The House Armed Services Committee has begun examining the issue of the standards used in determining whether certain jobs must be performed by federal employees because they are inherently governmental, versus which could be performed by contractors. At a hearing, long-standing questions were raised about the quality of contractor performance, the government’s ability to oversee contracts and whether contracts produce the expected savings. While the committee’s focus is on DoD, which does the bulk of the government’s contracting out, the issue has implications for other agencies. Concerns in those areas led Congress to enact several restrictions on contracting last year—for example, specifying that certain mine safety inspection and Energy laboratory jobs are off-limits to contracting. Currently there is a running controversy over an IRS project to allow contractors to collect overdue tax debt.