Bush Playing With Fire

Perhaps it should not be surprising that a national administration whose hallmarks seem to be reckless ideas and poor judgment is looking to farm out 2,000 firefighting positions in the U.S. Forest Service to contract employees.

Nonetheless, there is a distinct Are They Kidding? quality to the Bush Administration's plans to give away part of the Forest Service's firefighting responsibilities to the highest bidder.

Mark Davis, a union official employed by the agency, told this newspaper's Ginger Adams Otis, "In carving up the Forest Service to serve up to government contractors, this program is also carving up the backbone of our nation's rapid emergency response capabilities, not only for wildfires but for any emergency incident."

What is particularly astonishing about this move to contract out - part of the administration's mandate that all Federal agencies study whether 20 to 50 percent of the work done by civil servants can be performed more cheaply by the private sector - is that it's in defiance of a Congressional move to limit the outsourcing of fire-suppression work. After the President issued his privatizing mandate three years ago, legislators probed the decision to give some Forest Service work to contractors and found enough problems that they required that no fire-suppression work could be farmed out without rigorous evidence that the contractors could perform it as least as well as the Federal personnel.

Cases can and have been made that it sometimes makes sense to outsource government work for projects of limited duration, since that can be more cost-effective than having an agency hire full-time staff that won't be needed once those projects are complete.

Some services, however, most notably in the area of public safety, should always be the province of government and its employees. If any doubts existed that firefighting was one of them, they should have been dispelled by the Bush Administration's experience when it farmed out responsibility for maintaining its fleet of fire engines and snowmobiles to an outside company. The White House crowed when it saved $1.7 million in fiscal year 2005 as the result of the contract. But less than a year later, the administration canceled the contract after problems that included 14 of 25 fire engines being out of service simultaneously. The contractor apparently had other, more pressing business to take care of, and wound up being deemed a safety risk.

President Bush has often indicated he has a distrust of government and believes it is less efficient than the private sector. Ironically, it is his own administration's incompetence that fuels such theories.