When a government agency is cutting services, closing offices, and laying off staff, spending public money on outside crisis PR and outside legal counsel is a story waiting to happen. The public will notice. The union will notice. Reporters will notice. Once the invoice becomes news, the original crisis is now two crises.
Retaining a PR firm during a crisis is not unusual. The problem is the optics of the invoice — not the retention itself.
The NAPE Example
The Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees (NAPE) disclosed that its government agencies spent roughly $129,000 over three months on a combination of labor-law specialists at McInnes Cooper and outside PR consultant Cathy Dornan — all while cuts and layoffs were being announced. Billing rates ran near $350 per hour. Handling a crisis PR situation like this without triggering a secondary controversy requires a different playbook.
How It Should Be Handled
When an agency already has internal public affairs staff, those people should lead. They are already funded. Redeploying them protects headcount elsewhere and blunts the "why outside help" question before it lands.
If specialized outside help is genuinely required, structure it as a training engagement — a session or two with in-house staff, at a flat rate. The bill is smaller, the internal team gets sharper, and the story reads as an investment in capability, not a bailout of it.
Legal follows the same logic. Most government entities have in-house counsel. Outside firms should be brought in for a narrow specialty task, not seated at every negotiation. Documentation, filings, and administrative work stay with in-house staff at their regular rate. Outside counsel bills only for the specialty layer.
The Communications Rule
Experts are sometimes necessary. What is almost always unnecessary is the size of the invoice. Agencies underprice the long-term reputational cost of a large outside spend during layoffs, then overpay for the fix.
When outside help is unavoidable, disclose it early. Publish the scope, publish the reason, publish the cost controls. Transparency ahead of reporters is cheaper than transparency after them. That is corporate communications discipline applied to public-sector work.
