The White House's Office of Management and Budget Circular No. A-76 (Revised), will be published on Friday in the Federal Register. This will open 850,000 federal government jobs to private sector competition. This means firing half the federal workforce. This includes all government work deemed a "commercial activity," from secretarial duties to building and grounds maintenance.

This is no ordinary outsourcing. The institutional values of public service are fundamentally different than business. Fairness, integrity, patriotism, accountability and the public trust inform day-to-day behavior. Affect how we feel about government workers.

Privatizing is an end run against work rules. Rules that protect these values and our workers. We've learned from a history of bribery, cover ups, shredding, abuses of power, kickbacks, nepotism, political bias, corruption, punitive personnel actions, incompetence, hazardous work places, unpaid overtime, compromised quality, sexual harrassment, sexual discrimination, racial discrimination, monopoly. Bush considers the rules that protect the American people and the federal workforce "bureaucratic," an interference in absolute executive power.    

This is a Republican attack on these values and these lessons. An attack on civil service. An attack on worker rights. An attack on unions. An attack on the people served. How we deliver services can be as important as what we deliver.

It can be OK to outsource. But slashing budgets and low-cost bids don't assure service innovation, service quality, service delivery, and service fairness.

Dubya and Cheney are abdicating management responsibility. If you have a problem, don't pass the buck. Fix it.

Madeleine Begun Kane:

"Privatize This!"   A good friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, has come up with a fun, clever challenge he/she calls "Privatize This." It relates to the Bush Administration's latest union-busting effort -- its plan to privatize about half of the federal workforce by "contracting out" 850,000 jobs.

Here's my friend's challenge:

As good Americans, we can help this effort by proposing private firms that might perform various public functions. Here are my public/private suggestions:

• EPA's hazardous waste cleanup could be contracted to Proctor & Gamble, maker of Bounty, the "Quicker Picker Upper"
• IRS tax collection work could be performed by The Mob
• The staff of the White House could be replaced by the cast of NBC's West Wing

Let's have your suggestions ... if the Administration is taking comments, I'll submit our collective suggestions as a comment on this privatization proposal (as my own private citizen comment, without identifying individual submitters).

Why am I telling you this? So you can rise to the challenge, of course. Please email me your creative suggestions. I'll send them on to my friend to use anonymously, as indicated, and I'll also post the best ones here. Please send them to me at madkane@madkane.com with "Privatize This" in the subject line. And let me know if/how you'd like to be credited on my site (with your name and/or website link, etc.) I can't wait to read your suggestions!

How much of this is pushing retirement obligations from the government to the privatized workers? Getting obligations off the books?

This changes the federal government's competition for workers with the private sector. As boomers retire in the next five years, many of these jobs will be filled indirectly (via contractors) instead of as direct hires. I'm not yet sure of the long term consequences.

[a klog apart Shrubbery]