BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SARBANES. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This amendment, amendment number 47, I believe, in the queue, would bring standards of good government and good government practice to procurement across the Federal agencies. What it does, in fact, is it takes a set of standards that has been put in place already with respect to the Department of Defense as a result of the DOD authorization bill of 2008, as well as standards that were built into appropriations bills applying to other agencies over the last couple of years, and it makes it clear that those are going to be authorized standards going forward to apply to non-DOD agencies as well now as to DOD agencies.
As many people know, over the last few years, the impulse to contract services out on the part of the Federal Government went too far. And in fact, studies have demonstrated that, for example, the Department of Defense's service contractor workforce grew from 732,000 in 2000 to 1.3 million in 2006, a huge increase. And this kind of phenomenon was not limited to the Department of Defense. We saw it in other agencies--the Department of Homeland Security and other places across the Federal workforce.
Secretary Gates, recognizing that things have gone too far in this direction, is looking for a better balance and has already declared that DOD will examine this reliance on contractors and begin to bring more of a balance back into the equation. So what this amendment would do is take that same approach, those same standards and apply them across the board to non-DOD agencies.
It includes a number of provisions. Very briefly, I will go over those.
The first is it would close a loophole that allowed certain work performed by Federal employees to be contracted out without determining whether in fact that would result in any savings. Well, that's the kind of analysis that needs to be done. And so we would close that loophole.
It would create a contractor inventory. Right now we don't really have a sense of which contracts are out there, what kind of outsourcing has been done. We need to get a handle on that, have an inventory, so we can make better decisions and informed judgements going forward.
It would also seek to bring some analysis as to when it's appropriate to bring back in-house some of these functions and operations that have been outsourced according to very reasonable and rational standards.
And the last thing it would do is improve oversight and transparency. It would prevent any agency from establishing arbitrary quotas or targets or numerical goals with respect to what should be outsourced or not. In other words, what this seeks to do is bring a rational analysis back to whether something should be outsourced or not outsourced. It doesn't try to tilt the presumption in one direction or another. It just says let's look at this on a careful basis and determine when it makes sense, when it can generate savings, when it's a good thing for the Federal Government to do, and when it may not be such a good thing to do.
So I urge support of this amendment because I do believe it will bring commonsense good government provisions back into the mix and will make those permanent for all government agencies across the board.
I reserve the balance of my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT