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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) strongly supports a call by the head of the General Accounting Office (GAO) for congressional action to guarantee federal workers and their unions the right to protest federal agency decisions to contract work to the private sector, the leader of the union said today.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley expressed her disappointment that GAO decided, under current law, it could not accept appeals of agency contracting decisions from federal workers. But she welcomed the call by Comptroller General David Walker in a letter to congressional leaders for legislative action to provide federal workers with the same rights enjoyed by private contractors.

“Clearly,” President Kelley said, “GAO is both aware of and troubled by the unfairness of allowing only one side in a contracting decision to have the key right of appeal.” Walker made his views known in letters to the heads of the House Government Reform Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, as well as to other congressional leaders.

Walker said that amending the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA) to provide legal standing to federal workers and their unions to bring such protests would be in line with the unanimously-agreed upon principles of the congressionally-established Commercial Activities Panel (CAP). President Kelley was a member of the CAP, a public-private body which studied government contracting practices for more than a year.

Last month, NTEU filed a statement in support of another union’s bid protest, urging GAO to correct what it called “a fundamental imbalance” in the government’s contracting out procedures by opening up its bid protest process to federal workers and their union representatives.

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. NTEU argued that last year’s massive revisions by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to its Circular A-76, which governs federal contracting practices, made federal workers and their unions “interested parties” under federal law, thus giving them the same appeal rights as private contractors.

GAO, however, ruled that although all bidders for federal work, including the federal employees presently performing the jobs, are treated more similarly under the OMB revisions to A-76, key differences remain. In denying the bid protests at issue, GAO said it remains bound by the language of CICA.

Since GAO has acknowledged the need for a legislative change to ensure fairness under OMB’s Circular A-76, Kelley urged GAO to join NTEU in calling on Congress to allow unions to represent agency ‘Most Efficient Organization’ (MEO) teams throughout a public-private competition, and not just during the appeal process. “This is the only way to ensure that federal employees are competing with private contractors on a level playing field,” she said.

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