An Obama administration official said last week that some federal agencies had gone too far in using government workers to take over responsibilities from contractors.
Daniel I. Gordon, administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, said he has met with some agencies that misunderstood the government’s new “insourcing” policy and clarified that the administration is seeking only “targeted, limited numbers of positions” to move from the private to the public sector.
“We do not view insourcing as a goal,” he said. “What we were doing is rebalancing our relationship with contractors.”
Several contracting organizations have complained that some agencies were insourcing positions without regard to whether they will save money and improve efficiency, but merely to meet a quota.
Gordon said the government is focusing the conversion of its contracting corps in order to maintain its capacity to oversee and manage federal contracts.
“No corporation would agree to have somebody else running their entire operations,” he said at a breakfast hosted by the Bisnow media company. “There are far too many situations where we have yielded control of our own mission . . . to contractors. That needs to be fixed, but it doesn’t require massive insourcing.”
— By Marjorie Censer – The Washington Post – December 13, 2010
