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Washington, D.C.—The president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has taken sharp issue with an administration suggestion that, despite House and Senate rejection of its quota-driven plan to contract out hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, it may try to move even more jobs to the private sector.

“With public pronouncements like that,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, “it is hard for federal employees or any other American taxpayer not to believe that this administration cares more about contracting out as many jobs as possible than delivering high quality government services to taxpayers.”

President Kelley offered the comment in testimony before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy. She called the strong July 24 House vote to reject the administration’s contracting out initiative—coupled with an identical provision pending in the Senate—“a clear repudiation by Congress of the flawed approached to contracting out taken by this administration.”

Federal agencies have been under pressure from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to comply with its directive that they must either directly convert to the private sector or open up to public-private competition by fiscal 2003 15 percent of the jobs considered commercial in nature. The ultimate goal, the administration has said, is to move 425,000 federal jobs to the private sector.

Earlier this month, an administration official threatened that if OMB can’t set targets, it would simply issue a blanket policy requiring agencies to open up to competition all “commercial” jobs in the federal sector—raising the number to some 850,000 positions that could be shifted to the private sector.

In wide-ranging testimony about the recommendations of the Commercial Activities Panel (CAP), President Kelley noted that one of the outsourcing principles agreed to by each of the 12 members on the public-private body was the need “to avoid arbitrary full time equivalent (FTE) or other arbitrary numeric goals.”

CAP’s supporting commentary, Kelley said, stated that there is “an overall concern about arbitrary numbers driving sourcing policy or specific sourcing decisions” and that “the use of arbitrary percentage or numerical targets can be counterproductive.”

Kelley was a member of CAP, which was established by Congress to examine federal contracting processes and procedures, and spent a year doing so. The NTEU leader urged Congress to reject the Panel’s broad final recommendations.

“Unfortunately, in the end, the CAP recommendations fail to improve current sourcing policies for federal employees or the taxpayers, and as a result, I am here today to urge you to reject them.” She added: “The

Panel’s recommendations should not even begin to be evaluated until the administration puts the brakes on this reckless initiative to open up 425,000 federal employee jobs to the private sector.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 26 agencies and departments.