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Washington, D.C.—In just the nine months since the government illegally slanted contracting out rules in favor of the private sector, serious negative effects on federal employees already are clear, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) will tell a federal court tomorrow.

Symptomatic of these effects, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said, is a tripling in some federal agencies of the number of jobs that are subject to being contracted to the private sector. “The jobs of these employees are now less secure,” Kelley said, “because of the illegal actions” of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

NTEU will make these and other supporting arguments at a hearing scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on an effort by the government to dismiss NTEU’s suit over the massive OMB revisions to Circular A-76, filed last June, without resolving the merits of its claims.

The major revisions would make it easier for the administration to carry out its agenda of shifting as many as 850,000 federal jobs—one out of every two positions—to the private sector.

“We’re confident that the court will see that OMB has gone far beyond its authority” in applying a substantially narrower definition of inherently governmental functions than is now contained in federal law, President Kelley said. NTEU’s suit alleges that OMB’s A-76 revisions conflict with the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act of 1998 which requires that activities which are “inherently governmental” may be performed only by federal employees. Other activities designated as commercial in nature may be contracted to the private sector.

By narrowing the statutory definition of “inherently governmental function” in its revised Circular A-76, the NTEU suit alleges, OMB has opened the door in two key ways to private sector performance of functions previously reserved for federal employees.

For example, the suit says, functions involving the collection, control or disbursement of federal funds, which routinely have been deemed inherently governmental under the FAIR Act, may obtain that designation under the new OMB rules only if they include the authority “to establish policies and procedures.”

That would make it harder for thousands of NTEU-represented employees at the Internal Revenue Service who are engaged in the collection, control or disbursement of appropriated or other federal funds, even though they may not be responsible for “establishing policies or procedures,” to establish that their jobs are inherently governmental, the suit argues.

The suit also alleges that OMB has significantly narrowed the types of jobs that can be deemed inherently governmental by requiring that they entail the exercise of “substantial discretion.” The FAIR Act requires only that the job involve discretion.

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