There was an interesting article in Government Executive magazine yesterday about measuring cost savings of federal jobs that are opened to public-private competitions. The specifics of the policies being developed by OMB and others within the federal government are quite complex, but one particular passage from the article references a statement from Office of Management and Budget Associate Administrator Mathew Blum that was moderately infuriating and still has me scratching my head: "We recognize that this is not going to be a precise science," Blum said. "We do ourselves a disservice if we spend too much time arguing about the precise formula for savings." He said that cost and performance validation are important but costly, and OMB will be looking for data on a sampling of competitions, rather than on each one. A sampling of competitions? So when OMB wants to evaluate regular government programs, it wastes excessive amounts of time, money, and energy making agency staff from every single government program wade through the ridiculous exercise of being surveyed under the Program Assessment Rating Tool (review a rundown of PART's flaws), but when there are private companies involved with doing public work for the government, we just need to use a handful of examples to evaluate whether Joe and Jane Taxpayer are getting the best value for the money. It's unclear to me why this isn't a pretty nasty double standard.