I'm starting to feel like I'm running out of ideas, since many of these posts are updates on things that I already put down in my book. Anyway, I mentioned in the book that government labs love to use permanent contractors as labor. The cause of this is purely political, no President wants to say that the NIH, NCI, or whatever increased in size under their watch. Unfortunately, the demands on these facilities continues to increase.
This is where government contracting organizations come in. These private companies find research staff and place them in the new positions. These jobs are attractive to scientists because they pay a little better and they are easier to find due to the fact that you don't have to navigate the worst website ever constructed, the USAJOBS page. The politicians who run the government facilities love these employees because they can say that their facility has increased output without hiring any government employees. And the contracting companies love to fill these positions because they can charge more than twice the actual contract employee's salary for each position they fill.
To make this clearer, if a government Postdoctoral researcher makes about $40,000/year, the same researcher could actually make about $45,000 if she worked for a contract company. The contract company will then charge the lab $100,000 for her services. It works out for everybody, particularly the private company that gets to pocket $55,000 for simply being in the right place at the right time. The only people that get screwed are the taxpayers and the people who think, for some strange reason, that the money might be spent better on having 2 postdoctoral cancer researchers....
Here is a recent article from Forbes regarding this phenomenon.
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