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As the congressional “Super Committee” seeks to slash the deficit, Washington’s ever-expanding “shadow government” looms large as a target. Although the Tea Party and deficit hawks frequently complain about a bloated federal workforce, the real growth has come within the ranks of federal contract workers, who usually get scant scrutiny.

While the full-time civilian federal workforce has remained relatively static at 2.1 million for the past three decades, a leading expert estimates there are about 7.5 million government contract workers, or more than three times the number of regular government workers.
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“[The] American people are right to worry about fraud and waste and abuse,” New York University professor Paul Light, an expert on the federal government, declared in a report released last summer. “Much more of the government’s work today is outsourced, without clear guidelines as to the net benefits or cost of such an approach.”

Light estimated that during the Bush Administration, the federal contract workforce jumped nearly 75 percent, from 4.4 million to 7.6 million. More than two years into the Obama administration, Light still puts the headcount at approximately 7.5 million.

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Approximately $320 billion – or about 60 percent of all federal dollars spent on contracts for goods and services – went to support the contract workforce in fiscal 2010, according to the OMB. To put that figure in perspective, it is about 40 percent higher than the total compensation paid to in-house federal civilian employees last year. Moreover, government contractors often are paid more for their services than the roughly corresponding full-time federal worker.

The government is buying contract workers ranging from information technology specialists at Washington agency headquarters to security officers in Iraq and Afghanistan to nuclear scientists at Energy Department laboratories across the country. Thousands of these workers are employees of technology and engineering behemoths such as Lockheed Martin Corp. and Bechtel Group. Lockheed, with headquarters in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, ranks No. 1 in both military and civilian contracts, according to the latest available figures.

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A report released this month by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan watch dog, asserts the federal government would have saved significant funds by using in-house employees rather than private contractors in 33 of 35 occupational classifications reviewed.

In addition, budget figures recently analyzed by POGO indicate the Pentagon alone spent more than $200 billion on contractors during the 2010 fiscal year – $50 billion more than the cost of all uniformed personnel employed by the Defense Department.