Move to lift ban on VA competitive sourcing prompts opposition

Senate Democrats, union officials and veterans groups are rallying support to strip a health care bill of a provision that would allow the Veterans Affairs Department to resume competitive sourcing studies.

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, plans to introduce an amendment to the 2005 Veterans Health Care Act (S. 1182) on Thursday that would preserve language in a 1981 law, which-as interpreted by the VA general counsel in April 2003-has effectively stopped public-private job competitions at the VA. Akaka will introduce the amendment during the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee markup of the bill.

The existing statutory language bars the Veterans Health Administration from comparing the cost of keeping work in-house to that of outsourcing it unless Congress directs funds toward such a study. It is on a list of barriers to competitive sourcing that the Bush administration has said it would like to see eliminated.

Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Larry Craig, R-Idaho, included language lifting the ban as part of the health care act.

"As a general matter, I believe it makes good fiscal sense for government to measure its performance against that of its counterparts in the private sector," Craig wrote in an Aug. 23 letter defending his move to an American Federation of Government Employees representative. "Based on that belief, it follows that I do not agree that anyone should be statutorily protected from having his or her performance measured against others in a similar field."

But backed by the union and a number of veterans groups, Akaka will offer an amendment striking Craig's provision from the bill. The Veterans Affairs Department should not be spending money running competitive sourcing studies when the agency is under a budget crunch, Craig's opponents argue.

"[We do] not support the use of critically scarce medical care resources for the purpose of studying public-private competition," Vietnam Veterans of America President John Rowan wrote in a Wednesday letter backing Akaka. "We firmly believe these dollars would be better used in the direct provision of actual medical care."

Leaders of the Blinded Veterans Association, AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans and Paralyzed Veterans of America wrote similar letters.

"Even as retired veterans and VA employees are being displaced from their homes and as loyal VA workers are rolling up their sleeves to help people devastated by the hurricane, the administration is ready to add to the devastation by using hard-won health care dollars on programs that will destabilize the VA health care workplace and put veterans working in VA facilities out of work," AFGE President John Gage said in a statement.

VA's resources should be spent on patient care and repairs of medical facilities, Gage said.

But Craig argued that VA's budget of more than $70 billion is large enough to sustain competitive sourcing. "I am confident that allocating a small amount of this budget towards programs and reviews will ultimately bolster the quality of VA services," he said.

Veterans Affairs hasn't been active in competitive sourcing because of the statutory restrictions and has earned red lights-the lowest of three ratings-for both progress and accomplishments in that area of the Bush administration's quarterly management score card. The department is looking at alternatives to public-private competitions, including business-process reengineering studies, which are geared toward improving the in-house workforce's efficiency.