One of the most important trends occurring in the public sector is the increasing use of public private partnerships to accomplish public goals. We see these where government contracts with business to produce commodities or services for less price and more efficiency than government can on its own, and where government contracts with public (though more private than government) nonprofits to provide services.
We have called for the management of the Parkway to become such a partnership where the local agencies, the county and the cities adjacent to or interested in maintaining the Parkway, form a Joint Powers Authority which would then contract with a nonprofit organization to provide daily management.
The Silent Revolution
By Paul L. Posner
Most of us would acknowledge that the scope and role that government plays in our lives has grown exponentially over the past 60 years.
Coinciding with the end of World War II, governments at all levels have been called upon to deal with a growing range of daunting problems and aspirations in areas ranging from health care and transportation to energy production and conservation and environmental protection.
It goes without saying that the federal government of President Truman, for instance, cast a far smaller shadow on the nation than the government of President George W. Bush, as reflected in the growth of federal spending from 11.6 percent of the economy in 1948 to 20.1 percent in 2005. Surprisingly, however, the number of federal civilian employees has remained roughly the same over this period. President Truman’s government employed from 1.6 to 2 million civilian employees, about the same level as President Bush’s government of 1.8 million employees.
This puzzling factoid reflects an important paradigmatic shift in the nature of governance that has been going on for five decades, literally under the radar screen of many public dialogue about government.
The growth of government programs and spending in the past half century was not accomplished by using federal employees, but rather by leveraging the resources of other sectors of the economy, whether it be contractors, state and local governments, or nonprofits. Paul Light’s analysis shows that federal employees now constitute only a small share of the nearly 15 million-member government workforce of contractors, state and local grantees’ staffs working under the yoke of federal grants and mandates, and others who have been cajoled, mandated, enticed, jawboned or mobilized to work on federal goals and programs.
Indeed, it is difficult to find many major federal mission areas that do not rely heavily on third parties for program delivery and even goal definition. Even the function of defending the nation’s borders has become a matter dependent on other actors beyond the Pentagon, whether it be defense contractors or local fire departments and other first responders who have become the line of first defense in the event of a terrorist attack. Contractors used by such agencies as NASA and Energy outnumber federal employees by ratios exceeding 10 to 1.
