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Federal procurement chief Angela Styles vowed Tuesday to fight congressional attempts to block the administration's competitive sourcing initiative, including legislation that would prevent new job competitions at the Forest Service and most Interior Department agencies next year.

Acknowledging that the drive for competition may meet more resistance from Congress, Styles pledged to resist efforts to exempt certain agencies and employees from competitive sourcing.

"We're going to have legislative battles on this," she said at a Washington conference sponsored by the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government. "We have them with air traffic control; we're going to have them at Interior. People are going to try and pick these off one by one. And we're going to fight every one of them. And we're going to fight them hard because this is a matter of principle."

Styles said the administration would resist a provision in the House Interior appropriations bill, Section 335, to block funding for new job competitions at the Forest Service and most Interior agencies in fiscal 2004. The land management agencies would be allowed to finish competitions begun in 2002 and 2003, but could not start new competitions in 2004 under the provision.

"You can't tell me that the janitors in the national parks are inherently governmental," said Styles. "There are other functions that people are performing in our national parks that possibly could be performed by the private sector . . . it is only in our best interest to take a look at it."

The measure was approved by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, chaired by Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., and will be considered by the full House Appropriations Committee Wednesday. Interior's Bureau of Reclamation is funded by a different subcommittee and would not be affected by the funding freeze.

The appropriations subcommittee acted in part to prod agencies to request specific funds for job competitions, instead of diverting funds from other operations, which both Interior and the Forest Service have done to date, according to House staffers. "While the committee is supportive of the goals of these initiatives, the costs have, by-and-large, not been requested in annual budget justifications," said the committee in its report on the provision.

The subcommittee also was concerned with the cost involved in staging job competitions. The Forest Service had planned to spend $10 million on job competitions in fiscal 2003, a figure that includes contractor support and the cost of running a competitive sourcing office in Washington, according to Thomas Mills, deputy director for business operations at the agency. On Tuesday, Mills said the Forest Service will conduct another estimate of the cost of its competitive sourcing in response to congressional concerns.

"It looks like there's enough interest that we're going to do a new estimate," he said. "I'm fairly confident it will be more than $10 million," he added.

Some Forest Service employees believe the costs are much higher. Carl Houtman, an engineer at the Forest Products lab in Madison, Wis., tracked meetings his office held on the topic between October last year and March. By adding contract costs to the cost of staff time devoted to the process, he found his office spent $350,000 on competitive sourcing over a six-month period. Houtman, who is a local steward for the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union representing Forest Service employees, believes the agency could be spending up to $140 million on competitive sourcing when all costs are factored in.

Mills said that figure is much too high. "There's no way that we think it's as high as $140 million," he said.

The Interior subcommittee also worried that competitive sourcing is keeping Forest Service contracting officers from performing their normal jobs. Last summer, the Forest Service halted many construction projects and maintenance to free up funds to fight wildfires. Congress restored much of this funding, but some contracting officers are too busy supporting job competitions to restart these projects, according to the subcommittee.

"The committee is concerned that all forests and most contracting officers will be heavily impacted by this effort at a time when they should concentrate their attention on improving business practices," states the subcommittee's report.

The subcommittee's provision has sparked resistance from other quarters in Congress. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, opposes the measure. "This type of freeze is bad policy and bad for the American taxpayer," said Scott Kopple, deputy communications director for the committee. "Competitive sourcing saves taxpayers [money] while giving people more efficient service."

The American Council of Engineering Companies, a Washington-based association of engineering firms, is also fighting Section 335. "ACEC will oppose any amendment that shields federal agencies from A-76 competitions," said Camille Fleenor, the council's director of federal procurement policy.

COMMENTS

• You know, all of this talk of 'principle' from the mouths of political appointees would be amusingly ironic if it weren't such a cynical & blatant attack on the federal workforce. The only principle at issue for these appointees is accomplishing the agenda of an administration that specifically seeks to gut any & all unions and government employees in general of their rights. And why do they seek to do this? Because they owe allegiance to the likes of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, advocates of outsourcing damn-near everything the Fed does. But, what goes unsaid in this whole debate about outsourcing, is the fact that the Federal govt, in general, and DoD, in particular, hasn't a clue as to how much they spend every year on outsourcing: they also don't know how many contractors are working for them & they sure as heck don't want anyone else finding out the true cost of this shadow workforce. The Army TRIED to do a study on this, sort of a cost/benefit analysis, to get a handle on how much they were spending & on what, and the Bush people shut it down. Look around DoD: everywhere programs are being implemented to benefit contractors, whether it's a 767 lease deal to bail-out Boeing (put in place by Darleen Druyun who, w/in a week of retiring was working for guess who?) or an arbitray percentage of the workforce to declare as eligible for outsourcing. GovExec.com reader Posted July 8, 2003 3:57 PM
• The idea that private contractors will do a more efficient job than full time career government workers is ludicrous. Private contractors will be beholden to whoever was in office that allowed them to win the bid. I work as an inspector in the FSIS. If FSIS jobs are outsourced the very companies that we inspect will control all the outsourcing for their industry and hence inspections of food products will be a farce. GovExec.com reader Posted July 8, 2003 3:00 AM
• "Principle"! Coming from this administration, this is either amazing arrogance or ignorance at best. The A-76 process is seriously flawed and is a continuation of politicians' harangue concerning the incompetence and expense of the federal civil service. These are the same politicians that developed the system, the legislation that undermines good management of the workforce and use it to escape to when the administration or their tenure ends. These are also the people that gave us the savings and loan debacle, ENRON, WORLDCOM, etc., etc. This isn't about principle, it is about dismantling the federal workforce so that contractors and politicians can control the process of government. GovExec.com reader Posted June 26, 2003 8:02 AM