Government is good at outsourcing…responsibility
- January 12, 2023
David Strom, Hot Air
Private sector companies have been outsourcing for decades, and the federal government occasionally does so.
Especially when they want to hide the ball. If there is responsibility for wrongdoing, no bureaucrat wants to be the one to accept it. That’s why huge swathes of intelligence gathering and analysis is quietly outsourced to private companies that are essentially accountable to nobody. They can often do shady things that nobody within the federal government wants to take responsibility for.
The Department of Homeland Security is a master at this, and the fine folks at the watchdog group Protect the Public Trust have experienced that firsthand.
They’ve been trying to get information about requests made by the government for censoring social media posts, and they have been getting the runaround. DHS works with “partners” around the country who make requests for suppressing content on behalf of the feds. DHS doesn’t make the requests directly, but outsources this responsibility to their partners. In this particular case the partner is the State of Washington.