[Ineedaride2]

As a contractor, I think one of the biggest problems is accessibility. I run a reputable, competitive service in my area of expertise, yet I would never be able to bid my services out to the federal government due to location and size. For many tasks which the fed would hire contractors, they are only interested in:

1) Companies that are large enough to handle the HUGE projects which are necessary for a HUGE entity like our federal government

2) Companies who are spread throughout the nation, as they are able to handle many different locations, thereby gaining a reputation as a "go-to" company for the people who administer the bids. Plus, larger companies have more accessibility to Washington.

Both of these prohibitions would be largely negated if the states handed out contracts. The projects would likely be on a much smaller scale, the location problem would largely be negated, and more contractors would have an opportunity to bid out there services. This lowers price, improves quality and enables growth of competition.

IMO, things start to breakdown some at the local levels, because outside of metropolitan areas, many local governments are too inept to really improve things by downscaling complexity of projects. However, the significance of projects at the local level would drastically reduce the effects of incompetent contractors when compared to incompetence/fraud at the federal levels.

The bottom line is, the bigger it is, the less competition there is, and the more screw-ups and overbids there tend to be. In some cases this can't be helped, but I believe it could be improved a lot.