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The Office of Management and Budget is set to report that savings from job competitions between federal employees and private workers grew to about $1.25 billion in 2004 from $1.1 billion in 2003, according to people who have seen figures provided by the agency. Those figures represent the projected savings over three to five years for the competitions held in each fiscal year.

In an off-the-record meeting with contracting groups last week, David Safavian, head of OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said 80 to 90 percent of competitions are still being won by in-house teams. He provided preliminary estimates of the savings OMB is expected to announce officially on Saturday.

The roughly $1.25 billion in savings translates into about $20,000 per full-time equivalent employee. The savings were likely from a combination of restructuring and eliminating positions, as well as other factors.

"The fact that the government is saving money proves we need to continue these public-private competitions," said Cathy Garman, senior vice president of public policy at the Contract Services Association.

Garman, who attended the meeting with Safavian, said the forthcoming report will include more of the larger "standard" competitions involving 65 employees or more than did the report on 2003 competitions, which focused more on smaller "streamlined" competitions.

The 2003 report, which was released last May, noted that many agencies chose to first engage in streamlined competitions in order to "acclimate" themselves to the process. The report said that as of Sept. 30, 2003, 1,888 full-time equivalent employees were involved in ongoing standard competitions while only 122 were involved in completed standard competitions.

Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, which represents companies that bid on government contracts, said savings are still "nowhere near what they could be." Contractors, he said, observe that the vast majority of competitions are won by in-house teams, and they decline to participate.

"They look at these 90 percent win rates and say it's not even worth my time to look at it," he said.

John Threlkeld, legislative representative for the American Federation of Government Employees, said he was not invited to meet with Safavian prior to the savings announcement. He said he questions the accuracy of OMB's projected savings.

"We and others have concerns about how they are calculating costs. We're concerned about these being 'guesstimates' and not representative of all costs associated with [competitions]," such as staff time spent on holding competitions, he said.

The Government Accountability Office also has expressed concern that agencies do not accurately estimate their savings from job competitions conducted under rules laid out in OMB Circular A-76, and that the costs of holding the competitions have been underestimated.

If the OMB releases the savings report Saturday as expected, the announcement will fall on the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower's order that the federal government should not provide any service or product that can be bought from the private sector.

Geoffrey Segal, director of government reform for the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit, wrote in his organization's Web log that the government still has not reached this goal, despite the Bush administration's push toward increased use of competitive sourcing.

He wrote, "Even while this policy has been supported and applied by every administration since, today, more than 800,000 federal employees are in jobs that the agencies themselves consider 'commercial' in nature - like cutting grass on federal property and writing software - these, and countless others are readily available in the private economy."

OMB declined to comment until an official announcement had been made.

COMMENTS

• I am not going to point fingers at any group or organization. I will note the fact that management positions continue to grow and blue collars positions go. I personally have seen nothing good come of contractors. They don't or can't do the work and always request more money to complete the job. And now the government is contracting jobs that there is no private sector equivalent for. Well done FMA. GovExec.com reader Posted June 28, 2005 10:05 AM
• The current thinking is that if the OMB contracts it out,it will show how good of managers they are. BullHockey. They won't be happy till this government is run by another country under contract. What they don't tell you is they downsize the operation and cut salaries if you win the MEO. We were under the gun and the contractor that was assisting us, told us to win was we had to cut everyone's pay grade by 2 and lose 30% of our staff at a facility that was already under manned. During the process we lost a lot of expertise that cannot be replaced due to the fact that they wanted to keep there income and then our HQ changed there minds at the last moment and took us off the table, because they found out it was not going to help the long term strategic plan. How did this help anyone? It didn't. It was totally based on the trying to show the general public that the someone in Washington can justify there job and save a couple of dollars. This isn't making America Stronger it knocking the wind out us. GovExec.com reader Posted January 18, 2005 9:23 AM
• Lawmakers and the public should view the OMB report with a skeptical eye. Only last year a DoS report claimed terrorism was at an all time low. Top officials announced the report with such an air of certainty that many assumed it must be true. And yet two months later we saw these same officials apologizing for gross miscalculations and omissions. The truth, as it turned out, was just the opposite of what the original report claimed. Unfortunately this Administration has a bad habit of massaging numbers to fit whatever goal they have in mind. This is how we ended up in a costly war and it's how we'll end up with a costly and ineffective privatized government. Clearly we shouldn't buy what OMB says either without deeper independent analysis. GovExec.com reader Posted January 14, 2005 12:27 PM