DoD gives vendors 20-day notice of insourcing of jobs

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DoD gives vendors 20-day notice of insourcing of jobs

A new interim rule implements a provision of the 2012 Defense Authorization Act requiring the Pentagon to tell vendors before pulling contractor positions back into...

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

October 31, 2013 2:22 pm

1 min read

The Defense Department will give vendors a 20-day notice if it plans to insource the contract the company is working on.

DoD issued an interim rule with a request for comments in today’s Federal Register implementing section 938 of the fiscal 2012 Defense Authorization Act.

“The notification will summarize why the services are being insourced and must be coordinated with the component’s insourcing program official,” the interim rule stated. “A copy of the notification will be provided to the congressional Defense committees.”

DoD also issued a policy in January to implement the provision in the law. It detailed three justifications for insourcing positions:

If the jobs are considered inherently governmental functions.
If the positions work closely with inherently governmental functions and that are critical in nature.
If the decisions are solely based on cost savings based on a cost-analysis.

The change the Defense Acquisition Regulations System is in response to DoD’s initial push in 2009 to bring jobs back in-house from contractors.

The Government Accountability Office found in February 2012 DoD brought only 17,000 positions back in house in 2011. The Army accounted for 42 percent of those positions.

DoD eventually slowed down the insourcing of jobs as it found the savings didn’t materialize like some initially predicted.

GAO issued a recent report in September where it found DoD has improved its cost estimating methodology, but still fell short in how they estimated the cost of training and did not include the reserve or national guard components.

Army puts brakes on insourcing