Young: Texas' privatizing quagmire

WACO, Texas — Has it been five years? Five years since a new Republican majority in the Legislature launched its "shock and awe" offensive against social services in Texas? Yikes.

A few months later, commander-in-chief Rick Perry, who looks good in a flight jacket, pronounced major operations against Texas bureaucracy a spectacular success.

Mission accomplished, y'all.

Like that other military gambit, where we blew up a country and thought a mobile and sleek fighting force could piece it together, Texas's privatizing experience has been a debacle. Or, as Thomas Ricks' best-seller termed the Iraq incursion, a "Fiasco."

In Austin, as in Baghdad, it long has become clear that blowing things up and sending in waves of contractors doesn't exactly work.

An excellent analysis by the Dallas Morning News's Robert Garrett frames this. Every Texan should read it. Many believe the Reaganesque, "Government is the problem." Sometimes government is a problem. But privatizing it can be even worse.

Five years ago Texas was sending out electronic pink slips to workers who handled eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps and more.

Within the scope of a sweeping remake of social services, those workers no longer would be necessary, they were told by e-mail. A contractor, Bermuda-based Accenture Ltd., would obviate most of their jobs.

A large network of local offices would be replaced with a small network of regional centers. Bada-bing.

So, what's happening five years later? Accenture has been fired. Employees have been rehired. Indeed, the state Health and Human Services Commission is offering incentives to lure new state eligibility workers and for those on staff to please not leave.

In the process, thousands of people needing social services have been left hanging. Their paperwork has been lost. Worst of all, the savings touted didn't pan out.

The 2003 privatization initiative was not just for eligibility centers but for the whole of human services. It was penciled in as a projected savings when lawmakers sought to close a $10 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes or addressing Texas' decrepit means of funding what a responsible state government ought.

This was a case of "roll tanks first, figure things out later." Heckuva job, Rummy.

GOP state budget writers told the Department of Mental Health/Mental Retardation (since restructured and renamed) to privatize services across the board — even if new contracts didn't reflect a cost savings to taxpayers.

It was a bust. Too few capable bidders stepped forth. In 2005, lawmakers voted to abolish the MHMR privatization directive. Perry vetoed the bill, issuing an executive order to privatize when possible but to use community MHMR centers as "providers of last resort," which they remain. Yes, evil, not-for-profit government.

While wholesale privatization in Texas has been of dubious benefit to most of us, it has been of great benefit to a cherished few.

As with contractors in Iraq (the only Americans doing quite well relative to that enterprise) someone in Texas is making a nice living off bad policy.

While thousands of Texas children were left hanging when the state trimmed the rolls of the Children's Health Insurance Program, auditors found the state had overpaid a vendor $20 million for administering it, including millions for individual consultants.

Now, just as the Army has begun offering bonuses for its personnel to re-enlist, even accepting felons to meet recruiting goals sapped by Iraq, so is Texas offering bonuses to bureaucrats it once deemed unnecessary.

Listen to the state and you'll hear that it's all working according to plan, that Texas taxpayers are being served and so are the needy people whose best interests this compassionate quest was all about. You know, the onward march of freedom and all that.

Watch out, Texas. With no end in sight to this quagmire, we may have to draft pencil-pushers next.

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John Young is opinion editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald. E-mail: jyoung AT wacotrib.com.