The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 41 D ESPITE THE B USH ADMINISTRATION ’ S PUSH AND DEMON - STRATED COST SAVINGS , THE COMPETITIVE CONTRACTING PROGRAM IS ADVANCING ONLY SLOWLY . B Y R ON U TT F O C U S O N F S S T A F F I N G resident George Bush’s campaign pledge to improve government service and reduce costs by requiring competitive contracting for commercial-type jobs in the federal bureaucracy became his administra- tion’s formal policy in early 2001. At that time the U.S. Office of Management and Budget announced that as many as 850,000 federal positions would be subject to formal competitions with private sector providers under the guidelines of OMB’s Circular A-76. To fulfill this obligation, each agency was expected to review its inventory of commercial-like positions, determine which ones were suitable for potential out- sourcing, and each year subject 5 percent of that com- mercial inventory to formal competition with qualified private sector providers. A Bipartisan Effort Some opponents of the president’s plan have attempted to present it as a radical, pro-business con- cept that would undermine the quality of government work. In fact, the program had its origins in the 1950s, and has received substantial bipartisan support from nearly every president since then. In one of the more significant enhancements of the program, President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1998 the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act, known familiarly as “FAIR,” which required for the first time that all agen- cies compile a comprehensive inventory of their com- mercial job positions, as well as those positions deemed “inherently governmental.” This inventory is to be compiled annually and sub- mitted to OMB, which reviews and approves the list. It is from this FAIR Act inventory that the Bush adminis- tration expects federal agencies to select positions and activities for its ambitious competitive contracting pro- gram. Nor was that President Clinton’s only commitment to contracting and privatization. In 1996 he privatized the Office of Personnel Management’s background investigations. In 1998 he proposed to subject 229,000 Pentagon positions to competitive contracting, and then raised it to 400,000 a year later. Also during the 1990s, then-Vice President Al Gore endorsed the idea of privatizing the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control towers as part of his “Reinventing Government” program. Yet despite its longstanding, bipartisan appeal, com- petitive contracting is actively opposed by many civil servants, their unions and some in Congress who want to protect some or all government employees from pri- vate-sector competition regardless of the nature of their jobs. Often presented as an anti-government P C OMPETITIVE C ONTRACTING : A N A VENUE FOR I MPROVEMENT