Presently, governments are partnering with different agencies, private organizations, or entities to provide public services. Such partnerships are perceived to be important in helping the government serve citizens better, although there are criticisms from various quarters concerning the same partnerships. For governments that have a centralized system of government, such partnerships or contracts can be relatively easy to design as well as to oversee because of a centralized decision-making system. However, for a country such as the United States, the concept of federalism and separation of powers presents various challenges when designing contracts and overseeing because of the many parties involved as well as the bureaucracies that may exist. According to Cohen (2008), nonprofit organizations have their own special characteristics, needs and challenges which make contract design difficult. Additionally, adequate and skilled staff is vital to structure contracts effectively for purposes of clarifying roles and responsibilities, monitoring the contract and ensuring risks are kept at a minimum. These are issues faced by local, state and federal levels as there is a huge gap in management resources. Also, structuring contracts, contract implementation, overseeing and accountability will be difficult to achieve when the contracted service is one that involves more levels of government because they will have different requirements and regulations. These issues have adverse results, such as lack of accountability, lack of monitoring and more time and costs are incurred due to complexities in design. According to Cohen (2008), after World War II it was discovered that many officials were corrupt and to tackle this separation of powers was implemented, these powers are designed to check and balance each other. To protect government contracting more than four pieces of legislation were created and having so many pieces to review when designing a contract takes time. Each branch of the separation of powers has a strong sense of its own responsibilities and importance in the scheme of things, each has powers that if exercised can frustrate the will of the other ( Contract Management and Governance, Week 2). Judiciary acts as a check on legislative bodies and this indirectly affects the design of the contracts by defining government responsibilities. Since each branch checks on the other, contracts are likely to take long and incur lots of issues with changes. These bureaucracies and issues affect how contracts are designed and confusion with who is responsible with overseeing certain aspects. Clear roles need be identified and shared to ease government contracting. All powers serve an important role and so they must find a way to help each other actualize this instead of frustrating each other.
References
Cohen, S. (2008). The responsible contract manager: Protecting the public interest in an outsourced world. Georgetown University Press.
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Contract Management and Governance: Ethics and Evidence. [PowerPoint slides]. Week 2 Lecture Notes
