Daniel I. Gordon Quotes
We pay a price as taxpayers when we don’t let our acquisition workforce get the same top-level training that private industry’s people have.
The Federal procurement people are generally negotiating up against private industry men and women who have much more experience than they do and have advanced training in procurement while the Federal staff have little advanced training. See {634890} for an example of the problem.
Daniel I. Gordon, Administrator, Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Quoted in “Can the Procurement System Be Saved?”, FCW Magazine, November 30, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Fogleman came out of retirement at the request of Air Force General Bernard Schriever, Commander of Air Force Systems Command, which was responsible for acquiring all missiles. He oversaw 40 percent of the Air Force budget most of which was spend on procurement contracts with companies. Schreiver wanted an experienced business man to oversee his procurement. In 1964 Foglemen volunteered to start up and train the procurement department for Sargent Shriver, President Johnson’s designee to direct the War on Poverty. 210 Job Corps Centers had to be constructed and corporations hired to operate the largest ones—all within a two year span. Fogleman faced the same problem where the Federal officials responsible for the Job Corp had very little business experience. He was very successful and persuaded Shriver and his key staff to hire a cadre of people with business experience and pay them at the high end of the Federal pay scale. The unit met the President’s deadline and obtained great prices, making exemplary use of taxpayer’s money. Fogleman retired for the third time, and after a few years the Job Corps was transferred to the Labor Department and the typical government procurement staff and norms began to operate. Forlleman and General Schreiber were unable to institutionalize Fogleman’s methods and after the General retired, the command that had been so effective for a few years, reverted to standard DOD procurement. See {634893} for a quotation of one of Fogleman’s trainees on military procurement.
The debate over whether the government ought to buy what it needs in the marketplace is as old as our country. Despite men like Jefferson having been strong advocates for market purchases of goods and services for government, there is even by the 21st century a marked tendency to have government actually do the needed work and create the needed merchandise. Even when the private sector is used, the market is avoided by sole source, non-competitive contracts and in the case of military research the National Laboratories were created which are means of avoiding the competitive marketplace and have the work done by entities that are Federal proxies.
The country was in a terrible recession and McKinley and other politicians of the time did not know about or understand the use of a counter-cyclical policy of government stimulus. With the economy devastated and the main revenue for the Federal Government coming only from import customs duty, the Federal coffers were emptying rapidly. Retrenchment was the only possible step that was then known.
While business generally pays much more than Federal service, there are many brilliant people in the government who are not primarily motivated by making the most possible money. NIST for example had two Nobel Prize winners, and several others have served in the National Institutes of Health. Some of the best economists have worked for the government, and the military is full of outstanding men and women of intellect. But generally, with its higher salaries, the private sector has the recruiting advantage though not to the degree Regan implied.
This is a noteworthy quotation because it illustrates—to a slightly exaggerated degree—a major difference between the public and private sectors. However, Conrad fails to point out that when government does try and establish several competitive programs and approaches, conservatives like him are the first say that the government officials do not know what they are doing and then they object to the “duplication” and “waste.” Further, usually, when a government entity does experiment as the private sector competitive system does, it is chastised by liberals and conservatives alike for having had attempts that failed or did not succeed well. Experimenting requires a cultural tolerance for failure or imperfection. Only very courageous executive politicians like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have been able to initiate many programs aiming at the same objective with the society keeping the best—like Social Security and rejecting the worst like the National Recovery Administration. See {631419} for his view.
