The Defense Department and several other major agencies Thursday issued lists of jobs that could be outsourced, pushing the tally of federal jobs that could be performed in the private sector above 850,000.
The Defense Department's list identifies 504,000 civilian jobs that could be performed by contractors, but only 308,000 have been identified as potential candidates for outsourcing in the near future, according to the Pentagon. The Veterans Affairs Department listed 187,000 jobs that could be contracted out, while the Justice Department identified 4,300.
The 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act required agencies to develop the lists as a means of determining how many federal employees' jobs are inherently governmental and how many could be contracted out. Agencies must update the lists annually and give contractors and employees the opportunity to challenge designations of jobs.
At agencies that released their FAIR Act inventories in October and November, contractors have challenged the exclusion of thousands of jobs from the outsourcing lists, while federal employee unions have challenged the inclusion of certain jobs on the lists.
With the release Thursday of 21 agencies' FAIR Act lists, the first round of the act's requirements is complete. In all, 115 federal organizations released lists. While several major agencies' lists-including the Transportation and Treasury Departments-could not be obtained Thursday morning, the total number of federal jobs on the FAIR Act lists has surpassed 850,000. According to the fiscal 2000 budget, the government employed an estimated 1.8 million civilians in 1999.
See all the FAIR Act lists in GovExec.com's FAIR Act Report.
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