Veterans

Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy.

If you hire a vet, their time working for the government as a civilian is added to their military service and becomes part/parcel of their pension package. The contractors get more money up front, and none downstream, and they can be dumped on a moment's notice. It's much harder to dump a career civil servant.

I think there needs to be independent "desk audits" of every damn job (and that includes the Big Wigs, the top management tiers) associated with government. Not just contractor positions, but civil service ones as well. The military does this every so often, as they adjust end strength to meet operational requirements, and they will probably need to keep tweaking their billet allocations as we continue with this latest drawdown.

So much money goes to waste, and in many cases, the bean counters can't figure out where the hell the money went even when they go back and try to audit the process.