Ban government Prime Contractors from also acting in Support Contractor roles for the government. This creates a direct conflict of interest where Support Contractors are serving in leadership positions across the government and making policy decisions that directly benefit their companies who are also serving as Primes. This is widespread throughout the government and results in direct corporate capture of our agencies.
For example, a support contractor in a leadership position advocating policy that pushes for an enterprise solution using a product that their company produces. Another example that is common: support contractors serving on high level government working groups gaining insider information that their company can then take back to enhance their products over their competition and sell to the government for a higher profit.
The underlying root cause is that DC HQs are now heavily reliant on support contractors due to billet caps after 2011 sequestration preventing HQs from creating additional billets which has resulted in a complete dependency on contractor support. The Pentagon for example is now largely comprised by support contractors serving at various levels of leadership. Those that would have previously held these positions as Civil Servants have since left the government for industry to make 3x the salary for the same work. These actors may have good intentions, as I know many of them, but they cannot be truly independent and unbiased as their loyalty has to be with their company first, not the American people.
There are additional policy decisions that could be made to make the government more efficient and eliminating this dependency on support contractors. For example there are layers and layers of bureaucracy that could be eliminated and have policy and program decisions made directly at the working level at field commands and designate those field commands as HQs (getting them away from DC). That would be hugely effective,emphasized text especially at the DoD.
Make the Civil Service Great Again!
Happy to help.
Sincerely,
An American Civilian Servant.