Aside from the goal of shrinking government, these measures permit the following:

1. weakening the labor movement by eliminating government workers who belong to unions and whose working conditions are regulated by a union contract. This has the delightful intended side effect of reducing the amount of dues collected and thereby the amount of money that unions have to back labor-supporting candidates. Not to mention the ability to pay workers less and take the balance as corporate profits or as bloated salaries for corporate executives - or even use the money for campaign donations.

2. This also weakens the civil service system, already horribly weakened by years of disregard and neglect. A key purpose of the system was to prevent patronage in government employment and the abuse of government workers for the gain of key politicians.

3. Outsourcing government functions makes politicians and political parties more ripe for bribing with campaign and other donations by companies that want to then get the contracts to do the government work. On the flip side, the political party in power or that hopes to be in power can then go to companies and promise contracts if sufficient support is provided to get party members elected (a kind of blackmail).

The system is set to be ripe for corruption and to reduce democratic oversight and control.

Here are some of my most recent experiences with the system.

A colleague recently contacted someone at NIH to learn about the scoring of a proposal that she had submitted. She was told that the agency is terribly short-staffed and having great difficulty getting participants for peer review panels and so they set the cut-off for scoring proposals at 180 (lower than has normally been the practice). The agency will get to the proposals that score above that within the next few months and will score all and give summaries for the ones that are not far from 200. The agency employee was exasperated. She told my colleague that between the difficulty that they are having reviewing proposals and the reduced funding they receive for awards, they are funding about 1/2 of what they were several years ago. I have experienced similar problems at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health which has had a woefully small and overworked staff managing its extramural portfolio.

The other thing that I’ve noticed is that the private corporations who now do the outsourced work of organizing review panels are themselves submitting proposals to do the research - they are establishing research groups. And, I recently read that these corporations, because of their size and wealth, have lobbyists working Congress to make sure that the work of running the research agencies continues to be outsourced rather than rebuilding internal staffing strength - so that they can continue and expand their business. Constella, one of these corporations working with NIH and CDC has an advisory board that has Tommy Thompson, former Director of the DHHS as the chair and Carol Browner, a former EPA director as a member. Constella received about $150M dollars in management and research support from NIH and CDC last year alone.

In the meantime, academic researchers across the country are finding it increasingly difficult to secure federal research grants. This is due to a combination of budget reductions for the research programs (money is needed for a war based on the lies of an administration that stole two elections to exist, and for drastic reductions in taxation of the wealthiest in our society - corporations and individuals) and ideological barriers put up against what will be funded and who will participate on review panels and science boards.

Take a look at the board of directors of Tetra Tech, the parent corporation of Science International. Albert Smith is the board chairman. Quoting from their web site:

“Mr. Smith is a former member of the Secretary of Defense’s Defense Science Board, serving from 2002 to 2005. He was an Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin and President of its Integrated Systems & Solutions business until 2004. From 1999 to 2003 Mr. Smith was Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin’s Space Systems Company. Prior to that, Mr. Smith was President of Government Systems at Harris Corporation. He has also worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, where he received the Intelligence Medal of Merit. Mr. Smith has served as Chairman of International Launch Services’ Board of Directors and as a Director of the Space Foundation.”

So, Science International, Constella, Lockheed Martin Government Services, Halliburton and its subsidiaries, are part of the ever expanding network of corporations with directors who have been busy running through the revolving doors between corporations and the federal government. As any corporation, their mission demands that they meet the goals of their investors as well as other fiduciary obligations. Their primary goals cannot be to support public health or the firm democracy that is critical to achieve optimal public health.

In the currently playing German film, The Lives of Others, viewers watch as a character who lived in the former German Democratic Republic (the former East Germany) and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and integration with West Germany is able to review all records collected on him by the former police state. It’s powerful to watch this, especially to then realize that here in the US we do not have that liberty. We cannot obtain, for free, the records that government political and police surveillance agencies have collected about us. We have to file Freedom of Information Act requests, pay for the copying fees, only to obtain records that have blacked out because they were deemed as state secrets and security risks.

Public health goals cannot be achieved in a state where democracy is squashed.