Kelley Supports Group's Key Contracting Recommendations

NTEU offered support for the key recommendations an advocacy organization says in a new report would significantly improve both the process and results of federal contracting.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said the report from the Center for American Progress “is, in very important ways, largely in line” with the recommendations on federal agency contracting submitted by NTEU to the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama.

President Kelley has long criticized runaway federal contracting, which often has resulted in cost overruns, shoddy work and a failure to meet performance requirements.

The report of the Center, which is headed by John Podesta, who is co-chairman of the Obama transition team, recommends greater transparency in contracting, including subjecting all contracts to an open and competitive process that seeks to prevent work being turned over to unscrupulous businesses; much better government oversight of contracts; and a pull-back in the amount of contracting. It also cites low wages and benefits for contractor employees, resulting in subpar work.

President Kelley noted the report’s concern that reduced contractor oversight has made it difficult to find waste fraud and abuse, noting the Center warns that “the bid process has since become a means to reduce accountability of public services to taxpayers.”

“The Center’s report highlights a number of the most serious issues infecting the federal contracting process,” she said. “This issue remains what it always has been—a matter of getting the best service for America’s taxpayers—and that means having experienced, trained and accountable federal employees performing the work.”

For its part, NTEU has recommended a number of steps impacting contracting in its transition recommendations submitted to the Obama transition team, including:

• The issuance of an executive order or agency head memorandum directing agencies to review all of their service contracts, cancel any found to be unnecessary and bring any inefficient, wasteful or contracts for inherently government work back in-house within two years;

• Increasing and improving oversight of private sector contracts by collecting and making available a comprehensive source of detailed, accurate, complete and timely information on federal contract spending—including no-bid and sole-source contracts;

• Rescinding the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum to agency heads requiring that the agent of directly affected employees in a contract awarded under OMB rules must be one of the employees; and

• Revising OMB contracting rules both to specify a process for contracting work back into federal agencies and adopt the more appropriate definition of inherently governmental function used in the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998, rather than the narrower term adopted by OMB in 2003.

The Center’s report supports a variety of steps by Congress to address transparency in contracting, including a measure in the last session co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama that would require the government to track contractors’ unpaid tax debts and their compliance with a range of laws. NTEU has asked that OMB apply these provisions administratively to the contracting process.

From its first days, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress made it a high priority to contract to the private sector as much federal work as it could. That has included the inherently governmental function of collecting taxes; the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) currently has contracts with two private companies to pursue tax debts.

Not only has NTEU called for an end to this wasteful program—it has been going on for more than two years and has yet to recover its start-up and ongoing administrative costs—but so have an increasing number of members of Congress, outside advocacy groups and the IRS’s own National Taxpayer Advocate. Ending the program was among NTEU’s recommendations to the transition team.

What You Can Do To Oppose Runaway Federal Contracting Out

Voice your opposition in a letter to the editor of your newspaper.

Are You Inherently Governmental?

If you are a federal employee whose job function has shown up on the commercial side of your agency’s FAIR Act list, challenge it. Click here for NTEU’s Inherently Governmental Matrix that will help you determine if your position should move from a commercial designation to an inherently governmental designation.