Defense solicits help in marketing competitive sourcing

The Defense Department is enlisting a consulting company's help to plot a fresh strategy for marketing competitive sourcing, the controversial initiative aimed at improving efficiency by allowing contractors to bid on government jobs characterized as commercial in nature.

The Pentagon has solicited proposals from companies interested in designing a comprehensive plan for disbursing accurate information about competitive sourcing, said Joe Sikes, Defense's director of competitive sourcing and privatization, on Tuesday. In part, the company would provide advice on generating positive publicity for the program, he said.

"Success stories" are vital to the Defense Department's efforts to run job competitions following rules in the May 2003 revised version of the Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-76, Sikes said. Lawmakers prevented the Pentagon from holding contests under the modified rules until officials completed a competitive sourcing report.

The department fulfilled that requirement and has announced contests under the revised rules, including several smaller competitions and a standard-sized contest (one involving more than 65 full-time jobs) at the Army Corps of Engineers. In an Aug. 5 internal Defense Department memorandum obtained by Government Executive, Sikes outlined plans for ensuring that these and other contests under the May 2003 Circular run smoothly.

The plans call upon all Defense agencies to obtain permission from Sikes' office before publicly announcing or notifying Congress of A-76 studies, and to allow the Office of the Secretary of Defense to oversee various steps of the contests.

"Increased Office of the Secretary of Defense oversight of the initial public-private competitions [under the May 2003 Circular A-76] is necessary to standardize the new approaches to the revised procedures within the Defense Department, and to ensure successes are achieved in the first set of competitions," Sikes said in the memo.

A communications strategy should also help the agencies within Defense follow the modified A-76 rules consistently and share best practices, Sikes said. He has received 15 or so bids from consulting companies hoping to design the strategy and plans on picking one in several weeks.

By improving communications, Sikes also is hoping to break down resistance in the field to competitive sourcing, a long-standing practice at the Defense Department but one that still proves controversial. "The idea is that A-76 is not received well," he said. "It has a bad reputation sometimes."

The department is hoping to get the word out that the modified A-76 process is "faster and fairer," Sikes said. "As far as I'm concerned, the worst thing that could happen with the new Circular is to have bad things happen. Everybody would assume it's because of the new Circular."

But Jacqueline Simon, public policy director at the 600,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, questioned Sikes' motives. "They've sort of thrown up their hands and [admitted] that they can't defend the indefensible," she said of the Pentagon's plans to seek a consultant's advice.

The strategy outlined in Sikes' Aug. 5 memo also suggests that the Defense Department is trying to centralize communications authority in the Office of the Secretary, ensuring that the press receives a "canned" party-line message extolling the virtues of competitive sourcing, Simon said.

"What it really is, is an attempt to squelch officers or officials on the local level from [telling reporters] about how [competitive sourcing] quotas are wreaking havoc on the department's ability to fulfill its mission," Simon alleged. "In Washington, you can spin it and spin it but when you get out there . . . the people on the local level are speaking the truth."

Simon also noted that communications work is inherently governmental and should not be left to a consultant. But Sikes said that the department is only retaining a consulting company to design a communications strategy for the in-house staff to implement.

Consequently, a line in the Aug. 5 memo stating that the Pentagon is "obtaining the services of a public relations firm in order to publicize our successes and better educate the public on the value of public-private competition" is misleading, Sikes said. Department officials have no intent of outsourcing public relations work, he said.

Agencies undertaking new management initiatives commonly solicit help in forming communications plans, Sikes added.