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Washington, D.C. — The federal government doles out nearly $700,000 in salary reimbursements for some federal contractor employees, and that amount may soon grow even larger, the head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) warned a key Senate subcommittee today.

“With the explosion of contracting under the previous administration resulting in a contractor workforce that is five times the size of the civil service, taxpayers increasingly are footing the bill for exorbitant contractor salaries and expenses,” NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said. “It is time for Congress to step up and pass commonsense reforms.”

In testimony submitted to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, Kelley said there must be reform of the federal contracting process as the government looks “for ways to achieve cost savings wherever possible and to root out waste, fraud and abuse wherever they find it.”

According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), between 2000 and 2008, spending on government contracts more than doubled, reaching over $500 billion.

In supporting caps for contractor salary reimbursements, President Kelley said government contractors already can charge taxpayers almost $700,000 for the salaries of their top five employees, while employees outside of the top five can earn taxpayer-funded amounts in excess of the current benchmark. And according to OMB, unless Congress acts to limit executive compensation, that level will rise to nearly $750,000 in the near future, in line with the congressional mandate to maintain parity with the private sector.

President Kelley told the subcommittee that NTEU supports instituting a cap on salary reimbursement for all government contractor employees, and lowering that cap to $200,000, as proposed under H.R. 2980, introduced by Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.). Recent studies have shown that lowering the cap to $200,000 for all contractor employees would save $50 billion over 10 years.

Pending Senate legislation, S. 2198, introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), would drop the cap to $400,000.

The NTEU leader also strongly supports extending the current moratorium on new A-76 competitions for federal work until the administration has fully implemented its plans to reform the contracting process. The president’s budget proposes extending the moratorium through FY 2013.

Kelley also asked for senators to support the CLEAN UP Act of 2011 (S. 991), introduced by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), which would reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government contracting by making substantive and long overdue reforms to the competitive sourcing process.

The NTEU president said the legislation “would help reform and clean up the broken competitive sourcing process and ensure that federal sourcing is both fairer to federal employees and more accountable to taxpayers.”

As the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers, NTEU represents 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.