Forest Service Unions Try To Stop Privatizing; Say Bush is 'Wasting Public's Money' Over Ideology

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS

BILL DOUGAN: Plan endangers forests.

Rangers and other Forest Service employees working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture are heading to Congress this week in an attempt to stymie an ongoing privatization push by the Bush Administration.

They want lawmakers to enforce a measure passed two years ago that caps how much Federal agencies can spend annually on studies that pit privateand public-sector workers against each other in competition for government jobs.

15,000 Jobs at Risk

USDA Forest Service employees learned late last month that 15,000 of the agency's 34,000 positions were going to be put through the competition process - known internally as an A-76 - in which the Federal government assesses whether outside contractors can perform job tasks for less money.

Nine thousand other Forest Service job titles were already put through an A-76 process, according to Bill Dougan, Forest Service Council President for the National Federation of Federal Employees.

He said the agency spent $100 million doing competition studies over the past three years - $30 million more than it had allocated - without being able to prove that it would save money by outsourcing work to contractors.

RICK BROWN: Administration stacking deck.

Capital to conduct more studies would likely come from diverting funds from resource management projects, he said, particularly clearing National Forest land of wildfire-causing fuel.

'A Dangerous Toll'

"Studying this many positions would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and there is no fat in the Forest Service budget to absorb this kind of an expense," Mr. Dougan charged. "This could cause a dangerous deterioration of our National Forests."

The Forest Service, like most other Federal agencies, is comprised of commercial and non-commercial titles - the latter are managerial in nature and can't be outsourced. The former have traditionally been filled with civil servants employed by the government, but more and more, the Bush Administration is opening them up as contracted positions.

"A-76's have been around for quite a while. It's a tremendously complex and drawn-out process," said Rick Brown, president of NFFE. "And we've seen that Federal employees, given a level playing field, still offer a very efficient and high-quality level of work, giving taxpayers the best value for their dollar."

Tilted Toward 'Privates'

Mr. Brown said recent rule changes in the A-76 process have allowed contractors to appeal the results every time a Federal employee wins a competition.

"And as we won more and more, the rules to appeal got easier and easier, but there's still no rule in place that allows Federal employees to appeal an outcome if they don't win a competition," he pointed out. "These were jobs that were considered life-time careers on behalf of the American public, and they're now on behalf of the highest bidder."

Heidi Valetkevitch, a spokeswoman for the USDA Forest Service, said the agency couldn't release the details of its "Green Plan," the internal name given to the A76 schedule, because "it was a working document that is changing," but that it would be posted on the USDA Web site once it was finalized.

She added that the agency has conducted 171 outsourcing studies since 2002, and 162 of the surveyed positions stayed within the Forest Service.

"Ninety-five percent of all full-time employees have remained in-house," she stressed.

The Forest Service isn't the only agency battling privatization efforts by the Bush Administration, which has been aggressively calling for cuts in staffing and a reduction in costs across the board.

Weakening Job Rights

The administration created a new personnel system to be implemented in the Department of Defense and several other key agencies - it would alter existing Federal regulations on the hiring, firing and promoting of employees, as well as link salary hikes to performance instead of seniority.

The NFFE, the National Treasury Employees Union, and seven other national labor organizations challenged the new personnel system in the courts and succeeded in holding off its implementation - at least temporarily - after a Federal judge ruled last fall that some of the proposed changes would illegally nullify the workers' collective bargaining rights. That ruling is being appealed as the Bush Administration continues to push its implementation plans ahead.

Mr. Brown added that he hasn't yet seen any cost prospectus on the training and implementation of the new personnel system. "I've asked for it, but it's like that data's just gone missing," he said. "By our conservative estimate, training managers and implementing a new personnel system would cost several billion dollars - and that's without even knowing for sure that the new system would eventually lower costs. So much of this is a waste of American taxpayer money."

Fear Weakened Agency

The Forest Service, like the Bureau of Land Management, has already lost many civil service positions to contract employees. Road maintenance, fleet maintenance and some fire suppression jobs are done by outside hires - and the jobs being surveyed now for competition range from information technology positions to departmental human resource posts.

The threat of continued privatization within the agency has triggered alarm bells among many watchdog and environmental groups, who fear a cut-back of whistleblower-protected civil servants could end up affecting endangered species and delicate ecosystems that exist in America's protected national parks and forests.

Union officials and advocacy groups have noted that several Federal agencies in recent years have suppressed scientific findings that ran counter to Bush Administration policies. The Environmental Protection Agency was slammed for altering or withholding facts in a report that said global warming was only a "theory." A member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stepped down after a type of birth control pill widely available in Europe was once again withheld on the grounds that it wasn't safe. And Fish and Wildlife Service officials admitted last year that the agency had engaged in scientific fraud that allowed developers to eat up too much of the land designated as "critical protected habitat" for endangered Florida panthers, now considered a "not-recoverable" species.

Fire Whistleblower

"That information actually first came out because a biologist in Fish and Wildlife blew the whistle on the flawed data his managers were using," said Jeff Ruch, director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group that protects whistleblowers. "He was fired the next day, but eventually we were able to get his job back."

Putting contract hires into positions traditionally held by civil servants would create a work force with fewer rights, Mr. Ruch said. He pointed to areas where the U.S. Government does a lot of its work with contractors - notably the no-bid contracts for rebuilding Iraq with Halliburton that have resulted in massive cost overruns - as "seabeds" for scandal after scandal.

"The work of the government is the people's business - and civil servants are employed by the American public," Mr. Ruch said. "When they blow the whistle, it's really them talking to their true employers."