Outsourcing Hollows Out Fed Tech Workforce

The idea that government should not be in the business of business was first articulated by the Bureau of the Budget during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. BOB was the predecessor to the Office of Management and Budget, which was created in 1970 during the Nixon administration.

Government should not be in the business of business. What this principle means is that there are broad areas of business activity that should lie outside the domain of government effort, e.g., providing food service, manufacturing, advertising, and offering medical services.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his top priorities was to shrink government. He believed that many of the activities carried out by civil servants could best be executed by the private sector. So he instructed the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) to aggressively implement OMB Circular A-76, a government directive geared toward privatizing government activities.