In the WaPo, Christopher Lee reports on how the President's Competitive Sourcing Initiative® is going. "The competitive sourcing initiative did little to improve management, produced a ton of worthless paper, demoralized thousands of workers and cost a bundle, all to prove that federal employees are pretty good after all," said Paul C. Light, a professor of government at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The president's program was implemented to bring the magical cost-cutting powers of the market to the federal government by pitting government employees against private contractors in a bidding war. So far, 83 percent of competitively-sourced have been won by federal workers. After $225 million in administrative costs and five years of putting decent-paying, benefit-providing jobs on the auction block, the Bush Administration has shown that the federal government is better at providing federal-government services more efficiently than most private firms.