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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has welcomed new House legislation that would help to reform the federal A-76 contracting out process and reduce efforts to privatize government work. The CLEAN UP Act was introduced by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) and is similar to legislation currently pending in the Senate.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley applauded the measure, saying it would help to reduce waste in government contracting and return work to the hands of federal employees.

“The CLEAN UP Act will help ensure that federal employees have a fair shot at competing with the private sector for certain government work, as well halt the competition of work that is inherently governmental and should only be done by trained and accountable federal workers,” President Kelley said.

Both the House and Senate versions of the legislation would ensure that inherently governmental work is actually performed by federal employees; encourage agencies to give federal employees opportunities to perform certain types of outsourced work, including work that was contracted out without competition; and would reform the Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 privatization process.

“This bill is about good government,” said Rep. Sarbanes. “Over the last decade, we have been much too quick to outsource many of government’s most basic functions to the private sector. The desire to do so reflected a political ideology of shrinking government at all costs – even if it meant diminishing the quality of certain government services that are paid for and overwhelmingly supported by American taxpayers.”

NTEU agrees that too often the last administration saw a reliance on outside contractors as the norm. “Contracting out for the sake of contracting out does not work,” President Kelley said. “There is no one who performs the work of the government better than federal employees.”

NTEU strenuously objected to the previous administration’s rewriting of the A-76 rules governing competition between private contractors and federal employees for government work, arguing that the new regulations favored outside companies and would result in poor performance.

This is what happened at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) when a private contractor announced it could not begin work on schedule under a $103 million contract for receiving, filing and maintaining tax returns and other tax-related documents. That left the IRS scrambling to staff the job after spending months transferring its own employees out of the work. It took nearly 16 months for the contractor to assume all its contractual obligations. Two years later, the IRS canceled the contract amid reports by agency employees of lengthy delays in retrieving information they needed to do their jobs.

NTEU’s concerns about the inefficiency of the current A-76 process are supported by a recent Government Accountability Office report that showed that the Office of Federal Procurement Policy is understaffed and its Past Performance Information Retrieval System—designed to be a repository of contractor performance information—is underutilized, resulting in agencies making uninformed decisions and awarding contracts to companies with faulty performance records.

“A lack of confidence in the information the federal government collects about the private contracts they award is undermining the entire contracting process,” President Kelley said.

NTEU joined a consortium of other federal employee unions last month in signing a letter of support for the CLEAN UP Act. In the letter, Kelley and others thanked Rep. Sarbanes and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), author of the Senate bill, their leadership on federal contracting out reform efforts.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.