Governmental use of consultancy services has long been a concern for scholars of public
administration, management and political science. Somewhat surprisingly, the largest
and most archetypal case of government contracting, the United States, has received very
little detailed treatment, despite a plethora of anecdotal and popular accounts claiming
to have documented a pattern of exponential growth in the size and impact of policyrelated government contracting. Some of the reasons for this gap between popular and
scholarly treatments of the subject has to do with the difficulties associated with
gathering detailed information on contracts and consultants’ activities. This paper
reports on these challenges in the context of the distribution of the American federal
government’s contracting of policy services and discusses how, thanks to several
initiatives on the part of the Obama administration, many such issues can now be
overcome, or partially overcome to provide reasonably accurate data related to
questions about the size, trends and other aspects of US federal government consulting.
While many of the problems listed above persist in the US case and continue to make it
difficult to track changes in consulting practices, recent reform efforts make it possible to
sketch out a general view of the pattern of US government consulting over the past
decade and promise increasingly accurate accounting and greater detail into the future.
Introduction: Policy Consulting in the Public Sector as a Problematic Phenomenon
Governmental use of consultancy services has long been a concern for scholars of public
administration, management and political science (Howlett & Migone, 2013a, 2013b;
Kipping & Engwall, 2003; Graeme & Bowman, 2006; Guttman and Willner, 1976;
Rosenblum & McGillis, 1979). Much existing research has focused either on placing this
expansion in a historical perspective (McKenna, 1995, 1996 and 2006) or assessing its
underlying causes and consequences (David, 2012; Berit and Kieser, 2002; McGann,
2007).
Although the impact of consulting is fairly broad, most of these studies have
focused on a narrow set of questions related to the effect of contracting out on levels of
public service employment and budgets (Dilulio, 2016;Guttman & Willner, 1976; GAO,
2011) rather than on policy outcomes. A number of recent studies, however, have begun
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to look at other questions, such as the increasing use of consultants for work related to
policy analysis, advice, implementation and evaluation — activities thought to be the
core work of policy workers in government (Saint-Martin 2001, 2005 and 2012). The
existing small literature on the subject acknowledges the simultaneous growth of the
policy consulting industry, and growing share of the public sector as a client of this
industry (Pattenaude, 1979; Hodge and Bowman, 2006; Gross and Poor, 2008) but draws
few conclusions as to policy impact and effects outside of Saint-Martin’s thesis of its
contribution to neo-liberalism and preferences for market-based policy alternatives
(Saint-Martin, 2012).
Empirical studies are scarce, however, with little analysis of quantitative data.
These studies to date have also only examined the situation with respect to the activities
of consultants in a relatively small number of countries; including New Zealand (Boston,
1996), Australia (Howard, 2006), Canada (Howlett & Migone 2013a) and the UK
(National Audit Office of the United Kindgom, 2016). And many existing statistics are
often idiosyncratic and do not allow for comparison between departments or countries,
nor for an assessment of trends.
Somewhat surprisingly, the largest and most archetypal case of government
contracting, the United States, has received very little detailed treatment, despite a
plethora of anecdotal and popular accounts claiming to have documented a pattern of
exponential growth in the size and impact of policy-related government contracting
(Gutman and Willner, 1976, Pattenaude, 1979; Rosenblum and McGillis, 1979; Hodge
and Bowman, 2006; Saint-Martin, 2007; McKenna, 2006; Gross and Poor, 2008; David,
2012).
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Some of the reasons for this gap between popular and scholarly treatments of the
subject has to do with the difficulties associated with gathering detailed information on
contracts and consultants’ activities (Howard, 2006, Howlett and Migone 2013a, 2013b).
These data difficulties are very serious and range from no reporting of contracts in some
jurisdictions, high dollar figure cut-offs for reporting in many, timelags in others, as well
as serious variations in reporting across departments and governments, variations in such
practices across time, secrecy provisions regarding contracts, and the general inability to
identify contractees from publicly available contract information, as well as difficulties
encountered separating out policy-related versus administrative or management
consulting activities and contracts, among others (British Columbia Office of the Auditor
General, 2001).
This paper reports on these challenges in the context of the distribution of the
American federal government’s contracting of policy services and discusses how, thanks
to several initiatives on the part of the Obama administration, many such issues can now
be overcome, or partially overcome to provide reasonably accurate data related to
questions about the size, trends and other aspects of US federal government consulting.
While many of the problems listed above persist in the US case and continue to make it
difficult to track changes in consulting practices, recent reform efforts make it possible to
sketch out a general view of the pattern of US government consulting over the past
decade and promise increasingly accurate accounting and greater detail into the future.
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