Official Says Administration Was Outfoxed on Outsourcing

[kskiska]

The federal government's management guru admits the administration blew it last week.

The White House was unprepared Tuesday when Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) attached language to a House spending bill that would crimp President Bush's efforts to force federal workers to compete with the private sector for their jobs, said Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget.

"We were not aware the Van Hollen amendment was coming up -- shame on us," Johnson said in an interview Friday.

The amendment, pushed by federal employee unions, would require the OMB to toss out newly revised regulations governing competitions between federal and private workers and return to older rules that the White House says are too cumbersome. No equivalent language exists in the Senate, although some lawmakers want it.

Johnson said the administration could have defeated the Van Hollen measure "if we had had less than 30 minutes to hustle up the information." Should the provision make it through Congress, he said, "I would recommend that the president veto it."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10237-2003Sep14.html