Forest Service catches breath on competitive sourcing
After finishing a large contest for technology work, the agency is settling into a more moderate job competition pace.
Now that the Forest Service has completed a public-private competition involving more than 800 technology jobs, it plans to slow down on opening work to contractors, at least for the next fiscal year.
The Forest Service, which got off to a rough start on President Bush's competitive sourcing initiative by running several flawed contests, will not initiate any competitions before the close of this fiscal year, and will only begin one next year, said David Heerwagen, the agency's associate deputy chief for business operations. Next year's contest likely will encompass roughly 100 communications jobs, he said.
Forest Service officials also are working to complete two large "business process reengineering" studies, one entailing about 900 human resources jobs and the other involving about 1,000 financial management positions. Business process reengineering reviews help agencies find ways of reorganizing to improve efficiency without necessarily considering outsourcing. The Forest Service's reengineering studies encompass jobs classified as both inherently government and commercial on Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act lists. Such reviews can lead to job contests for the commercial work, but don't always.
Aside from the business process reengineering studies and the one new contest, the Forest Service will concentrate next year on overseeing the winners of already completed contests, Heerwagen said. Even if work stays in-house after a job contest, the prevailing employees must live up to promises outlined in their bid.
For example, the Forest Service now must carry out the work plan proposed by federal technology specialists prevailing in a recent contest for IT jobs. The agency announced earlier this week that an in-house team won a $295 million bid to retain technology repair and maintenance work for five years, after offering savings of more than $100 million over that time.
Agency officials spent a year and a half on the technology services contest, and looked at the equivalent of 830 full-time jobs, though not all of those would have been eligible for outsourcing, Heerwagen said. The in-house team submitted a proposal to complete the same work with 650 employees, meaning that as many as 180 employees could see their jobs cut.
But Heerwagen said he hopes that the majority of those 180 can either transfer to other jobs in the agency or take advantage of early outs. The Forest Service will begin implementing the in-house team's plan in October, and hopes to eliminate the 180 now obsolete positions starting in January.
Proper oversight of this competition and other completed contests will take time and energy. "We just have run sort of up against the limit of what we can handle," Heerwagen said.
Originally the Forest Service planned to begin two new A-76 studies in fiscal 2004. But the agency, beleaguered by glitches in competitive sourcing studies, decided to hold back on any new ones until at least the end of the fiscal year.
The Office of Management and Budget also let the Forest Service out of implementating the proposals of in-house teams that won 142 contests for maintenance jobs. These studies involved only a few positions each and, if implemented, promised few improvements in efficiency.
Congressional investigators in March found shortcomings in the Forest Service's process for completing FAIR Act lists, and pointed to a variety of significant problems in public-private contests initiated over fiscal 2002 and 2003. The agency ran a lot of small competitions at a high cost, investigators found, failing to meet the competitive sourcing initiative's objective of increasing efficiency and thereby saving tax dollars.
OMB officials noted the flawed work in a separate report on competitive sourcing and are working with the agency to correct past problems. Other agencies can learn valuable lessons from the Forest Service's mistakes, OMB Deputy Director for Management Clay Johnson told Government Executive in an interview earlier in the summer.
The recently completed technology study shows that the Forest Service can "do it right," Heerwagen said. "We're proud of this one, and we're proud of a number of the other ones we did."