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Congressional negotiators on Thursday night agreed to retain legislative language designed to block the potential outsourcing of more than 1,300 immigration services jobs at the Homeland Security Department.

The language, included in both the House and Senate versions of the department's fiscal 2005 appropriations bill (S. 2537), would bar the department from spending money on a public-private competition for the jobs of immigration information officers, contact representatives and investigative assistants.

Despite a veto threat from the White House and recent appeals from Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, conferees decided to leave the provision intact.

"This is yet one more hurdle we've overcome," said Mary Lynch, an American Federation of Government Employees official opposed to the competition. "But we're cautiously optimistic."

As of Friday evening, negotiators had not filed a final conference report, leaving room for changes. Last year, in last-minute negotiations, Bush administration officials persuaded conferees debating the fiscal 2004 Transportation-Treasury appropriations bill to eliminate language perceived as detrimental to the administration's effort to subject thousands of federal jobs to competition.

The Office of Management and Budget last month threatened that President Bush would veto Homeland Security's $32 billion 2005 spending package if lawmakers failed to remove the measure blocking funds for the immigration services contest announced by Citizenship and Immigration Services in August 2003. Ridge also urged conferees to reconsider the provision.

"Numerous studies have confirmed that public-private competitions create new opportunities for innovation, improved data management, economies and performance improvements, and the immigration information officer competition has proven to be no exception," Ridge wrote in a Sept. 27 letter to leaders of House and Senate appropriations committees. "Every day, we are learning more about our customers, the services provided and alternative approaches to improved service delivery."

Lynch said Ridge's letter indicates that the competition is about politics, not sound management. "When you have people in that high a position getting down in the weeds, it becomes more and more apparent that this action is politically motivated and is driven by the pressure to outsource [a certain] number of positions," she said.

Lawmakers supporting union efforts to halt the competition have said that the immigration officer and contact representative work at stake is inherently governmental. The workers answer questions on eligibility for immigration benefits and adjudicate applications for some benefits, Lynch noted.

But the competition's supporters have argued that the employees under consideration perform GS-5 to GS-8 level administrative work reviewed by GS-9 supervisors. "Immigration information officers do not exercise substantial discretion nor bind the government to a particular course of action," Ridge wrote in his letter to appropriators.

"We are confident that contract employees . . . could perform this work using the same statutes, regulations, training and internal guidance that is available to federal employees," Ridge said.

But Lynch noted that certified immigration information officers sign off on applications for replacement green cards, a responsibility requiring extensive training and judgment. "You're basically giving someone a green card to walk around this country for the next 10 years," she said.

In his letter urging appropriators to allow the contest, Ridge also noted that Homeland Security already has invested a lot of time studying the work. "A competitive solicitation is being finalized, and a significant amount of work has been completed in the preparation of an in-house bid for the work," he wrote.

Lynch said she would not necessarily view the time as wasted. In putting together an in-house bid, federal immigration services employees discovered more efficient ways to perform the jobs, she said. The in-house employees could better implement some of the ideas outside the confines of a public-private competition, she argued.