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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) strongly supports congressional legislation introduced by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) that would limit government privatization efforts and initiate reform of the entire federal A-76 process. NTEU has joined a consortium of other federal employee unions in signing a letter of support for the measure.

“Taxpayers deserve a federal contracting process that is fair, accountable and efficient,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “The CLEAN UP Act would help reduce waste and fraud in government contracting, return work into the hands of federal employees and save taxpayer dollars.”

Under the previous administration, Kelley said, too often the goal of placing federal work in the hands of private contractors superseded any real analysis of how to provide better taxpayer service. “Contracting out for the sake of contracting out does not work,” she said. “There is no one who performs the work of the federal government better than federal employees; they just need the opportunity to effectively compete.”

The CLEAN UP Act, S. 924, 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 (OMB) Circular A-76 privatization process. A companion measure is soon expected to be introduced in the House by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.).

NTEU has been at the forefront of federal privatization reform efforts, especially during the union’s aggressive fight to end the use of private tax collection at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). That effort proved successful earlier this year when the IRS decided not to renew the contracts of the two private companies and returned the inherently governmental work to federal employees.

In ending the contracts, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman noted that a study of the cost-effectiveness of the program showed “it is reasonable to conclude” that when working similar inventories, “IRS collection is more cost-effective than the contractors.”

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 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 role in shining a light on these situations in recent years has contributed a great deal to the current knowledge about the inherent unfairness of many A-76 competitions,” President Kelley said.

In their letter of support, Kelley and others thanked Sen. Mikulski and Rep. Sarbanes for their leadership on federal contracting out reform efforts, saying that years of indiscriminate privatization have created a mess for countless agencies governmentwide. “Your thoughtful and innovative legislation would make federal sourcing policy more accountable to taxpayers and more fair to federal employees,” the letter read.

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