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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today called on the General Accounting Office (GAO) to correct “a fundamental imbalance” in the government’s contracting out procedures by opening up its bid protest process to federal workers and their union representatives.

In a statement to GAO, NTEU expressed its strong support for the legal standing of employees and their unions to protest agency bid decisions. NTEU submitted its statement in support of a bid protest filed with GAO by the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), which is challenging a U.S. Forest Service decision to contract out fleet maintenance services.

The imbalance occurs, said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, because under present GAO procedures only private sector bidders have the opportunity to obtain third-party review of an agency’s contracting out decision by filing bid protests with GAO.

“The federal employees who stand to lose not only the public-private competition but their jobs as well have no opportunity to obtain such review,” Kelley said. The NTEU statement argues that GAO’s long-standing rationale for its position that employees and their union representatives can’t appeal bid decisions “has now vanished” with the massive revisions last year by the Office of

Management and Budget (OMB) of its Circular A-76, which governs federal contracting processes.

GAO historically has found that federal employees and their union representatives are not “interested parties” as that term is defined in the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA)—that is,

they lack the legal “standing” to bring bid protests before GAO. In several key aspects, however, the A-76 revisions now make federal employees identical to the private sector bidders seeking their work.

NTEU said that federal employees now meet the “interested party” standard because the OMB revisions have “transformed (employees) into ‘offerors’ who submit bids in response to the agency’s solicitation and who are bound by a contract if they win the competition.”

Further, NTEU urged GAO to determine that the front-line employees, who are directly affected by the public-private job competition, and their union representatives, are the only parties with sufficient interests to pursue protests on behalf of federal sector bidders.

“Because agency managers lack a sufficient stake in the outcome of a bid protest, and face insurmountable conflicts of interests that would keep them from pursuing meritorious protests,” NTEU said, “the protest right will be meaningful only if the directly-affected employees are authorized to exercise it.”

Putting federal workers “on an equal footing” with their private sector counterparts on the important issue of third-party review of bid protests would not only correct a major injustice, NTEU said, it would benefit taxpayers by providing an avenue for overturning agency contracting out decisions based on faulty analysis and legal determinations.

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