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Washington, D.C.—The latest report by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on federal contracting shows the administration’s competitive sourcing program to be little more than a politically-driven initiative designed to turn over as much government work as possible to the private sector, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees said today.

“If, as the administration claims, its intent is to provide the public with services in an effective, efficient manner at the lowest reasonable cost, then OMB should be supportive of all means of competition for federal work—including in-sourcing,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

“Yet, the OMB report discounts the idea of bringing back into the hands of federal employees work previously contracted out to the private sector even when federal workers can identify efficiencies and quality improvements that can be generated by in-sourcing,” Kelley added.

As evidence of the administration’s determination to move federal work to the private sector, the NTEU leader pointed to recent examples in both the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

DOE, she said, is “so absolutely committed” to turning over its headquarters logistics work to a private bidder that, despite its own employees submitting the lower initial bid and winning a bid protest, the agency decided to rerun the bidding process to give a private sector contractor a second shot at winning.

And, she said, the IRS “has taken contracting out to the next level” by seeking to contract to the private sector the inherently governmental work of assessing federal taxes on the nation’s fuel supply. This work is performed by a small group of experienced IRS revenue officers who—acting as the face of the federal government in the field—examine the fuel supply to ensure that appropriate taxes are paid and that black market fuel does not enter the supply system.

The IRS is also moving forward with another contracting out effort outside of the A-76 process that moves additional tax collection work to the private sector—privatization of debt collection. By this summer, the IRS plans to turn over thousands of taxpayer records to three debt collection firms to go after unpaid tax debt and has plans to expand the program to include up to 10 additional companies in the next year or two.

Kelley said the OMB report to Congress on federal contracting—its third—is disappointing in a number of other respects, as well. One of these, she said, is OMB’s “continuing practice” of using unsupported estimates and projections of potential savings from contracting rather than trying to find and report actual savings, if any, from the practice.

She noted that the report contains an extensive discussion about validating the work of the employee-based organization put together to generate the in-house bid for the work—but no meaningful attention is paid to validating the contractor’s work.

Another failing in the report is its bow to contractor complaints that having to provide health benefits—either comparable to those in the federal sector or any such benefits at all—has the effect of limiting private sector bids.

“That appears to me,” President Kelley said, “to be an admission that contractors save money on their bids by denying their employees health care. And that can’t be a direction that makes any sense for the country.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments.