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Washington, D.C.—Congress should take immediate steps to increase the accountability of the federal contractor workforce and determine whether they are delivering the services they promised, on time and within budget, the head of the National Treasury Employees Union today told lawmakers at a congressional hearing on contracting out.

“Even though more dollars are doled out to contractors each year than are spent on the federal workforce, there is little to no oversight of federal contracts once they have been awarded,” said NTEU National President Colleen M. Kelley. “And agencies continue to contract out federal work even though there are no reporting systems in place to determine whether contracting out has achieved real cost savings or improved government services for the taxpayers.”

Testifying before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy, Kelley pointed out that there is a great deal of accountability within the federal workforce and that through the scrutiny of Congress and Government Performance and Results Act “there is little we don’t know about the quality and costs of government services delivered by federal employees.” American taxpayers should have the same level of accountability of the work performed by contractors, Kelley said.

NTEU believes that the best way to increase accountability in the current system is for Congress to pass, and President Bush to sign, the Truthfulness, Responsibility and Accountability in Contracting (TRAC) Act. The TRAC Act would require agencies to implement systems to track whether current contracting efforts are saving money, whether contractors are delivering services on-time and efficiently and, Kelley noted, would bring government work back in-house when contractors don’t live up to their end of the deal.

“Recent extreme actions taken by the Bush Administration will only exacerbate current problems with contracting out,” Kelley said. She pointed to recent White House directives ordering federal agencies to contract out five percent of the jobs listed on their annual FAIR Act lists in the next fiscal year and 10 percent the year after that.

“How can the Bush Administration set these arbitrary quotas without first evaluating their impact on an agency’s delivery of services?” Kelley asked. “NTEU believes these actions are only going to lead to more waste, more broken promises, and more cost overruns in government contracting.”