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Contractor Agility, Responsiveness is a Critical Asset to Overcoming Ever-Changing Threats

Arlington, Va., July 20, 2010—Today’s Washington Post article questioning the intelligence community for tapping the vast array of private-sector talent to meet immediate intelligence needs after 9/11 glosses over the government’s most basic need: to respond with agility to changing threat environments, the Professional Services Council said today.

“The private sector has been extremely agile and flexible in responding to the government’s ever-changing needs post 9/11,” said PSC President and CEO Stan Soloway. “The private sector’s adaptability and responsiveness to the government’s determination of its needs has been and remains an essential component of our national security response.”

“No one could have anticipated the needed surge for specialized skills required after 9/11 and there was no way the intelligence community could have been expected to have a ‘bench’ with those skills standing by,” Soloway said. “It would be fiscally irresponsible and functionally impossible for the government to maintain that kind of workforce capacity with highly technical skills it may or may not ever need.”

As the Post series has demonstrated thus far, much work remains to be done to ensure that government management remains in control of the mission when responding to new threats.
 
“This is not a contractor issue, it’s a government management and organizational issue,” Soloway said. “The key for the intelligence community, as with all of government, is to ensure it has the internal management capabilities to execute and effectively oversee all of its work, regardless of who performs it.”

“With critical work like intelligence, the decision to hire in-house staff or to hire contractors is a question of the government considering the totality of its force and using contractors as a force multiplier when needed,” Soloway said. “This is entirely consistent with recent OMB direction to agencies about managing a multi-sector workforce.  In truth, the intelligence community was ahead of most federal agencies in identifying this management challenge and taking it on.”

Where cost can be considered in the decision to hire federal employees or contractors, intelligence agencies, like all agencies, must conduct an accurate cost comparison of the fully burdened contractor costs with the full cost of a federal employee, including salary, lifetime benefits and overhead. Evidence suggests that this apples-to-apples comparison is not being done.

“Even where these comparisons can be done, it does not erase the fact that the people with the sophisticated, high-end skills profiled in the Post series are in short supply and great demand across the global economy and thus cost more,” Soloway said. “Given the government’s salary restrictions, it cannot realistically expect to hire, let alone retain, large numbers of people with those skills.”