The American Federation of Government Employees will protest a decision to outsource 300 public works jobs at the U.S. Military Academy to the private sector.

AFGE thinks the award of a cost-reimbursement contract rather than a fixed-price contract was improper, according to Diana Price, a procurement specialist for AFGE. The federal employee team competing for the work was able to provide a clear price for its work and a defined workload, she said.

The Army awarded the West Point maintenance services work March 25 to Ginn Group of Peachtree City, Ga., after conducting a 30-month competition between Army civilian employees and the private sector.

The union plans to file the protest with the Government Accountability Office after an as yet unscheduled Army debriefing on why the employees lost the competition, Price said. Information from the debriefing will likely provide grounds for the protest.

Federal employees won the right to protest competitive sourcing decisions to GAO in January 2008, but employees involved in competitions that began before that time can only protest if there is a problem with the final decision, not the competition process, she said. The Army announced the competition in 2006.

But AFGE thinks the West Point competition was flawed.

It maintains the Army removed janitorial jobs from the competition and didn't provide the public works employees enough time to respond to the change in their bid, Price said. She also contends that the competition overran its statutory 30-month limit because the Army did not account for pre-competition planning, which began in 2002.

"The [competitive sourcing] studies at West Point are the worst examples of government waste I've seen since Walter Reed," said AFGE President John Gage. "This process is broken, and it needs to stop right here and right now."

Outsourcing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is blamed for poor maintenance there, a fact that became the subject of congressional investigation in 2007.

There is no date for the union's West Point debriefing because of an ongoing protest filed by a losing private-sector bidder. The losing firm, Dellew Corp. of Honolulu, Hawaii, filed a protest with the Small Business Administration alleging the winner, Ginn Group, Inc. of Peachtree, Ga., is too big to compete for the work under government contract rules, said Tiffani Clements, an SBA spokeswoman. The competition was set aside for small businesses.

SBA was scheduled to complete the assessment by April 17, but additional time was needed. The case is now expected to be decided by April 24, Clements said.

So far, AFGE has filed 20 protests with GAO under the new protest rules, but has not won any.

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