Call Vet Hospital Woes Typical In Farm-Outs

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS

The president of the National Treasury Employees' Union, one of the largest labor organizations representing Federal employees, last week held up the Walter Reed Army Hospital health-care scandal as an example of the hazards of overly zealous government outsourcing.

COLLEEN M. KELLEY: Breakdowns no surprise.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley issued a statement March 8 denouncing the Bush Administration's partial privatization of the facility, a couple of days after Congress began hearings on the conditions at Walter Reed.

A Nightmare for Vets

The Washington Post first reported in February on a series of problems related to outpatient care and deteriorating infrastructure at the hospital. Soldiers spoke of chronically leaky roofs that caused mold and insect infestation in their rooms, among other problems.

U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, noted in a public statement that when Walter Reed began a public/private competition for maintenance work at the facility, more than 300 employees were performing it. By last month, when the contractor took over the work, fewer than 60 employees remained.

Senator Mikulski was particularly critical of the failure of the Senate while under Republican control to approve a measure that would have prohibited the Army from outsourcing maintenance work at Walter Reed.

Ms. Kelley said the NTEU has launched a new page on its Web site devoted to educating the public about the Federal contracting process.

'Typical in Contracting'

"What happened at Walter Reed is all-too-typical of the results of Federal contracting," she stated.

The NTEU has been battling changes to the Federal rules covering contracting that were issued by the Office of Management and Budget in 2003. The union argues that the new rules strongly favor private-sector companies in their efforts to take over Federal jobs.

The most immediate impact of the 2003 rule that said private- and public-sector workers must compete for jobs, according to Ms. Kelley, is that Federal employees, fearful of losing their positions in an agency reduction-in-force even if Federal workers win the competition, leave in droves. After they're gone, Federal agencies find it virtually impossible to recruit replacements, and the quality of the work suffers.

NTEU has also been critical of the fact that IAP Worldwide Services, the company awarded the maintenance contract at Walter Reed, is the same private contractor that the Internal Revenue Service recently hired to handle some of its filing work.

Consultant Not Up to It

IAP in November issued a statement saying it couldn't perform the work of receiving, filing and maintaining tax returns and related documents under the schedule it had agreed to when it bid on its IRS contract.

That left the IRS, which had given IAP a five-year, $103 million contract, scrambling to fill the positions that just a few months earlier had been held by its own Federal employees.

Ms. Kelley called that one of several Federal contracting "boondoggles" that have taken place under the Bush Administration. She also cited Mellon Bank's recent failure to oversee contractor employees who lost or destroyed tens of thousands of tax documents containing some $1 billion in tax payments as part of the IRS's lockbox program.

IAP: 'We're Committed'

According to a statement released March 7 by a company spokesperson, IAP's contract at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center began Feb. 4 and included maintenance of the building and other infrastructure. IAP didn't provide medical care.

"IAP's personnel and staff have responded with a sense of urgency to address maintenance concerns throughout the complex," the statement read. "IAP's personnel and staff are fully committed to addressing facility maintenance and preservation tasks assigned by the Army."