Agencies To Consider Insourcing Service Contracts Civilian agencies will be required to create an inventory of their service contracts and evaluate whether some of the work should be insourced. The provision is part of the 2010 Consolidated Appropriation bill that has passed both houses of Congress and was awaiting President Obama’s signature at press time. Section 743 of the bill requires the annual inventory and directs agencies to “evaluate whether it makes sense to bring the work performed by the contractor ‘in house,’” according to a summary released by the House Appropriations Committee. As part of the evaluation, the agency must make sure it is not using contractor employees to perform inherently governmental functions or to perform critical functions in a way that might limit the agency’s ability to maintain control of its mission and operations. “In the absence of complete and reliable information on the extent of their reliance on service contractors, Federal agencies are not well-equipped to determine whether they have the right balance of contractor and in-house resources needed to accomplish their missions,” the conference report on the bill states. In 2008 Congress required the Defense Department to inventory its service contracts. The conference report says the Army has already saved $50 million by insourcing some of the work. The first inventories of civilian agency contracts are due to be submitted to Congress by Dec. 31, 2010, and will be publicly available. For each service contract or task order, the inventory must include a description of the services and how they contributed to achieving agency objectives; dollar amount; contract type and date; name of contractor and place of performance; number of contractor and subcontractor employees; and whether the contract was awarded noncompetitively. The appropriations bill, H.R. 3288, combines six different bills and provides nearly $447 billion to fund many federal agencies for the rest of the fiscal year. The Defense Department appropriation was awaiting congressional action at press time.