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on average, contractors may be billing the government approximately 1.83 times what the government pays federal employees to perform similar work.

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Indeed. Here’s the problem: when it’s an actual private company doing work for profit, there’s an incentive to keep costs down. When it’s an actual government worker with democratic oversight, there’s an incentive to keep costs down. But when you contract out to a private contractor and take both competition and government oversight mostly out of the picture, you’ve created a government-sanctioned monopoly – a private company basically does the work of the state but with an eye toward making profit, not through competition but through a parasitic relationship with the state. This is bad for taxpayers, obviously, but it gives politicians an opening to say they “shrunk government” and often <a class="" href='http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/09/01/texas-and-the-prison-industrial-complex/'>line their own pockets</a>. This is called cronyism in many circles, and with good reason.