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On May
29, the Office of Management and Budget shortened and simplified
the process by which private sector companies compete to
provide public services, the first major overhaul in 20 years.
Clearly,
a lot of taxpayer money is at stake. The government currently
spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year
on commercial services provided by 850,000 government employees.
These services include engineering, laundry, computer support,
custodial service, fee collection at National Parks, eyeglass-making
and landscaping, to name just a handful of examples.
The new policy will open up 425,000 federal jobs to competition
from private companies to do the work that federal employees
now perform, according to the Washington Post.
The OMB said
the action is aimed at streamlining a process by which the
private sector can compete fairly for this work. “Those
providing top level service at the best value will win every
time,” says Angela Styles, Administrator of OMB’s
Office of Federal Procurement Policy.
According to the OMB,
independent studies by the General Accounting Office (GAO)
and the Center for Naval Analyses
show that holding these competitions saves taxpayers an average
of 30 percent.
No surprise, unions opposed Bush’s
move to boost outsourcing. “Given
this tremendous discretion, they will exercise this discretion
in a way that favors contractors and pushes the work right
out the [government agency] door,” says Jacqueline
Simon, public policy director for the American Federation
of Government Employees.
The May action was the first revision
of the A-76 circular since 1983. The Clinton Administration
made moderate adjustments
in 1996 and pushed to increase the number of competitors
at the Department of Defense.
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