Competing To the Death - yet another bush failure.....

[The Straight Story]

FEATURES Competing To the Death
By Robert Brodsky [e-mail] Government Executive March 1, 2008

President Bush's much heralded competitive sourcing program is on life support.

Seven years ago, President Bush launched what some envisioned would be the most radical transformation of government operations in a generation. Competitive sourcing would leave the Texas Republican's market-based imprint on the ethos of Washington by requiring federal employees who perform commercially available work to justify their positions through direct competitions with the private sector. Although opposition was expected from unions and Hill Democrats, the administration anticipated that the performance improvements and taxpayer savings spun from the initiative eventually would win over intractable critics. As with many administration predictions, cold hard reality would soon trump optimism.

As the theory goes, competitive sourcing drives cost savings and efficiency by requiring agencies to put jobs that could be performed commercially up for competition with contractors or other agencies to determine which organization can accomplish the work most economically. Money would be saved even if the federal team won, because the competitions would force agencies to streamline their operations. But some say the program not only threatens federal jobs, but fails to produce results.

As the Bush administration enters its final year, competitive sourcing is on life support, suffering a slow and debilitating decline that could incapacitate the program for the next nine months. Legislative restrictions have burdened the program virtually since its outset, with pockets of resistance taking hold in the Republican-controlled Congress. But those constraints amounted to little more than a hiccup compared with the complete program overhaul of the past year.

Democratic-backed legislation has halted more than a half-dozen planned competitions or swung the pendulum in favor of federal employees by removing health care and retirement benefits from the cost comparison process for the ones allowed to continue. Stressed with a bevy of other issues, agencies have become increasingly tentative toward major competitive sourcing projects while the private sector, frustrated with the perceived imbalance in the competitions, has all but thrown in the towel. Even the Office of Management and Budget, the program's most ardent defender, apparently sees the writing on the wall, focusing on verifying past savings rather than on initiating competitions.

http://www.governmentexecutive.com/features/0308-01/0308-01s2.htm

[Trajan]

1. It isnt a 'Bush Failure' ....

It is a GOP failure ...

It is a Republican failure ....

It is a Conservative failure ....

In short ; They suck .....

[DCKit]

2. It's not a fair contest.

Federal employees aren't allowed to under-bid contracts, present cost over-runs to be paid without question, apply for no-bid contracts or lose billions due to "accounting mistakes".