OMB has issued guidance for agencies to use to substantiate that savings are achieved and performance is improved through public-private job competitions, saying post competition oversight would ensure that competitions produce expected benefits and promote public trust of the competitive sourcing initiative.
Agencies have already put in place infrastructures to carry out job competitions, something OMB said could save billions over the next five to ten years, but it said realizing the benefits of those competitions requires monitoring the implementation.
The guidance covers agency responsibilities for tracking costs and performance data, and the review of that data to determine whether costs have been saved or not.
Whether job competitions actually produce savings remains a contentious issue, with opponents such as employee unions arguing that official savings estimates are misleading and impossible to measure and that the costs of carrying out the competitions themselves are not factored into the total.