OFPP Proposed Workforce Policy Too Complex, Lacks Clarity

The Professional Services Council, through the Council of Defense and Space Industry Associations (CODSIA), made recommendations to the Office of Federal Procurement Policy on how it can improve its proposed policy letter “Work Reserved for Performance by Federal Employees” to avoid creating an environment that would promote arbitrary insourcing at federal agencies.

The proposed policy letter sought to clarify the definition of what constitutes “inherently governmental” work that must be performed by federal government employees and to provide guidance to agencies to help them identify functions “closely associated with inherently governmental” and “critical” functions that should also be reserved for federal employee performance.

But we felt that agencies could misinterpret the proposal as a mandate to insource work that is neither inherently governmental nor critical to government’s mission performance, such as base maintenance, information technology support or other tasks found in the yellow pages.

To avoid a final policy that results in wide-scale, non-strategic, quota-driven insourcing, we recommended OFPP:

• Provide a clear definition and examples of what constitutes inherently governmental work;
• Combine the categories of “closely associated with inherently governmental functions” and “critical functions” into one narrowly defined category to eliminate duplication and confusion;
• Require that agencies to submit and publicize a list of their inherently governmental and critical functions and define which critical functions must be reserved for performance by federal employees;
• Require agencies establish a comprehensive human capital plan and conduct in-depth cost comparisons before making insourcing determinations for work that could be performed by either the public or private sectors.

Abt CEO Flanagan: Company Mission is “Improving People’s Lives”

Two weeks ago, PSC testified at a hearing where the commitment of federal contractors and their employees to the government’s mission was questioned. Obviously those questioning that commitment haven’t talked to contractors the way the Boston Globe’s Beth Healy did in this May 23 profile of Kathleen Flanagan, the chief executive of Abt Associates, a PSC member company actively involved in our International Development Task Force. The entire piece is worth a read, but I’d like to highlight Flanagan’s response to Healy’s question of what drew her to the development field.

Flanagan said:

"I’m very passionate about making a difference, and Abt is a mission-oriented company. Abt is dedicated to improving people’s lives, to helping our clients improve programs, and going into fragile countries or underdeveloped countries and raising them up.”

That sounds a lot like dedication to mission and public service to me. And it serves as a good reminder to those who question the motives of for-profit contractors: it IS about the mission.

When it comes to insourcing, greater analysis is needed to avoid mission paralysis

Federal agencies, quite rightly, are determining where they may have gone overboard with outsourcing by contracting out work that should have been kept in-house to maintain government control over its mission. Where agencies find they’ve improperly outsourced jobs, they’re supposed to insource only the positions that will put the government back in the driver’s seat of mission control.

But so far, the government’s execution of insourcing has been a non-strategic, quota-driven exercise, which actually threatens the government’s ability to carry out its mission in an efficient and cost-effective manner, PSC Executive Vice President and Counsel Alan Chvotkin warned the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Insourcing for the sake of insourcing is no more intelligent, no more effective, and no more defensible than outsourcing for the sake of outsourcing. Nor should government accept repeating the mistakes of past outsourcing efforts when implementing insourcing efforts,” Chvotkin said at a May 20 hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia.

It’s IT Procurement Reform…and PSC Helped!

The Senate took a step toward smart information technology contracting on May 19, passing S. 920, the “Information Technology Investment Oversight Enhancement and Waste Prevention Act of 2009.” The bipartisan bill, which PSC helped the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee craft, would improve agency and congressional processes to track the performance, cost and schedule of IT projects and prevent the requirements creep that often lead complex IT procurements into failure. The legislation, which was sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn, D-Del. and Susan Collins, R-Maine, would also create an “IT SWAT Team” of government, industry and non-profit IT experts to provide skilled support to agencies managing complex IT projects. The SWAT Team would support government project managers from system development to execution to ensure it is successfully deployed. The bill now heads to the House for approval, as it travels on the School House Rock described path to becoming law.

Government contracts abroad spur jobs at home, save taxpayer dollars

What do government contracts for work removing landmines in former combat zones, protecting embassies globally and outfitting forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan mean at home?

To the Tennessee towns of Lenoir City and Maryville, the more than $80 million in combined contracts two rival companies — EOD Technology of Lenoir City and Relyant of Maryville — hold with the government have created nearly 200 local jobs and generated substantial tax revenue.

To the troops in the combat zone, they have provided information technology and logistics support, as well as money-saving, climate-controlled for housing that allows for investment in other equipment.

To embassy staff around they world, they’ve provided safety through compound security contracts.

And to the communities they work in abroad, they provide roads and fields free of explosive devices and free of hazardous waste due to contracts for munitions and waste cleanup.

You can read more about the local and global impacts these firms have had in the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel.

While you read, keep in mind these are two firms with a small slice of the $500 billion government contracting pie. Given the successes of these firms, imagine what the entire government contracting community brings at home and abroad!

Shah’s Vision Offers Opportunities…and Pitfalls

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah praised for-profit and non-profit development firms for their work at a town-hall meeting the Global Leadership Coalition sponsored in yesterday in Washington, D.C. That was right before he told those gathered he plans to insource much of the program design, monitoring and evaluation work many contractors have diligently completed for USAID for decades.

“Our current contracting systems exist for a reason. They enable our employees to get work done in an environment where they don’t always have the internal resources to do that work. And we depend greatly on many of our partners in this room to get that work done and to be a part of that system,” Shah said. “We have to insource program design, monitoring and evaluation. We simply can’t write contracts anymore that include and outsource all of that in a singular effort.”

PSC responded to Shah’s comments today with a letter urging him to keep industry in the loop during his strategic human capital planning. In the letter PSC President and CEO Stan Soloway also urged Shah to keep that strategic planning strategic.

Smart Contracting leads to Freedom from FAFSA Fear

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is a government form with a reputation for striking fear in the heart of every college student on an annual basis. Students and their parents know – or soon find out – that a student’s entire aid package (even the non-federal aid offered by educational institutions) hinges on how they answer the 107 questions required by the Education Department. And one mistake could cost more than a student loan.

So it’s no wonder that the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid was one of the three winners in the Third Annual Citizen Services Awards for an online support tool to assist FAFSA applicants with their submissions in real time. The tool was implemented by Vangent, Inc. of Arlington, a Professional Services Council member and, as the award attests, one smart contractor.