Outsourcing

Nobody is talking about the coming plague much today. There is so much else in play and much at stake. The Iraqis are going to be voting, and there will probably be fewer suicide attacks, since travel by automobile is banned. That can’t go on for long, of course, since goods must be distributed. But it provides a certain unusual tranquility to the day.

I wish they would do that here in Arlington . The Counties to the West of the Capital have already cancelled the day. There is an ice storm coming, perhaps for lunch, and the local governments have conducted a pre-emptive surrender, like the French Army.

I don’t blame them. Steve Canyon and I attended a conference out in Chantilly the last two days at the big blue building complex with the cryptic memorials in the lobby. Solemn portraits of the leaders of Programs “A,” and “B” and “C” line the walls. But there is no mention as to what those great efforts were, or what they accomplished. The portraits are apparently enough for the people who work there, and that is fine with me.

The usual suspects were in attendance, hundreds of them, and they gathered by group to drink coffee, sorting themselves by their program allegiance, since most of the work is outsourced these days. The one-time badges issued to permit access to the big blue building overwhelmed the card-readers at the check-points, and the guards quickly began to just wave us through. I have always marveled at that. Our security systems only function properly when they are not subjected to stress. Like the highways that lead in and out of the District.

The roads and bridges are fine when there is no traffic on them, but later today it will be the perfect storm, ice on the concrete, the bridges freezing first, and the early darkness cloaking the honking vehicles with miles of frozen road to the bedroom cities in the hinterland.

It is enough to make an old bureaucrat go back to bed. But there is a Program Review at the Bus Station downtown, and physical attendance is required. If things go according to plan, the freezing rain and the meeting will begin simultaneously.

The Times this morning says that the wild increases in spending in the Defense Department have come to an end, and that the budgets will be cut back. There is a relation to those in the business of providing things to the government. There must be adjustments and plans formulated to exploit what remains, and hence the meeting today.

But there are meetings elsewhere, too. The President told his government to prepare for the Bird Flu a month or so ago, and the army of bureaucrats has moved out to create a plan. Aside from the production of industrial-grade rhetoric, planning is the major industry in town. We have reams of plans, social ones and defense ones, and now Homeland Security ones.

I have an interest in Homeland Security issues. I am a concerned citizen, and with luck, a predatory capitalist. I am monitoring Border Security issues for business opportunities, and there is the constant pressure on the Department to prepare for everything.

That would require a lot of brainpower, and there is not enough to go around. Most of the nation’s critical infrastructure is in private hands. That includes the highways and bridges and power plants, of course. But the system-of-systems that is America has hidden vulnerabilities, not in the massive brick-and-mortar. The Internet is one, and the financial system, and public telecommunications are others. 

That is how we arrived at the plague. There is an office at the Department responsible for planning and outreach to industry. It is called the Infrastructure Coordination Division (ICD), and it is located in the Infrastructure Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. The Director of this office is charged with coordinating industry and government response to threats to the infrastructure from natural and human sources.

He is a man with a wry wit, a wily veteran of the chaos of the establishment of two Cabinet-level Departments, Energy and Homeland Security. Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, he is no fool.

He is also instrumental in coordinating the efforts of government and industry to have detailed plans in place to ensure the reconstitution and continuity of business operations under all circumstances. That includes bad men in hi-jacked airliners, major meteor strikes, and now hurricanes.

It was a lively session, and I will not bore you with the minutia of it. But I was more than a little stunned to hear that the number one priority in the ICD is the preparation of guidelines to protect against the consequences of pandemic disease.

The President took a principled stance against H5N1. He is opposed to the Bird Flu. It is a peril, for sure, and there are battalions of health professionals watching to see if it makes the leap to human-to-human contagion. So far it has not. But the medical people are predicting that if it is not that, it will be something else. Something awful is not only likely, but inevitable.

In fact, the Director said something awful is overdue to menace the public health. He took a sip of his iced-tea and referenced the great epidemic of 1918-19 repeatedly in his remarks. He said it killed as many as 700-800,000 Americans, most in the prime of their lives. Considering the national population was approximately 105 million at the time, it was a staggering blow.

The basic planning guidelines were to accommodate an outbreak of disease that would affect 40% of the workforce. There was a murmur around the table. Suppose nearly half the workers could not report to the job? Suppose more would not, to safeguard their families? What would happen to an economy that has leaned itself down to just-in-time delivery? 

Who was responsible for ensuring that the gas stations and supermarkets were stocked? Would it be happenstance, with individual locations shifting for themselves, leaving the poor behind, as they were in the 9th Ward in New Orleans after the flood?

Could people work from home, if the numbers attempting to do so crashed the network? And who should be inoculated first? The police and firefighters? Or is it possible in this complex system that the most critical worker is not the First Responder, but rather the handful of people who run the public water plants?

If there is no pure water, there is no life.

The Director challenged us to learn the lessons from Katrina, and his conclusion surprised me. He said the Federal government had to get out of the way of institutions like WalMart, which are considerably better at delivering services than the government.. I was unsettled by the notion that the role of the government is to facilitate the private sector. This is new territory for those of us who grew up in the long shadow of the Second World War, when the Government knew best.

The Director said that the best logisticians are no longer in the Army. They are at FedEx and the Home Depot.

I was both comforted and disquieted. The government is actively on the case, and that is good. But I am reluctant to leave my fate to Sam Walton’s employees. I thought it might be a good idea to stop by the store on the way home and stock up on canned goods. I made a notation on my list of things to do: Prepare for pandemic. Buy Campbell ‘s Soup .

The Director glanced at his watch and said he had to be getting back to the compound for a planning meeting for the coming crisis. He speared the last morsel of his crab-cake, and said he would be needing our help to ensure that the private sector was ready to respond. Everything was going to work out if WalMart was quickly restored to business. They know what they are doing, he said.

I left the meeting with the uneasy feeling that the government’s move to outsource functions in the name of efficiency had just moved to an entirely new level. It now appears to be outsourcing the Government itself.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window