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Washington, D.C.—The administration’s major revisions of the rules covering the contracting of government work to the private sector contain so many flaws and problems, the head of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees said today, that members of a key House committee should work to block their implementation until the contracting process can be fixed.

In pointed testimony, President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) urged members of the House Government Reform Committee “not to be misled” by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rhetoric that the new rules will improve the use of public-private competitions for government work.

“Instead, the new Circular A-76 is designed to give OMB one more tool to contract out as many federal employee jobs as quickly as possible,” President Kelley said. NTEU is leading the fight against the administration’s plan to contract out as many as 850,000 federal jobs, and has filed a federal court suit challenging the legality of the OMB revisions to Circular A-76, the document that sets out government contracting rules.

“The final version of the Circular remains heavily slanted in favor of private contractors over federal employees, and will deprive taxpayers of the benefits of fair competition,” the NTEU leader

said. Among multiple problems, she cited the circular’s failure to make even “one single meaningful change to improve oversight of contractors, and better track their performance.” All it does, she added, is “endorse the status quo of asking agencies to monitor the work of contractors without having given these agencies any additional resources to better track their work.”

President Kelley attacked, as NTEU did in its suit, OMB’s narrowing of the definition of inherently governmental work to make it easier to contract out federal jobs, and OMB’s restrictions on the rights of unions and others to challenge improper designations of government functions as ‘commercial’ in nature and thus subject to being contracted to the private sector.

The NTEU leader noted that while the A-76 revisions supposedly eliminate the use of direct conversions—a flawed privatization process in which federal employees are not given an opportunity to compete in defense of their jobs—it is unclear if OMB will prevent agencies from either bypassing the new rules altogether or seeking waivers to continue with direct conversions.

“OMB has managed to create numerous loopholes to ensure that more government jobs are moved to the private sector as quickly as possible and with as little competition as possible,” she told the committee.

NTEU also is concerned, President Kelley said, with provisions in the new A-76 that encourage agencies to move away from cost-based public-private competitions “to more subjective analyses that will lead to more outsourcing at higher costs to taxpayers.”

The revised circular allows agencies to use what it calls a “tradeoff source selection process.” Under it, agency contracting officers would be permitted for the first time to awards contracts to a more expensive bidder but one promising to perform work not requested by the agency.

“Introducing this tradeoff concept into public-private competitions would make fair comparisons between bids even more difficult,” President Kelley said, “as it undermines the agency’s ability to conduct an ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison, an important aspect of any procurement decision.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 29 agencies and departments.