Contracting, Funding Provisions Are Hangups

The White House has threatened to veto the Treasury-Postal measure, although not because of the raise language. Instead, it objects to language added on the House floor and at the Senate committee level that would bar agencies from using numeric goals or quotas in their privatization programs. The administration has told agencies to either directly convert to contract or conduct formal cost-comparison studies on 15 percent of their jobs that are not inherently governmental by the end of fiscal 2003. The congressional language would effectively block that initiative, which is one of the major points of the administration’s management agenda. The House and Senate bills also would reject the administration’s request to charge individual agency accounts, rather than the Treasury, for Federal Employees Health Benefits program and CSRS retirement system costs and to shift the costs of administering Federal Employees Compensation Act benefits from the Labor Department to individual agencies. However, the administration has not explicitly threatened a veto over those issues.