Council aims to combat ‘misinformation’ on job competitions

An interagency council will distribute informational pamphlets on the A-76 job competition process to agencies in September, hoping that the better the federal workforce understands the Bush administration's competitive sourcing initiative, the more likely it is to embrace it.

The Federal Acquisition Council, formerly known as the Procurement Executives Council, plans to release two guides in September-one for rank-and-file federal employees, and the other for federal managers and first-line supervisors, said Scott Cameron, chair of the council's competitive sourcing committee and deputy assistant secretary for performance and management at the Interior Department.

Committee members are developing the guides to clear up some common misunderstandings about public-private competitions, said Cameron. The committee has been working on them since April and recently circulated a fourth draft to the full council, as well as to a group of procurement experts. A final version should be ready for distribution in early September, and will include explanations of the policy changes announced in the revised A-76 circular, according to Cameron.

The guides fit with a larger Office of Management and Budget effort to counter what it calls misleading information about competitive sourcing distributed by the news media and unions, among others. OMB has reached out to unions to try and set the record straight, said Angela Styles, federal procurement chief, at a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in late July.

"In spite of our efforts, there is a tremendous amount of misinformation [on competitive sourcing]," Styles told lawmakers. "We are constantly fighting erroneous propaganda."

The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union have vowed to fight OMB's competitive sourcing initiative. Newly elected AFGE President John Gage said last Thursday that he intends to publicize the administration's intent to "privatize half of our government's workforce."

But OMB and the Federal Acquisition Council do not characterize competitive sourcing as an attempt at privatization.

"The single biggest misperception is that competitive sourcing is about reducing the federal workforce or contracting out things on a mindless basis," Cameron said. This view dates to previous administrations, including the first Clinton administration, where there was a "conscious effort to contract things out," he said. "It's only natural to assume that the present resembles the past."

The guide for employees will emphasize the differences in the current administration's competitive sourcing plan, he said. This initiative is "fundamentally about management vigilance" and ensuring that agencies are organized to perform work as efficiently as possible. Once federal employees realize that savings generated from competitive sourcing can be used to further agency missions, they will be more apt to buy into the initiative, Cameron predicted.

But NTEU President Colleen Kelley disputed the idea that competitions always produce savings. Money spent running competitions could outweigh money eventually saved through enhanced efficiency, she noted. "At this point, nobody can confirm how much the competitions cost," she said. NTEU is lobbying lawmakers to require agencies to track the money they spend running competitions as a line item in their budgets.

Kelley agreed that many federal employees are uninformed about competitive sourcing, but the message she would like to get across is much different than the one the administration plans to convey.

"I worry about federal employees who think that this initiative is not about them," she said. Many civil servants at the 29 agencies NTEU represents have a tendency to think their jobs will never be subject to competitions, she explained. This is especially true of federal workers outside the Beltway, Kelley said.

Employees' lack of information cannot necessarily be blamed on managers, Kelley said, since many of them do not understand the administration's latest moves. Communications between OMB and agencies often take place at very high levels, and managers are not privy to whatever information is disseminated, she added.

The Federal Acquisition Council's guide for managers will provide tips for "thinking strategically about which activities to study for competitive sourcing," Cameron said. In addition, the manager's guide will "stress the importance of communicating with employees and letting them know what's going on, or not going on."

There are plenty of tools managers can use to help allay employees' fears about competitions, according to Cameron. For instance, managers could point to academic studies that show federal workers win more than half of the job contests they enter. Statistics also show that civil servants rarely lose their jobs as a result of competitions, he said.

Ultimately, the only way the administration will be able to win federal employees' support for competitive sourcing will be to show them that they have nothing to fear from the initiative, Cameron predicted.

"We're trying to walk the walk here," he said. "I believe we're [doing that] by being very careful to protect federal employees' future careers in the way we're implementing [the initiative]."