Creating More Federal Employees
The debt of our nation is soaring. The U.S. Government has spent more than $13 trillion above what it has taken in. The Obama Administration and Democratic majority in Congress have passed policies causing government to grow faster than ever adding more than $1.4 trillion in additional debt this fiscal year alone.
To make matters worse, the federal government has promised its citizens more than $100 trillion in additional government benefits that it has not yet figured out how to pay for. These unfunded liabilities will create huge economic problems for future generations. Rather than address these problems and stop the hemorrhaging of red ink, the government is moving in precisely the wrong direction by eliminating jobs with private-sector contractors and increasing the number of federal employees.
Since the Clinton Administration, the federal government had followed a policy that unless a job was considered to be “inherently governmental,” as defined by the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 (the FAIR Act), the activity should be open to a competition with the private sector to provide taxpayers with the best value for their tax dollars.
The FAIR Act does not mandate that the government must use private contractors. However, it did initiate public-private competitions for the work. It had proven successful in reducing the waste of taxpayers’ money. The most recent report produced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for fiscal year (FY) 2007 concluded the program had saved taxpayers more than $7 billion over the previous five years.
Just having a competition prodded more value and efficiency out of federal workers too. In fact, in FY 2007 federal employees won 73 percent of the competitions which led to their increase in efficiency.
Since then, a new majority in Congress sought to end these competitions and increase the federal workforce. First, the new Democratic controlled Congress included a provision in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-161). This provision in Section 739 of Division D of the law mandated that the private sector could only compete with government workers if they provided the same benefits package.
This effectively ground competitive sourcing to a halt as private contractors do not have the overly generous pay packages that are used in the federal government. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal concludes that “the government effectively overbills Americans by almost $40 billion every year just on labor costs.”
Forcing rigged results was just the first attempt to stop competitive sourcing. Competition with the private sector was halted altogether by the FY 2009 Omnibus Appropriations bill signed into law 50 days after President Obama was sworn into office. It included provisions specifically prohibiting any further studies of public-private competitions even if the private sector must use bloated federal compensation packages.
Further, it included new provisions that were a complete reversal on the old. The Obama Administration was now embarking on a government insourcing policy. The new law mandated that the federal government and its agencies now study how to recapture jobs that were previously contracted out.
The following year, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of FY 2010 called for the government to create a comprehensive inventory of all the outside contracts it wants to revert to federal employees.
So far these mandates to reduce private contracting in the federal government and replace them with more federal jobs has been limited to one-year appropriations bills that need to be renewed every year. However, this spring the Democratic majority made a move to create a permanent authorization to convert private contractors to government employees.
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of FY 2011. Normally, amendments to defense bills are limited to the Defense Department. But the Sarbanes amendment applied government-wide. This is the next step in mandating the conversion of government contractors into federal employees which will prove very costly for taxpayers.
— Roger Morse
