Outsourcing Testing?

According to this piece, FSA let a $1.8 million contract for 2 years which is being satisfied by six staff members in the Kansas City area. Let's see--1.8 divided by 2 = $900,000, divided by six = $150,000 per person.

What's it for? "The work for the farm agency in Kansas City, Mo., will include stress testing of applications, Web and software development, application support and project management."

Something funny going on:

• back in the good old days, FSA did its software development in Kansas City and its testing, both using government employees. Then the IT types got moved into USDA IT (OCIO). I assumed IT was still doing the software testing.
• the contract seems to show some of the testing is being outsourced. I guess $150,000 is reasonable (subtract 33 percent for contractor overhead and another 30 percent of the remainder for fringe benefits and you're probably down to what a government employee would cost--maybe. We the taxpayer would be paying $50K for the right to fire the employee quickly (as in the recent flap over passport file access) and maybe for some expertise that's hard to develop in-house.) (I may be wrongly assuming the bulk of the contract is testing.)
  
• but the odd thing is that FSA is doing the contracting--seems as if it should be IT, just to make for cleaner responsibilities and reporting.

Oh, the mysteries.