Congress Votes More Limits on Competitive Sourcing In what has become an annual ritual in Congress, lawmakers are attaching strings to the Bush administration’s competitive sourcing initiative. The Senate voted to allow federal employees to appeal the results of job competitions to the General Accounting Office. The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Carl Levin (D-MI), was added to the 2005 Defense Authorization bill by unanimous vote June 15. The Senate also passed an amendment ordering the Defense Department to consider using federal employees to handle new work, rather than automatically contracting it out. That amendment was sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). The Collins-Levin amendment would amend the Competition in Contracting Act to let GAO hear protests from either the “agency tender official,” the manager of the government’s in-house team, or a representative chosen by a majority of federal employees in a competition. Collins said the proposal would “level the playing field.” Contractors argue that it would tip the playing field because private-sector employees have no protest rights. The House-passed version of the Defense Authorization bill, H.R. 4200, contains tougher restrictions on competitive sourcing. An amendment sponsored by Reps. James Langevin (D-RI) and Jim Cooper (D-TN) would require the Defense Department to allow its employees to compete for work now done by contractors. It also would give DOD employees a 10% cost advantage in streamlined competitions involving 65 or fewer workers. The cost advantage was put into place last year but will expire this fall unless it is extended. Separately, the House voted June 18 to block the largest competition in progress at the Homeland Security Department, a study of 1,100 jobs in the Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau. The amendment’s sponsor, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), said the jobs of immigration information officers, contact representatives and investigative assistants should be classified as governmental and exempt from competition. The House Appropriations Committee voted to sharply limit the amount of money that can be spent on competitive sourcing by the Interior and Energy Departments and the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service. The White House said the administration “strongly opposes” the provisions, but stopped short of threatening a veto. In previous years both houses of Congress have approved various restrictions on competitive sourcing, but the administration has succeeded in erasing many of them when joint Senate-House conference committees wrote the final legislation.