Mr. President, I rise today to express my concern over the Administration's proposed changes to the A-76 process, and its impact on the federal workforce and accountability in contracting decisions. The OMB draft rules issued last week raise serious questions over the transparency of federal procurement policies and their effect on federal workers. True competition must be fair to federal employees, be cost-effective, and promote financial transparency and public accountability.
The proposed regulations to A-76 do not represent fair competition. The regulations would place federal workers at a severe disadvantage by implementing a competition process where federal jobs may be eliminated at any time, even before a competition is completed. The process would place greater emphasis on a contractor's past performance, but would fail to account for the past performance of in-house employees.
The OMB proposal could threaten cost-effective procurement policies. Under the draft rules, subjective notions of "best value" would replace objective cost-savings in driving decisions for whether federal work would be performed in-house or by the private sector. Government procurement should be based on sound analysis giving the greatest weight to cost savings. Decisions to contract out federal jobs, which are based on projections and expectations of performance, risk squandering limited public resources on contractor promises to deliver more work than is needed, at a higher cost to the public.
We must ensure that any changes to A-76 are fair. The OMB proposal would require agencies to complete competitions within a 12 month time-frame. If a federal agency was unable to finish a competition in this time, OMB could simply out-source federal jobs to a contractor without competition. Moreover, the draft regulations would support the Administration's arbitrary targets for contracting out federal jobs, which I oppose because these targets artificially impose goals for contracting out. The proposal would also expand the types of federal jobs that would be subject to public-private competitions, such as supervisory positions.
According to OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the majority of public-private competitions under the proposed rules would be based on the current lowest cost standard. There would be a pilot project to test the "best value" standard on information technology jobs. However, the use of the "best value" standard approach is controversial and subjective. I would hope that this would be limited to a genuine pilot project and would allow for a careful, objective review of the results.
There are important steps we can take now to improve financial transparency and accountability in federal contracting while strengthening fairness in public-private competitions. In June of this year, I was pleased to work with Senator Kennedy to improve financial transparency and cost-savings in contracting policies at the Department of Defense (DoD). Our amendment to the DoD Authorization bill failed by only one vote. Our amendment would have required cost savings before decisions were made to contract out government functions. It would have improved financial transparency by establishing measures for the true cost and size of the DoD contractor workforce. Our proposal would have promoted equity in public-private competitions by ensuring that federal employees had the opportunity to compete for existing and new DoD work and that DoD competed an equitable number of contractor and civilian jobs.
As Chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Federal Services Subcommittee and Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, I look forward to ensuring that federal contracting policies are conducted in a manner that achieves the best return on the dollar and is fair to our federal workforce. It is my intention to work with my colleagues in the 108th Congress to pursue these goals.
