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Washington, D.C.—In a letter to a key member of Congress, President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) urged that a congressional review of the contracting out of governmental services focus on “the problems of waste and overstated savings” resulting from “the lack of accountability” in the current system.

In a letter to Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), chairman of the House Technology and Procurement Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Reform, Kelley applauded his plan to conduct hearings in June to look at the growth of contracting governmental work to the private sector—a growth the Bush administration is proposing to sharply accelerate.

“What we know about government contracting efforts,” Kelley wrote, “is that more and more government jobs are being contracted out without fair competition.” She added: “Even though more dollars are now being doled out to contractors than are being spent on the federal workforce, there is little or no oversight of federal contracts once they have been awarded.”

The NTEU president, who was recently appointed to a public-private panel to study government contracting practices and procedures, repeated her call for “a government-wide suspension in awarding new service contracts” until a system is put in place that will result in greater accountability, including whether or not contracting to the private sector actually saves taxpayers money.

“Before we debate transferring more government work to the private sector, agencies need to put in place systems to track whether current contracting efforts are saving money, whether contractors are delivering services on time and efficiently, and that when a contractor is not living up to his or her end of the deal, the government work is brought back in-house and a new competition is held. The taxpayers deserve nothing less,” she wrote to Davis.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments, and has been aggressive in its demands for fair public-private competition, as well as for a far greater degree of accountability both by agencies and private sector companies in connection with governmental work that is contracted out.