GAO: Civilian agencies slow to in-source jobs

Federal agencies are taking their time about drafting guidelines to advise managers to bring work back into the government which has been contracted out to vendors, according to the General Accountability Office. Despite the push by the Obama administration and a new law requiring civilian agencies to develop insourcing guidelines by mid-July 2009, the top nine federal agencies have taken no steps forward.

The State Department was the only agency that has issued preliminary guideless on the multi-sector workforce, but it did not deal with insourcing. State is running a pilot project that will end in April 2010 and then it will issue guidelines.

Much of the outsourced work involves information technology and little has been done to address how this could impact the industry--not to mention if the work can even be done in house, especially jobs that require high-tech expertise such as cybersecurity.

Three other agencies--the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security and NASA--have drafted, but have not issued directives. Five others--the General Services Administration and the Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Transportation and Veterans Affairs--are still working on draft guidelines. GSA told GAO that it planned on releasing its initial insourcing directive in October.

The Homeland Security Department has identified 3,200 contractor jobs that will be converted to federal positions, according to a senior acquisition official. Tom Mason, director of policy and acquisition workforce at DHS' Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, said DHS currently has 1.1 to 1.2 service contractors for every federal employee.

"This doesn't seem terribly out of line when you look at other places," Mason said at a conference this week. "But if we were to add on the number of contractors that we have providing goods--not services--it gets to be a pretty high number. The question is, are we at DHS properly staffed. We've come to the conclusion that we really aren't."

GAO said that federal agencies are paralyzed about taking action on insourcing because of the uncertainty around government regulations such as how to do cost analyses. Auditors also said agencies need better data to bring jobs in-house instead of continuing to allow them to head out the door.

For more on insourcing jobs:
- see this Federal News Radio article

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