In a markup of its fiscal 2009 appropriations bill, the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee approved a one-year moratorium on any new A-76 competitions last week, effectively deferring any decision to continue opening up federal jobs to private sector competition until a new President is elected.

Predictably, the bill has strong support among federal labor unions who have lobbied against outsourcing federal jobs deemed commercial in nature vigorously. The bill also provoked a strong negative reaction from the Bush administration, which has made competitive sourcing a top priority.

The language would not actually kill competitive sourcing, only put an end to Bush's A-76 agenda and allow the next administration to consider and implement its own private-public workforce policies.  Only permanent authorizing legislation would end the program forever.  It will also not apply to the estimated 18,000 positions being evaluated in competitive sourcing studies for 2008.  These studies will take months, if not years to complete.

A-76 began with very high expectations, as President Bush mandated that agencies open 425,000 - half of all federal jobs deemed suitable for competition positions - to competition from contracting firms who might be able to do the tasks cheaper.  That number was reduced to 127,000, but federal agencies had difficulty meeting that goal due to resistance from labor unions and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

According to data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), agencies competed for a very modest 4,000 jobs in 2007, and since 2003 have held just 1,375 competitions for just over 50,000 jobs.  

OMB claims these competitions will yield $400 million in savings over the next five years, but critics argue that these numbers are just a smoke-and-mirrors effect and no such savings will be realized.

This latest A-76 bill is just one more attack on competitive sourcing in a long series of attempts to weaken it by Democrats.  In 2007, Congress passed a sweeping number of reforms that excluded health care and retirement benefits from the cost comparison process and gave protest rights to the federal competitors.  Last year, moratoriums on competitive outsourcing were signed into law at the Labor Department, Bureau of Prisons, Federal Prison Industries, Army Corp of Engineers, Forest Service, the Coast Guard's National Vessel Documentation Center and for positions related to OPM's Human Resources Lines of Business initiative.  

Previous legislative restrictions halted competitions at the Veteran's Affairs Department and for specific programs at the Departments of Agriculture and of Homeland Security.  Meanwhile an amendment in the pending fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill would suspend all Defense Department competitions for the next three years.

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