OMB issues new guidance on job competitions

The Office of Management and Budget revised its guidance on which jobs are considered so essential to government that they cannot be outsourced.

The guidance has been fairly consistent for the past decade, but the latest revision gives agencies the option to exclude from competitions jobs performed by disabled workers. The prospect of disabled workers, who are often hired because the government has goals for their recruitment and employment, being forced to compete for jobs against nondisabled contractors has outraged some advocates of the disabled community.

Last October, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., introduced a bill to protect the jobs of disabled workers, which Congress is still considering. OMB said it will release a more detailed memo on how agencies should handle potential job competitions with disabled workers at an unspecified future date.

"We view it as helpful, but do have concerns with how it is going to be implemented," said Julie Ward, director of employment and transportation policy at the Arc and United Cerebral Palsy Disability Policy Collaboration, a Washington-based organization that advocates on behalf of the disabled community.

She was also concerned that leaving so much discretion up to each agency would make implementation difficult.

Diana Price, a procurement specialist for American Federation of Government Employees, said while she was pleased OMB "has taken a small step toward protecting disabled federal employees," there are still problems with the guidance.

"Giving agency officials the power to make up their own definitions and classify federal employees based upon only select portions of the work they do politicizes the process by allowing agencies to target particular employees," she said.

The inventory guidance, which the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act requires OMB to issue annually, informs agencies which jobs should be considered "inherently governmental" and which should be considered "commercial." Jobs that are considered inherently governmental are considered "so intimately related to the public interest" that they must be performed by government employees, according to a 1992 OMB policy letter.

The definitions leave a lot of room for debate. "There's a huge gray area," said Allan Burman, president of the federal arm of Jefferson Consulting Group and former head of OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Burman drafted the 1992 guidance, which was the first time the definitions were explored so thoroughly.

The Arc and United Cerebral Palsy Disability Policy Collaboration, along with other groups representing disabled workers, wrote a letter to OMB Tuesday expressing concern that competitive sourcing initiatives hurt disabled workers, and asked that they be exempted from job competitions.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that between fiscal 1999 and 2003, the percentage of federal employees with targeted disabilities, which includes severely disabled workers, fell by 7.5 percent, to 25,500 workers. The number of employees with mental retardation fell by 21 percent.

The reason for the drop is not clear, but one potential explanation could be that disabled workers now have more employment options and as a result fewer work for the federal government.

A spokeswoman from Van Hollen's office said he hasn't decided whether to continue pushing his bill, and that he will monitor the situation and make sure OMB follows though on its new guidance.

OMB also said it was developing a database to track job classifications and expects it to be ready in 2006.