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Washington, D.C.—An angry President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today accused the Department of Energy (DOE) of treating the rules allowing federal employees to compete to retain their jobs as “little more than a nuisance” in the wake of that agency’s decision to turn over its headquarters logistics functions to a private contractor.

“DOE clearly was determined to achieve this result from the beginning,” Kelley said, after the agency rejected her third protest of the contracting decision on behalf of impacted DOE employees.

“DOE’s behavior has been outrageous from the start,” the NTEU leader said, “and its latest position is its most outrageous.” DOE, she said, dismissed her protest for lack of detail after the agency itself—contrary to Government Accountability Office (GAO) practice—refused to provide NTEU counsel access to the bid of the private contractor for purposes of drafting the protest.

After the awarding of a contract in a public-private job competition, anyone from the private company has the right to fully view the employees’ bid but DOE has determined that neither President Kelley, as the designated representative of the employees, nor her lawyer, can view the offer submitted by the winning private vendor, even though her lawyer is subject to an order prohibiting disclosure of any information about the private sector bidder. GAO’s practice has been to afford counsel for interested parties, such as President Kelley, the right to review the winning offer for purposes of drafting a protest.

“This is what happens when an agency makes up its mind to privatize federal work even before it solicits private sector bids,” Kelley said, calling DOE’s actions “another example of the foolishness and unfairness of this administration’s drive to contract out as many federal jobs as it can.”

DOE originally awarded the contract for the logistics work at its Washington headquarters and facilities in Maryland to a private company—Logistics Applications, Inc.(LAI) —despite that company bidding $2.6 million more than the federal employees already doing the jobs.

When a DOE senior procurement officer upheld Kelley’s initial protest of that award—marking the first such successful protest under revised Officer of Management and Budget rules—the agency’s contracting officer refused to award the work to the DOE employees and instead reopened the competition, changing the source selection method to a ‘lowest cost, technically-acceptable’ standard.

Again, the contract was awarded to LAI; Kelley filed a protest that the contractor’s latest bid reduced the number of labor hours to perform the function over the period covered by the contract from its previous offer. That occurred, she said, even though LAI was responding to a revised solicitation that actually increased the performance period—from 51 months to 60 months.

“The contractor’s revised bid flies in the face of common sense,” the NTEU leader said. “How can it decrease significantly the number of hours it will provide when the performance period is nine months longer?” That inevitably will lead to cost overruns that are not being factored into the contractor’s bid, she said.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including some 1,900 at DOE.