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Washington, D.C.—The army of federal contracting employees is growing at an alarming rate and at more than 7.6 million in 2005 is four times the size of the 1.8 million member federal civilian workforce, raising serious concerns about accountability and value for U.S. taxpayers, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees said today.

“Runaway federal contracting is a shell game, masking the true costs of government to America’s taxpayers and handing the important work of the government to a less accountable workforce,” warned President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

“A far better course,” she added, “would be to have trained, responsive and accountable federal employees do the work.”

President Kelley made her comments in the wake of a lengthy report by New York University professor Paul C. Light, who has a long history of familiarity with federal workplace and workforce issues. Light previously has referred to federal contractors and grant recipients as a ‘shadow’ government.

His latest report highlights the recent and rapid growth in the contractor workforce, pointing out that this administration’s continuing efforts to contract work to the private sector has added some 2.5 million contractor employees just in the period between 2002 and 2005. The growth in that period alone exceeds the current number of federal workers.

What’s more, Light said, the expansion reflects a nearly $50 billion increase in federal contract spending in a single year—from 2004 to 2005.

Equally troubling to the overall growth in the contractor workforce, President Kelley said, is this administration’s insistence on turning over to the private sector an increasing amount of inherently governmental work—such as the collection of taxes.

For example, the Internal Revenue Service is moving ahead with an ill-advised program of hiring private sector debt collectors to pursue tax debts despite its repeated acknowledgements that having the private companies perform the work is more expensive—and thus less cost-effective—than having IRS employees perform the jobs.

In his report, NYU’s Light suggested that one of the administration’s goals in privatizing so much federal work is its effort to keep federal workforce numbers from appearing to grow. At the same time, he warned that the administration and Congress “are paying a premium for their insistence on a relatively small civil service.”

Federal employees “certainly feel the pinch in their concerns about the lack of enough employees to do their jobs well,” he said, adding that it can be argued “that the lack of hard head-counts from the hidden (contractor) workforce prevent the kind of labor-cost comparisons that might drive some jobs back into the civil service.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.