Despite opposition from the White House, Congress is acting
to keep several provisions restricting the contracting-out
program at two major agencies, Defense and Homeland Security.
In a spending bill for Homeland Security (S-2537),
House-Senate conferees retained a provision that will
prohibit contracting-out of some 1,300 contract representative
and investigative assistant jobs in immigration services,
reflecting a view that such work is inherently governmental.
The Bush administration views the work as primarily
administrative in nature that does not involve the type
of discretionary decision-making that would make the work
fall into the inherently governmental category.
Separately, in passing a fiscal 2005 authorization bill for
the Defense Department (HR-4200), Congress kept language
effectively bars use of factors other than cost when making
contracting decisions at DoD, which accounts for about
two-thirds of the government’s contracting-out activity.
The provision requires that when a formal cost comparison
study is done, work must be kept in-house unless the
projected saving would be at least $10 million or 10
percent. The administration also had sought to have that
language taken out, although earlier this year President
Bush signed a DoD appropriations measure with similar language.
In crafting the final measure, though, conferees dropped
several other provisions that had been in earlier versions.
These include language to: allow the in-house side to
reorganize into a “most efficient organization” as the
basis for its bid; require that some work already out on
contract be recompeted to see if it could be brought back
in-house; guarantee that federal employees be considered
for new work; and exclude health costs from the cost
comparisons if the contractors contribute less toward
their employees’ health insurance than the federal
government does.
Meanwhile, even stronger language that would effectively
bar any of the changes in contracting policy that the
administration announced last year is pending as part of
the Transportation-Treasury spending bill. That provision
would be applied government-wide.
