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Washington, D.C.—The administration’s arbitrary quotas for privatizing hundreds of thousands of federal jobs will significantly disrupt operations at such key agencies as the Internal Revenue Service and Customs Service, the head of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers told a Senate committee today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), a leading opponent of government contracting out, told the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs that the administration has taken “extreme actions” that will “undoubtedly only exacerbate current problems with contracting out.” Kelley urged Congress to enact legislation “to block this policy.”

“The one-size-fits-all arbitrary outsourcing quotas, which give no consideration whatsoever to the uniqueness of each agency,” Kelley said, “will harm the ability of the IRS and other federal agencies to effectively carry out their missions.”

The union leader made her comments at an early morning Senate hearing, then led several hundred federal workers opposed to contracting out in a rally on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

President Kelley said NTEU is “strongly opposed” to administration efforts to increase the number of federal jobs contracted to the private sector, and in particular to a directive from the Office of Management and

Budget (OMB) ordering every federal department and agency to arbitrarily open up to the private sector in fiscal 2002 five percent of the federal jobs on its Federal Activities Inventory Control (FAIR) Act lists—and an additional 10 percent in fiscal 2003.

To reach its arbitrary quotas, the union leader said, the administration ultimately will be directing agencies and departments to open up to the private sector fifty percent—more than 425,000—of the federal jobs they consider potentially commercial in nature, without even being required to hold public-private competitions before privatizing these jobs.

Such actions, the NTEU president said, will lead to “more waste, more broken promises and more cost overruns in government contracting,” and she asked whether it is “worth the long-term risks to our nation to shut the government out of the government services business and become dependent on profit-driven private sector companies.”

President Kelley urged Senate passage of S. 1152—the Truthfulness, Responsibility and Accountability in Contracting (TRAC) Act—legislation that would implement a system to track the cost and effectiveness of contracting out. She added that Congress and the administration must invest in more agency staffing and better training “so that government services can be delivered by federal employees at even lower costs, increased efficiency and lower risk than they are today.”

At that same time, she repeated her criticism of the lack of meaningful government oversight of the already large contractor work force, and called for an increase among agency contract officers, who not only award but oversee private sector contracts, and for more and improved training for these employees.

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.