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Washington, D.C.—The president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today she is encouraged by a General Accounting Office (GAO) decision to seek public comments on whether the administration’s recent massive changes to federal contracting rules provide federal employees access to important GAO appeal rights.

President Colleen M. Kelley, leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees, was responding to a notice published by GAO in the Federal Register inviting public comments on how recent changes in Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-76 impact the limited rights of federal employees in appealing contracting decisions. GAO handles appeals from agency contracting decisions.

“To date, federal employees have been unfairly and unreasonably denied any opportunity to challenge faulty contracting out decisions,” President Kelley said. She added that allowing invalid competitions to stand causes taxpayers to incur substantially higher costs for the work.

“I am encouraged that GAO is obviously uncomfortable with a system that limits appeal rights to private contractors only, and is willing to examine whether the new Circular provides a basis for change,” the NTEU leader said.

The imbalance in appeal rights was one of the key problems President Kelley raised as a participant in GAO’s Commercial Activities Panel (CAP) and was a central theme in the union’s comments to OMB’s proposed changes to its Circular A-76.

Last month, OMB issued its final revisions to Circular A-76, which NTEU and others criticized as eliminating critical substantive rights of front line employees to compete for their jobs and stacking competitions in favor of the private sector. The administration’s publicly-stated goal is to move as many as 850,000 federal jobs to the private sector.

The new A-76 provides for a ‘standard’ public-private competition that must be concluded within 12 months. That is six to 12 months shorter than the time typically needed to complete an effective competition, President Kelley said.

It also includes a new ‘streamlined’ competition, to be used in the case of units consisting of 65 or fewer employees, which must be concluded within 90 days, with a possible extension to only 135 days. NTEU, which has taken the lead in fighting the administration’s drive to contract more and more federal jobs, has sharply criticized these unrealistic timetables, as well as the impediments to effective appeals by employees.

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