The Competitive Edge

Even when the agencies, responding to the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act's demand, identified 850,000 jobs as having similarity to those performed in the private sector, only GovExec.com bothered to compile the inventories on the Web. The FAIR Act, many believed, would join the obscure list of 1990s management reform laws whose acronyms are understood only by the most obsessive government groupies: FARA, FASA, GMRA, GPRA, GPEA, GISRA, ITMRA, FISRA, FMFIA, etcetera.

In 1998, with the Clinton administration still in office, the new law seemed of little consequence. But President Bush and his team have put real muscle behind the 1,600 words that comprise the FAIR Act. The Republican administration made "competitive sourcing" one of five pillars of the president's management agenda and pledged to put half the inventory, or 425,000 jobs, up for competition between incumbent government workers and private sector bidders. Some 127,500 jobs were to be competed by the end of fiscal 2003.

So agencies have been combing through their employment rosters, looking for jobs they might put up for bid. For all but those in the Defense Department, this has been a new and unsettling experience. Few had experience with the difficult, time-consuming and expensive procedures for competition outlined in OMB Circular A-76, a creation of the Eisenhower administration.

In this special issue, we tell the story of Douglas Scott, a National Park Service archeologist whose staff of 37 is now on the auction block. We examine the Housing and Urban Development's outsourcing of oversight for subsidized housing projects-an experiment whose considerable cost has tempted HUD to bring some of the outsourced jobs back into government. We look at the Army's Logistics Modernization program that has turned critical management of supply operations over to the private sector, epitomizing a new trend toward "business process outsourcing." We detail the Transportation Security Administration's decision to rely from the start on Unisys for the technology infrastructure that will make the difference between mission success and failure. And we explore the views of federal employee unions and federal contractors, each group wary for its own reasons of the A-76 process.

Public-private competitions are said to save the government money no matter which team wins. An example is found at Offutt Air Force Base, where a winning team of federal workers pledged to get their mission accomplished with less than half the staff they'd had before. That achievement earned the 55th Wing of the Air Force a Presidential Quality Award-presented at a ceremony last fall by the president himself. One had to wonder, of course, if the mission had been vastly overstaffed, or if the winners were promising more than they could deliver. We sent Matthew Weinstock to Nebraska to seek the answer.

For a generation, federal agencies have been under pressure to cut staff, leaving them little choice but to rely on third parties for essential work. Thus, as William D. Eggers and Stephen Goldsmith argue in this issue, the Bush administration's emphasis on competitive sourcing is another step in a long march, one that is requiring federal executives to act as coordinators of complex networks and thus is changing the essential nature of public management jobs.