By Calvin Biesecker
The Obama administration has put forth a reasonable vision for balancing the strategic workforce needs of government agencies with the need to maintain competition for government service contracts but the implementation of this guidance has been uneven, officials with the Professional Services Council (PSC) said yesterday.
For example, there is work at the Defense Department where competition is not being considered even though the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has stated that it should be for work that is either not inherently governmental or critical but not inherently governmental as long as internal controls are in place, Stan Soloway, president and CEO of the PSC, told reporters at a media roundtable and teleconference hosted by the group.
On the one hand, there is insourcing going on at some defense agencies that is strategic but there is also support work that had been done at military bases that has “summarily” been insourced with no clear analysis that money would be saved, Soloway said. One small business recently lost support work that a military base stopped outsourcing and now that company is in danger of going out of business next month, he said.
At the other end of the spectrum in the guidance issued by OMB in July is government work that is inherently governmental and government work that is critical but not inherently governmental yet where an agency must ensure control of its mission and operations. Soloway said that here it is too early to say how this will play out for government contractors. However, he expects that there will be a “rebalancing” of the “high-end” workforce to meet the strategic needs of government agencies that will have an impact on some companies.
The Obama administration has made government contracting reform a priority, with insourcing some jobs that are currently performed by private contractors a component of that plan. Soloway said that between 60 and 70 percent of PSC member companies have had “some insourcing experience” in the past few months. He added that it would take at least 10 to 15 years, if not a generation, for the federal government to rebalance its workforce properly.
Soloway doesn’t believe that the administration has an “insourcing agenda” However, he said, “There still is a growing perception we’re seeing and hearing from agencies, DoD is the most prominent but it is also in other agencies, that there is some sort of insourcing mandate or agenda in the administration or even in the congressional legislation, despite the fact that the legislation seeks to consider insourcing, it doesn’t mandate anything. And actually the administration memo is very balanced and source neutral. But that creates a kind of immediate conflict, if you will, in the process.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which has made some initial efforts regarding insourcing, in particular for contracts over $1 million, has said it won’t be until the FY ’11 budget request next year where contractor outsourcing gets a thorough review (Defense Daily, May 14).