The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has updated its database of government contracting (you can also check out fedspending.org to search through contracting data). The House's website has interesting profiles of cases where contracting went wrong, and there's a very comprehensive report on contracting. What it doesn't have is a good narrative to explain why all this stuff matters. As far as I can tell, the dominant narrative goes something like this: corrupt politicians gave away contracts to companies that lined their pockets. That's why so much money is being wasted and contracting is growing. But isn't that an anti-government message? Then it's the politicians and the agencies fault for all the waste in contracting. There's some truth to that, but is it the whole truth? And is it the message we want to be sending? All it implies, in terms of solutions, is that the corrupt politicians need to be kicked out, and government needs to be scaled down. How about this for an alternative: most of the time, private companies aren't set up to do government work right. We asked them to do things they couldn't, so they wasted a lot of money. The solution is to make government do a better job of what it does best: government services.