[quote=Allan from Fallbrook][quote=desmond]Do governments even have workers to build buildings? Isn’t it contracted out with maybe government supervisons on the job?[/quote]
On the Military/Federal projects I work on, the owner (US Army Corps, Naval Facilities, etc) has a project team that runs the gamut from contracts officers (who manage the contract with the winning contract team, including architects, engineers and general contractor), through project engineers (who oversee that the project is being built according to the approved plans/specs and ensure quality control) to a project manager who provides oversight throughout and then signs off on the final construction and “gets the keys” (and thus releases the project team).
I’m not aware (on the Mil/Fed side) of any government construction teams; it’s all done by private contractors who bid/bond/prosecute the work.[/quote]
Not sure how much actual construction work they do these days (as opposed to private contractors), but what about the…
Navy Seebees:
“Seabees are members of the United States Navy construction battalions. The word Seabee[1] is a proper noun that comes from the initials of Construction Battalion, (CB) of the United States Navy. The Seabees have a history of building bases, bulldozing and paving thousands of miles of roadway and airstrips, and accomplishing a myriad of other construction projects in a wide variety of military theaters dating back to World War II.”
“From the beginning, many politicians wanted the Corps to contribute to both military construction and works of a civil nature. Assigned the military construction mission on 1 December 1941 after the Quartermaster Department struggled with the expanding mission,[17] the Corps built facilities at home and abroad to support the U.S. Army and Air Force. During World War II the mission grew to more than 27,000 military and industrial projects in a $15.3 billion mobilization program. Included were aircraft, tank assembly, and ammunition plants, camps for 5.3 million soldiers, depots, ports, and hospitals, as well as the Manhattan Project, and the Pentagon.”
And there’s this (not just construction related, but it is related to fraud, waste, and abuse whenever public money and private interests intersect):
“September 12, 2011 — The recent report by the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting, which examined contracting abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, understandably focused on the loss of up to $60 billion to waste and fraud out of the $206 billion given for contracts and grants.
The commission offered a series of sensible recommendations for reform, some of which resonate with a 2010 report I co-authored on contracting’s role in the future of warfare. Private contractors are likely to be an enduring presence on the battlefield – some 260,000 contractors served in Iraq and Afghanistan last year, more than the entire American troop presence in those countries. While we are unlikely to see another large-scale reconstruction effort akin to Afghanistan and Iraq any time soon, for the foreseeable future America will be unable to engage in conflicts or reconstruction and stabilization operations of any significant size without private contractors.”
“It is a new era in which contractor waste can threaten mission failure after eight years of war. But the reality is that America’s reliance on private contractors is not likely to fade. The Pentagon and others have made major advances in recent years, but the path to reform remains long. It is time to get on with it.”
