AFGE Applauds Sen. Mikulski's Clean Up Act

Federal Union Praises Efforts to Clean Up the Mess that is Federal Procurement

WASHINGTON, April 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, the American Federation
of Government Employees, AFGE, applauds Senator Barbara Mikulski's (D-MD)
introduction of The CLEAN UP Act, a bill that would help to clean up the mess
that the previous administration left behind in federal procurement.

The acronym CLEAN UP stands for Correction of Long-standing Errors in Agencies
Unsustainable Procurement. The legislation builds on the provisions signed
into law as part of the recent FY09 Omnibus Appropriations Act, which
indefinitely suspended the now notorious OMB Circular A-76 privatization
process and required all agencies to establish and implement the same
insourcing policies for new work and outsourced work that became law for the
Department of Defense through the FY08 Defense Authorization Bill.

"The CLEAN UP Act would go a long way towards making the federal procurement
process more accountable to taxpayers and all of the American people who
depend on the government for important services," declared John Gage, AFGE
national president.

"Senator Mikulski's bill would ensure that agencies follow through on the
statutory requirement to start insourcing new functions instead of giving them
to the usual sole-source contractors," continued Gage. "The CLEAN UP Act
would require agencies to return to in-house performance functions that are
inherently governmental, closely related to inherently governmental, and
mission essential, but which had been wrongly contracted out during the
previous administration's wholesale privatization crusade. The legislation
would require agencies to determine where they are experiencing shortages of
federal employees and to develop strategies to correct these deficiencies.
The CLEAN UP Act would also require agencies to establish inventories of
service contracts so they can determine which ones should be eliminated or
insourced."

"The bill calls on the Obama administration to correct problems in the Office
of Management and Budget's privatization process that have been identified by
the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Defense Inspector
General, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO), and
others, before again using the A-76 circular," concluded Gage.

AFGE is the largest federal employee union representing 600,000 workers in the
federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.

SOURCE American Federation of Government Employees

Michael Victorian of American Federation of Government Employees,
+1-202-639-6405