Hmm? A nonprofit is still a privately controlled entity. Many nonprofits and for-profits are given government grants and subsidies, this does not exclude them from being classified as private entities.
So this still qualifies as privatization, no?
If your contention is more rooted in the amount of direction that the government gives the private entity it is "delegating" to, then maybe that's something to explore?
That said, I would still say that using contractors like Blackwater or Lockheed Martin is "privatizing" various aspects of the military industrial complex, even if their actions are to greater or lesser degrees guided by government mandate.
I think what he's pointing out is that the traditional meaning of "privatization" is linked to going to a for-profit organization rather than a non-profit-government one.
In this sense, the fact that this was delegated to non-profit organizations, which have the same objectives as the state (provide help, rather than profit) makes some difference.
So the issue here seem more the funding cuts rather than who manages them.
Smaller, disjointed entities have, by definition, higher overheads: if before you had 1 payroll accountant for 100 state employees, then you split duties over 5 nonprofits, now you have 5 payroll accountants.
The counter-argument is that the 5 orgs can be somewhat more efficient than the one monolith, but the key is the conditional: they can, but there is no guarantee, whereas the 4 extra overheads are guaranteed. That's one of the many systemic flaws of privatized/delegated systems.
It's true that larger organizations can be more efficient in theory. But it's largely just that: theory.
Because, as organizations scale up and enough time passes, the usual outcome is a gigantic web of inscrutable policies and procedures. And lots of people to write and enforce them. Getting something done that in a small organization can trivially be handled by the person originally seeing the need for it, will in a large organization often involve five other people in a messy chain of emails. Or it can't be done at all, unless one is willing and able to play politics to get it done.
Example: I work at a school/university with some 30 thousand students, that is the merger product of many smaller schools, each targeting different professions. These mergers were done for efficiency reasons. I'd estimate the teacher/support head count overhead for these originals schools to be somewhere between 30 and 50%. Currently, we're well over 100% overhead. So we employ more non-teachers than we employ teachers. (And on top of that, teachers handle a lot of non-teaching-related work, of course.) Somehow, the merger is seen as a success.
Small organizations are awesome. It's a shame that government rules and regulations often make them unsustainable.
So this still qualifies as privatization, no?
If your contention is more rooted in the amount of direction that the government gives the private entity it is "delegating" to, then maybe that's something to explore?
That said, I would still say that using contractors like Blackwater or Lockheed Martin is "privatizing" various aspects of the military industrial complex, even if their actions are to greater or lesser degrees guided by government mandate.