Agreed, I'm with Bush on this one. Hope he stays the course.
Posted on 07/02/2003 7:41:09 AM PDT by yoe
WASHINGTON (Talon News)
-- President Bush's Management Agenda, a plan that would put as many as 425,000 of federal jobs up for competitive bid to the private sector is under attack in Congress.
A group of House Democrats, led by Reps. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) are circulating a letter to Joshua Bolten, Director of the Office of Management and Budget asking for greater scrutiny of the competitive sourcing. Other signers include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX), and Elijah Cummings (D-MD).
The letter points to excerpts from an internal memo from National Park Service Director Fran Mainella to Interior officials that indicate "job competitions in the Washington and San Francisco areas may affect the diversity of our workforce."
The Park Service is the first battleground in Congress to derail the competitive process. Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) inserted Section 335 into the appropriations bill for the Interior Department that would block funding for staging job competitions. He defended the measure that was approved, saying, "The subcommittee simply wants to make sure that we're not going too far, too fast, in terms of outsourcing, so we do not lose professional expertise in the land management agencies and Park Service particularly."
The Park Service has 1,700 of 15,000 jobs that have been identified as "commercial" and therefore subject to competition. Federal procurement chief Angela Styles dismissed Moran's objection in saying, "You can't tell me that the janitors in the national parks are inherently governmental."
She said, "We're going to have legislative battles on this," citing similar resistance in the Senate. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) inserted legislation into the FAA's reauthorization bill that passed in the Senate to exempt air traffic control jobs, including an ongoing job competition involving 2,700 flight service specialists. Styles explained that the specialists are "people who look at the weather for pilots" and that those jobs are classified as commercial.
Resistance has come at the agencies themselves. The Park Service has threatened to cut visitor services as a way to fund job competitions. The Smithsonian Institution has for many years classified some commercial jobs as "inherently Smithsonian" a category that does not exist. The 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act defined only two categories, "inherently governmental" and "commercial." Only commercial jobs would be subjected to competitive sourcing.
Unions representing federal workers are also opposing the competitive sourcing plan. The National Treasury Employees Union has filed suit against the OMB for "illegally" narrowing the definitions for "inherently governmental," and the National Federation of Federal Employees has questioned the costs involved in the bid process, implying that the potential savings are less than the cost of staging the competitions.
Despite the opposition, Styles is adamant. She said, "We're going to fight them hard because this is a matter of principle."
The White House recently reaffirmed its commitment to competitive sourcing, when spokesman Ari Fleischer told Talon News, "The proposals on competitive sourcing ensure the taxpayer dollars are spent in the wisest fashion and that the work force works in the most effective way."
"And competition is the best way, in the President's judgment, to do this in many cases," Fleischer added.
OMB estimates that competitive sourcing saves taxpayers 30% over current expenditures for the same work performed. Geoffrey Segal, Director of Privatization and Government Reform Policy for the Reason Foundation, did the math for Talon News. Segal roughly estimates, looking at federal jobs whose average costs are $60,000, that savings would be $18,000 per year. If all 450,000 jobs were successfully exposed to bid, the savings would be $7.65 billion in year one. Over five years, over $38.25 billion could be saved.
-- President Bush's Management Agenda, a plan that would put as many as 425,000 of federal jobs up for competitive bid to the private sector is under attack in Congress.
The letter points to excerpts from an internal memo from National Park Service Director Fran Mainella to Interior officials that indicate "job competitions in the Washington and San Francisco areas may affect the diversity of our workforce."
Federal procurement
outsourcing
professional expertise
inherently governmental
inherently Smithsonian
competitive sourcing
and so on..........
Downsizing the federal feather bedding, make work fancy name jobs and eliminating all unqualified people is going to make a big difference in this bloated federal government.
Agreed, I'm with Bush on this one. Hope he stays the course.
Agreed.
May 2003 - The Bush administration announced yesterday a long-awaited policy to speed up a process to open up 425,000 federal jobs to competition from private companies to do the work that federal employees now perform. The administration has said that 850,000 federal jobs -- out of a total civilian federal workforce of 1.8 million -- are essentially "commercial" in nature and could be performed by nongovernment workers. It has set an ultimate goal of opening half of those jobs, or 425,000, to competition from private contractors. The administration's immediate goal, which Styles said will be met by a handful of agencies, is for 15 percent of the 850,000 jobs to be subject to private competition by the end of the current fiscal year.Under the revised process announced yesterday, these competitions will have to be completed in one year, although that deadline could be routinely extended by six months. The new process also creates a "streamlined" competition involving 65 or fewer federal jobs that has a 90-day deadline for completion that could be extended to 135 days.
The Homeland Security Act authorized agencies to offer early-outs to employees when necessary to restructure its workforce. Previously, this authority could only be given if it was necessary to reduce the size of an agency's workforce. So, for example, if an agency has too many administrative employees and needs to hire more engineers to accomplish its mission, it may offer an early-out to the administrative employees in order to restructure its workforce. Agencies do not have the automatic authority to offer an early-out. They need to obtain approval from OPM.
From what I have read, 8000 postal employees have recently been offered VERA and the DOJ is also offering VERA to its employees. The DOJ announcement outlines the guidelines and can be found here.
The administration cited five case studies including four at military bases in which competition saved the government money. In one case, competition reduced the costs of printing the president's 2004 budget request to Congress from $505,370 to $387,000 even though the work was retained in house.
McChord Air Force Base in Washington shaved more than 60 percent of its cost in refueling, maintaining and parking transient aircraft by hiring a contractor to do the work. And Goodfellow Air Force Base in Washington, which put facility repair up for competition, shaved its costs to $41 million from $59 million even though the work stayed in-house.
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