National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. SARBANES. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this amendment, and I want to thank the cosponsors: Representatives Hanabusa, Langevin, Loebsack, and Reyes.

This amendment is designed to preserve current law with respect to the service contracts and outsourcing activity of the Department of Defense.

Current law now has in place a requirement that before the Department of Defense can do more outsourcing, can do more privatization of service contracts, they have to do an inventory of the contracting activity that's already in place. And this makes perfect sense. This is really a good government proposition if you think about it. It's important enough that it was included in the 2010 Defense Authorization Act; so it is part of current law.

Unfortunately, the proposed bill, the new Defense Authorization Act, would remove this requirement. And if you remove that requirement, you're really undermining the public's stake in making sure that government is functioning in an efficient manner.

Now, the impetus for having this kind of requirement in place--and the amendment that we're putting forward here today would maintain the requirement that's currently in law--the impetus came from a lot of research that showed that in many instances the costs to the government and, therefore, to the taxpayer of outsourcing these various services of the Federal Government, particularly within the Department of Defense that this is directed at, the costs did not justify the activity, and in many instances you didn't get better performance when you had this outsourcing. In fact, you got worse performance.

So when those studies were done and that research was done, there was a move to make sure that the Department of Defense would conduct an inventory. The current law says that no further contracting can occur until the Secretary has certified to Congress that a contractor inventory has been developed, reviewed, and integrated into the budget process. That makes a lot of sense. Our amendment would restore this provision and therefore keep current law in place with respect to this contracting activity and inventory.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SARBANES. Well, I couldn't agree with what my colleague said more. I mean, we do want to have a balanced approach. Nobody's arguing--certainly I'm not arguing that we should eliminate outsourcing or the privatization of certain services where that makes sense. In fact, what the amendment that we're proposing here would do is keep in law a process whereby the Department of Defense looks at its contracting activities through a commonsense lens and determines whether continued outsourcing in some instances makes sense, whether additional outsourcing makes sense.

Right now, there does not exist a comprehensive inventory of these contracting activities, so how are you going to make a commonsense judgment about where to allocate your resources going forward if you don't have that at your disposal? That's why the requirement was put in place. I think it's very bipartisan in that sense because it's saying let's get as much knowledge as we can so the government can run efficiently and make these decisions in an efficient way, which is very much in keeping with what the public wants to see these days.

So this is about good government. It's about having good information at your fingertips.

We think that the requirement to do this kind of inventory ought to stay in place. The underlying bill right now would remove that commonsense requirement, and this amendment would put it back. That is why we are putting forward the amendment today.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SARBANES. In closing, let me just say in support of this amendment that I am not on the House Armed Services Committee, but what I understand is the report that was approved last week by the committee criticized the Department of Defense for failing to inventory service contracts, which is what we are trying to accomplish here. That is why we are supporting this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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