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Washington, D.C.—There are potential ways to improve the federal government’s contracting process, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers said, but revisions announced today by the administration do nothing more than eliminate virtually all substantive rights of front line employees to compete for their jobs, and stack competitions in favor of the private sector.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) leveled the charges in response to broad revisions announced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to its Circular A-76, governing most federal contracting practices. “OMB’s revisions make it clear that the administration’s objective is to privatize more than 850,000 federal jobs,” President Kelley said.

The new A-76, she said, opens the door to convert thousands of jobs to the private sector by broadening exemptions and creating an unrealistic timetable for public-private competitions. Further, it continues to limit the appeal rights of federal employees—but not contractors.

President Kelley said the proposal is harmful not just to federal workers, but to American taxpayers who will wind up paying more than is necessary to get the job done and who will have less accountability as to how their tax dollars are spent. “The new A-76 process moves away from cost-

based competitions to more subjective analyses that will lead to more outsourcing at higher costs to the taxpayers,” Kelley said.

The NTEU president was particularly critical of “unrealistic time constraints” contained in the A-76 revisions for agencies to conduct public-private competitions. The new rules encourage so-called ‘streamlined’ public-private competitions in which agencies have only 90 days to complete a competition.

“These rules emphasize speed in privatizing federal jobs at the expense of quality and costs,” President Kelley said. “The shortened process will make it harder, if not impossible, for an in-house proposal to maximize new efficiencies and innovations, creating a bias in favor of the outside contractor.”

President Kelley described as “very dangerous for taxpayers” an A-76 provision that effectively keeps contracted work in the hands of the private sector without regard to the quality of the performance by the private sector firm. “If the work is kept in the government agency,” she said, “that agency has to recompete that work periodically; why not the contracted work?”

The NTEU leader again urged substantially greater accountability and oversight of contractors, guaranteed opportunities for federal workers to compete in defense of their jobs, and appeal rights for federal employees and NTEU to challenge faulty contract awards.

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