Keep in mind that most of the benefits of Privatization could be had by a public agency if the pols really meant it when they said “do more with less�

True words. The problem with government agencies is that their inherent “inside the box” thinking makes it much harder to innovate. Most analysts agree that the key to downsizing is re-organizing the work so that it can be done more efficiently or investing in automation. Not just dumping more work on less people. This leads to a slow hiring creep as people are re-hired to the necessary jobs, and then another round of cuts and layoffs hits, trimming the payroll again. The uncertainty serves to demoralize the remaining overloaded employees further, lowering productivity even more.

The reason why government agencies are less efficient, in general, is the dead wood factor. Every employee has far more rights to their job as a governmental worker than a private sector employee. Civil service, of some sort or another, virtually always holds a public sector manager so accountable for discipline or firing someone that it’s much easier to shove the problem child off on someone else than to hope the employee isn’t connected to someone somewhere or that a board doesn’t overturn a firing. I’ve watched City Council hem and haw about some fired worker who claimed his supervisor was “out to get him”, eventually finding the guy another slot in a different department after it was found out he was simply a lousy employee. Contrast that to the multitude of private sector employees; with no paper trail they can be fired at will (since most don’t have contracts). The race card is so overplayed in public sector personnel matters that if the manager is a white male, he almost always needs another person to do the dirty work too.

It’s been my experience that employees in either sector are similar (your astute observerations elsewhere aside) if given the same motivators though. The pols in charge of the process will make it clear, one way or another, that the company will have to be at least as responsive as the government workers they’re replacing and that few get a contract without paying for it off books. It might mean holding a fundraiser at the appropriate time or contributing “in kind” services if not a straightforward payoff but major contracts always have strings attached (and tend to be written to exclude most, if not all, competition).