Sen. Mikulski Pushes Insourcing Legislation Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski is proposing legislation that would roll back the Bush administration’s outsourcing policies. Mikulski’s bill would block new public-private job competitions until a number of changes are made in the process. She has already pushed through a one-year moratorium on new competitions for fiscal 2009. In addition, the bill would require agencies to insource work that is inherently governmental “or closely related to inherently governmental.” It would encourage agencies to give federal employees the opportunity to perform new work rather than contracting it out; and to insource work that was contracted out without competition and work that is being performed poorly by contractors. “The Bush Administration made a mess of federal personnel contracting – pushing contracting out even when it wasted taxpayer dollars and undermined the mission of our federal agencies,” the Maryland Democrat said. “This bill will be a major step towards cleaning up the contracting abuses of the last eight years and bringing jobs that were wrongly awarded to private contractors back to where they belong – with our first-rate federal employees.” Competitive sourcing was a key component of the Bush administration’s management strategy. However, the administration’s studies showed that federal employees won nearly 90% of the job competitions in some years. As a result, many contractors refused to take part in the competitions. The Professional Services Council, a contractor group, said it will strongly oppose the Mikulski bill, which is titled the Correction of Longstanding Errors in Agencies Unsustainable Procurements (CLEAN UP) Act. “Insourcing for the sake of insourcing is no better as a management policy than outsourcing for the sake of outsourcing,” the council wrote in a letter to the senator. The council said several studies have found that job competitions resulted in lower cost to the government, no matter whether federal employeess or contractors won the work. “Regrettably, this legislation inappropriately limits the Obama administration’s ability to achieve its goals and only drives yet another unnecessary wedge between federal employees and federal contractors when we should be building partnerships.” PSC president Stan Soloway said in a statement. “It is the wrong bill, based on the wrong premises, proposing the wrong ‘solution,’ at the wrong time.” Nine other Democratic senators are cosponsoring the legislation.