Last Tuesday, without discussion, the House voted 308-60 to authorize a new ship for an obscure government agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to use in hydrographic surveying — that is, for mapping the ocean floor.

Over the last decade, NOAA has been repeatedly warned and scolded by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and various inspectors general to start contracting out its mapping work, and to charter its vessels from the private sector instead of buying new ones. NOAA’s proposed new ship, which replaces a retiring one, costs a mere $75 million. But the ease of its House passage is a sign that conservatives have let momentum die for private outsourcing of such government work.

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“This administration really could have done more,” said Brian Johnson, the privatization specialist at Americans for Tax Reform. “There are several services the government retains today that are really non-governmental.”

At the beginning of the Bush presidency, the administration enthusiastically embraced and fought for competitive sourcing. Bush’s first budget director, Mitch Daniels, issued a revised version of a Reagan-era OMB Circular to that end. “To ensure that the American people receive maximum value for their tax dollars,” it reads, “commercial activities should be subject to the forces of competition.”

The 63-page document, which exempts the military in time of war or mobilization, urges federal agencies to outsource jobs that are not “inherently governmental” and lays down guidelines for doing so. In the past, this practice has created significant savings — there is no reason, for example, to pay lawn crews and janitorial staffs government-union salaries and pensions, when a private company could do the work for less.

This principle can also be applied to more complex jobs. Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, who worked in the Reagan White House’s privatization office, offered cartography as an example. In 1999, he bought a United States Geological Survey (USGS) map of his town while writing a white paper on competitive sourcing. The map “was not an accurate reflection of the Fredericksburg area,” he wrote. In fact, it was a 1963 map with additions that had been superimposed in 1983.

“If I’d used the government map to find the hospital, I would have ended up at the Chamber of Commerce,” Utt told National Review Online. He then went to the nearest gas station and bought a cheaper map made by a private company, which was both accurate and up to date.

Indeed, most of the USGS maps available today are badly out of date. It is not hard to see how private companies, which already do a better job, could take over this function.


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