Army Corps employees win public-private competition for IT work
Award could still result in job loss, as the in-house proposal involves teaming with a contractor.
The Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday announced that an in-house team won a public-private competition for about 1,100 information management and technology jobs. Details of the winning bid were not made public, but loss of some jobs is considered likely.
The award comes two years after the start of the competition, carried out under the Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-76 rules, and ends delays stemming from two internal Army reviews conducted after the agency reached a preliminary decision.
According to Wednesday's announcement, one private sector offer competed with the agency's "most efficient organization" team, which proposed reorganizing the work. The winning team offered to complete the work for $447.3 million during a one-year phase-in period, one year of operations and four one-year option periods.
Gordon Taxer, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 97, an AFL-CIO affiliate, said the in-house bid proposed a collaboration between federal employees and a contractor. Later in the day Wednesday, Lockheed Martin announced it was the partnering company.
"We are excited about our partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," said Linda Gooden, president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology. "Our combination of Corps operational knowledge and Lockheed Martin best practices is a solution designed for mission success."
Details of the proposed collaboration, including the balance of federal and contract employees, have not been announced, but Taxer said reductions in the workforce were likely.
George Halford, a spokesman for the Army Corps, was not aware that details of the employee bid were publicly available, and could not confirm whether a contractor was part of the plan.
According to a Web site hosted by the Army Corps, the agency's in-house bid involves an unusual setup in which employees would be selectively hired into the new organization based on "competitive reassignment," as well as through a priority placement system that includes other Corps employees.
This would make employees performing jobs other than those encompassed in the competition eligible for positions in the restructured organization, change how preferences based on criteria such as veterans status and years-in-service are taken into account, and limit the positions available for reassignment.
Management will "get to handpick who they want without regard to others who may be better qualified, or may be a higher priority in the RIF process," Taxer said.
Halford, the Corps spokesman, said the plan "matches jobs to people and skill sets, as opposed to placing people based on seniority and the criteria that are under a RIF."
"The easiest way to think of it is a hiring process, where you have the jobs and people go apply to them by priority placement and submitting their résumés," Halford added. "It's a pull system, as opposed to a push system."
At town hall meetings held nationwide Wednesday to inform employees of the competition result, Army Corps officials laid out the next steps. The losing bidder has until mid-July to decide whether to file a protest of the award decision with the Government Accountability Office. If that deadline passes without a protest, the Army Corps will announce the final award decision and publish details of the plan; a protest would extend the time before full details are released.
When this competition began, it was described as encompassing 1,350 jobs at 45 locations, making it the largest public-private competition held by the Defense Department under a 2003 revision to the A-76 rules. In May, an Army Corps official said a hiring freeze and attrition have brought the number of affected employees to about 1,100.