The potholes are still there, and garbage pickup is spotty. The Sewerage and Water Board can’t keep the power on during a rainstorm. And yet, New Orleans keeps signing checks—big ones. While city workers and departments struggle with understaffing and outdated equipment, tens of millions of dollars flow to private consultants each year. Whether it’s infrastructure, homelessness response, or public safety, more and more of the work that should be done by government is handed off to outside firms. What’s been created isn’t just inefficiency—it’s a shadow bureaucracy, one that’s expensive, unaccountable, and largely invisible to the public. This is more than a budgeting issue. It’s a question of who’s actually in charge.
The Million-Dollar Pipeline
New Orleans taxpayers are shelling out millions to consultants while basic services falter, and the receipts are piling up.
CDM Smith, a go-to engineering consultant for the Sewerage and Water Board, secured a $1.95 million contract in January 2024 to draft a water treatment master plan. That same agreement was extended and expanded to a total contract value of $12.3 million through 2028—an astonishing figure considering the agency’s persistent infrastructure failures and frequent boil water advisories.
The story doesn’t end there. CDM Smith also plays a major role in the Joint Infrastructure Recovery Request (JIRR) program—a federally funded infrastructure rebuilding initiative with a total price tag exceeding $2.3 billion. CDM is the city’s lead program manager, responsible for coordinating among the Department of Public Works and the Sewerage and Water Board. Their oversight includes hundreds of FEMA-funded street and drainage projects, many of which have faced delays, disruptions, and cost overruns.
Meanwhile, Unity of Greater New Orleans, the city’s main homelessness services contractor, has received more than $178 million since 2019, accounting for 82% of all local homelessness spending. That’s out of a combined $216.3 million from city and federal sources over just five years. Yet encampments continue to grow, shelter access remains inconsistent, and outcomes are poorly tracked.
These contracts aren’t anomalies—they are the architecture. Consultants are managing the city’s most important infrastructure programs while internal public capacity continues to shrink. And with this level of dependence comes a glaring lack of oversight, performance accountability, and public control.
The Disappearing Public Sector
What happens when a city stops building internal capacity and starts contracting out nearly everything? You get a hollowed-out government. And New Orleans is Exhibit A.
Despite an adopted 2025 budget topping $877 million, an alarming portion of critical operations are no longer carried out by public employees. Instead, they’re outsourced to external consultants and nonprofits with little long-term investment in the city’s workforce or institutional memory.
The Department of Public Works, tasked with maintaining over 1,600 miles of roadway, relies on external program managers to coordinate basic functions once overseen internally. The Office of Homeless Services and Strategy, created by Mayor Cantrell in 2023, has almost no direct service staff. Instead, it channels the majority of its funds to Unity of Greater New Orleans, which acts as both a contractor and gatekeeper for shelter access and HUD services.
And then there’s the tech infrastructure. In FY 2023, the city’s Office of Information Technology and Innovation (ITI) had a modest $11.8 million budget—but more than 40% of those dollars went to software licensing, data management consultants, and service contracts rather than growing a full-time municipal IT workforce.
Even departments that handle core governance functions—like Safety and Permits or Capital Projects—increasingly use third-party reviewers and consultants to manage inspections, permit processing, and compliance work. This diverts public dollars to private firms and slows down processes that residents and businesses rely on.
The long-term cost? A city that can’t govern itself. Public workers leave for higher-paying jobs in the very firms they used to supervise. Departments lose institutional expertise. And when contractors fail—or walk away—there’s often no one left in-house with the knowledge to recover quickly.
Accountability for Sale
When private contractors perform public functions, who answers to the public?
That’s the fundamental problem at the heart of New Orleans’ consultant culture. Once money leaves City Hall and enters the hands of firms like CDM Smith or nonprofits like Unity of Greater New Orleans, public oversight becomes murky. Performance audits are rare. Public-facing dashboards are sparse. And while city departments must answer to the public, contractors rarely do.
Take the Joint Infrastructure Recovery Request (JIRR) program—a FEMA-funded initiative designed to address New Orleans’ crumbling roads and fragile drainage systems. The program, which represents part of a $2.4 billion federal investment, is managed not solely by the city but by a consortium of outside firms, including CDM Smith and MB3 (also known as Civix), alongside the Department of Public Works. CDM Smith, whose contract was recently extended through July 2028, has been authorized to receive up to $12.3 million in city funds. Yet despite the size and scope of this investment, residents across the city have endured torn-up streets, months-long construction delays, and incomplete or abandoned work sites. While the public often directs frustration at City Hall, the reality is that the oversight and implementation of these massive recovery projects are deeply entrenched in private hands that operate with far less transparency and direct accountability to the residents footing the bill.
Meanwhile, the Office of Homeless Services and Strategy directs millions to Unity of Greater New Orleans, but there are few detailed reports publicly accessible on how funds are allocated across shelters, outreach, and housing placement. The city’s 2023 budget presentation listed over $15 million in homelessness spending, but the actual service outcomes—such as how many people were placed in permanent housing—remain unclear.
Contracting out does more than obscure accountability—it erodes it. Public employees can be held to civil service standards, open meetings, and ethics rules. Consultants are subject only to the terms of their contract. And when failures mount, blame gets deflected in circles—often landing nowhere at all.
This model of governance isn’t just inefficient. It’s undemocratic. It reduces residents to customers in a privatized system where critical decisions are made behind closed doors, shielded from public scrutiny.
The Case for Rebuilding Public Capacity
The overreliance on consultants in New Orleans isn’t a matter of fiscal virtue—it’s a symptom of a hollowed-out municipal workforce, left understaffed by years of austerity and privatization. Under pressure to deliver with limited staff and stretched resources, city departments have turned to outsourcing by default. But stopgap contracts have become a long-term strategy, and the consequences are catching up with us.
To change course, New Orleans must reinvest in public capacity, which includes hiring more permanent employees, providing specialized training, and cultivating the institutional knowledge needed to manage infrastructure, homelessness, and planning initiatives in-house. Unlike contractors, public servants are accountable to residents, not shareholders. And when they leave, their expertise stays in the building.
Consultants can serve a purpose—but only when their role is clearly defined and limited. Without careful boundaries, New Orleans risks paying premium rates year after year for services it should already own. CDM Smith, for example, was awarded a $1.95 million water treatment master plan contract in January 2024 that has since ballooned into a $12.3 million project through 2028. Meanwhile, Unity of Greater New Orleans has received more than $178 million in public homelessness funding since 2019—over 82% of the city’s total outlay for the issue.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Minneapolis and Portland offer smarter models. In Minneapolis, the Public Works Consulting Pool is designed for flexibility, not dependency. The city maintains a tiered roster of pre-approved consultants, each bound by strict project caps, streamlined scopes, and limits on contract size—all while keeping city staff in control. The system has also expanded opportunities for minority- and women-owned businesses, improving both access and accountability.
Portland, similarly, has adopted internal capacity-building as a long-term strategy. In response to concerns about cost overruns and oversight gaps in consultant-led transportation projects, the city began reinvesting in its Bureau of Transportation staffing. By 2022, Portland significantly reduced its dependency on outside firms for design and project management, allowing internal teams to lead capital planning, street repair, and infrastructure coordination more efficiently.
These cities haven’t eliminated consultants, but they’ve made public investment the backbone of governance. New Orleans, by contrast, has allowed consultants to become an unofficial workforce: making decisions, managing systems, and absorbing public dollars with little public accountability.
If we want transparency, sustainability, and long-term efficiency, we can’t keep outsourcing the very functions government exists to perform. The solution isn’t necessarily just fewer consultants. It also demands smarter governance accountable to the electorate. That starts with hiring public workers, investing in their development, and restoring public control over the future of our city.
Final Thoughts – Impact of Dependency on Consultants
Consultants will always have a place in modern governance—but they should not replace it. What New Orleans has done instead is build a dependency. Critical decisions, long-term projects, and community services are too often funneled through outside firms with limited transparency, minimal oversight, and unclear outcomes.
We don’t just need to reform this system—we need to reconsider the political philosophy behind it. A truly public city government invests in its own capacity. It hires people who live here, work here, and stay here. It trains them, trusts them, and holds them accountable—not just in quarterly reports, but at the ballot box, in public meetings, and on the street.
Until we break the cycle of outsourcing our problems, we’ll keep getting solutions that don’t stick.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
