straight answers about contractor performance. Inspector generals face access restrictions. The fundamental democratic principle—that citizens can understand what their government does—breaks down when 'their government' is actually a private company operating behind corporate confidentiality.

Takeaway

Public money doing public work through private hands creates structural blind spots—places where democratic accountability simply cannot reach.

None of this means contracting is inherently wrong. Private firms genuinely do some things better than government agencies. The problem isn't privatization itself—it's unconsidered privatization that treats all functions as equally outsourceable and ignores the hidden costs.

Smart government would ask hard questions: Do we maintain enough expertise to be intelligent customers? Are we genuinely saving money or just hiding personnel? Can the public still hold someone accountable when things fail? Until we ask these questions honestly, we'll keep pretending government shrunk while its shadow keeps growing.