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Washington, D.C.— In a letter to the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the leaders of the two largest unions of federal workers have expressed their “profound concern about the strong pro-contractor bias” shown by the Bush administration in connection with several issues dealing with the contracting out of federal jobs.

Presidents Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and Bobby Harnage of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) accused the administration of “wasting no time in assiduously and diligently carrying out the contractors’ agenda” of shifting increasing amounts of government work to the private sector. The Kelley-Harnage letter was sent to OMB Director Mitch Daniels.

The two leaders, whose unions together represent some 900,000 federal workers, were particularly critical of an OMB directive that agencies list inherently governmental jobs on their listing of jobs under the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act, which, as approved by Congress, is supposed to contain only those jobs that are potentially commercial in nature.

Inherently governmental work “was deliberately excluded” from the scope of the FAIR Act, they said. Later legislation, proposed at the behest of contractors, to include such work drew “virtually no support from lawmakers,” they noted.

The union leaders criticized another OMB directive, seeking to impose a requirement on agencies that they use OMB Circular A-76, which governs the federal contracting out process, to either convert or put up for public-private competition at least five percent of the jobs on their FAIR Act lists.

They called this requirement “part of a drastic and unprecedented effort to throw up for grabs at least 425,000 federal employee jobs over the next four years.”

Kelley and Harnage also brought one other matter to the attention of Daniels—the administration’s effort to encourage the direct conversion of government jobs to the private sector. They wrote: “Let us be unmistakably clear about this issue. Absent a compelling rationale arising out of an extraordinary set of circumstances, there can be no justification for a direct conversion.”

Whether such a step is called new work, privatization, reeingineering, reconfiguration, or any similar name, the union presidents said, “there is no rationale for direct conversion other than giving work to contractors that they cannot win for themselves through full and fair public-private competitions.”

In addition to the proposed five percent requirement affecting jobs on FAIR Act lists, the administration is proposing a similar five percent quota for direct conversions.

NTEU and AFGE have been in the forefront of the argument that the true size, cost and effectiveness of the contractor workforce is not known, and thus, any projected savings by shifting work to the private sector are little more than illusory.

The union leaders, who accused the administration of disregarding the upcoming work to be conducted by the congressionally-mandated public-private Commercial Activities Panel, have called for a full accounting of contracting out by government agencies.

Kelley, who is a member of the new panel that will review contracting practices, has urged a government-wide suspension in awarding new service contracts until a system exists for conducting a meaningful review of the practice.