Justice Dept. Looks to Private Sector : Government: The bid to ‘contract out’ jobs is seen as a cost-cutting move by some. Critics say the duties are ‘inherently government functions.’

WASHINGTON —  Can some Justice Department operations be turned over to private industry?

In the eyes of many department employees, the idea is unworkable--the brainchild of short-sighted budget cutters and free-market zealots left over from the Ronald Reagan Administration.

But to the Office of Management and Budget, and apparently some Justice managers, the move may be long overdue. This month, responding to a longstanding OMB directive, the department announced that it may look for private contractors to oversee hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-drug, child abuse and other programs managed by two agencies in the Office of Justice Programs--the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

The bid to “contract out” these programs would eliminate the jobs of 48 program managers and other social scientists--or more than 60% of the career positions in the two agencies. These managers oversee and evaluate federal grants that sponsor community anti-drug workshops, train police to cope with child abuse cases, run “neighborhood watch” anti-crime programs and scores of other locally oriented criminal justice efforts.

“This is all a farce,” charged Stu Smith, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2830, which represents the employees in the Office of Justice Programs. “These people are not giving haircuts . . . or making widgets. These are all inherently government functions.”

Velva Walter, spokeswoman for the Office of Justice Programs, said that is precisely what the department wants to find out. Under current OMB policy, departments must constantly review the work force to determine what positions can be more efficiently performed by the private sector. “It was determined that the social scientist positions constituted the single largest function capable of being contracted out,” Walter said.

Walter also said that no final decisions have been made. “We are just doing what is required by OMB . . . to perform a study,” she said.

But Smith argued that the department clearly tipped its hand by running a notice in Commerce Business Daily soliciting a private contractor to determine “the availability of commercial sources” for providing services to the Office of Justice Programs.

The flap over the social scientists is the latest in a long-running debate over the wisdom of “privatizing” government services. Free-market conservatives have always favored the idea, arguing that private companies interested in maximizing profits are generally more efficient and productive than bureaucrats insulated from the rigors of the marketplace.

Indeed, OMB officials contend they have saved millions of dollars in recent years by contracting out such services as the manicuring of lawns at the Coast Guard or custodial services at the Army Corps of Engineers. But some academic experts are skeptical. They argue that competition is the only sure guarantee of cost-saving, and that substituting a private monopoly for a government agency may produce just as much waste and abuse, as the Pentagon procurement scandals of a few years ago demonstrated.

“It’s not obvious that if you give a person a private monopoly that they can be more efficient than the government,” said Clifford Winston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a specialist in government regulation.

The debate has been further complicated at the Justice Department, which until now has argued that, given the nature of its duties, the department ought to be immune from privatization altogether. Last year, for example, OMB moved in on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, identifying 640 positions that should be studied for privatization, including finger-printers, data transcribers and computer programmers. Justice officials--backed by key allies on Capitol Hill--fought back hard. Turning over sensitive bureau jobs to outside contractors could compromise foreign counterintelligence investigations and threaten the security of FBI crime computers, they argued.

Late last year, OMB backed down on the FBI. But the war is far from over. OMB recently pushed Justice to study 1,981 positions for contracting out over the next four years. Ironically, even though OMB generally favors as many privatization studies as possible, the Office of Justice Programs social scientists were not even on the list.

“This sounds like something that Justice is doing on their own,” said an OMB spokeswoman.