The Bush Administration has threatened to privatize at least 850,000 federal jobs - roughly one-half of the federal workforce. The Administration's outsourcing effort, known as the competitive sourcing initiative, would favor contractors, limit federal workers' ability to compete for jobs, hobble federal agencies, and raise questions about accountability - all without necessarily saving money.

The privatization proposal is the latest Bush Administration attack on American workers. President Bush's labor policy doesn't work for American workers. Since the start of his Administration, President Bush has turned his back on workers and taken every opportunity to undermine workers' rights and safety.

Since President Bush took office, the number of Americans out of work has increased by 50 percent, to 8.9 million. Over this same period, 3.3 million private-sector jobs have been lost, including 93,000 in August. The unemployment rate now stands at 6.1 percent - and almost two million Americans have been searching for work for more than six months.

With the stagnant economy already battering American families, President Bush has proposed to abolish the right to overtime pay for more than eight million American workers, a move that would slash take-home pay and remove the protection against excessive work hours.

The claims that privatization will save money are deceiving. The initial savings from privatization is often lost when contractors increase their prices over time. The OMB is unable to forecast any budgetary savings from the Administration's plan to privatize more than half of the federal workforce.

Privatization is one-sided and unfair. For nearly three decades, the government has had a policy that required public-private competition before the jobs of federal employees could be outsourced to private firms, and these public-private competitions have been decided on the basis of who could provide quality products and services at the lowest cost to taxpayers.

The Bush Administration's proposal is designed to benefit private contractors. Most of the private contractors would be selected without competitive bidding. The proposal would allow political appointees and managers to decide the winners of public-private competitions on the basis of subjective factors and award government contracts to firms whose bids are both more costly and less responsive than the bids of in-house, unionized federal employees.

Privatization is costly. At a time when our nation is struggling with huge deficits and critical programs are being cut, it makes little sense to spend money on outsourcing federal jobs. Congress has not appropriated money to implement privatization. Therefore, hundreds of millions of dollars for outsourcing reviews are being taken from operational budgets. For example, National Park Service Director Fran Mainella wrote in an internal memo earlier this year that outsourcing review costs would force cutbacks in services. The Forest Service is spending about $100 million on outsourcing reviews, ten times more than it publicly claimed.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent $7 million to hire contractors to help conduct the outsourcing process, primarily because the agency has little experience in outsourcing. The $7 million came out of NIH's overall budget, reducing funds available for cutting edge medical research to combat diseases like cancer and AIDS, as well as research that protects Americans against biological threats. The NIH also diverted employees to the outsourcing project, spending 114,000 hours of staff time.

Outsourcing reverses the progress we have made in diversifying the federal workforce. It is important for the federal government's workforce to reflect the diversity of our nation. The Administration's proposal threatens to reverse the gains of the past 30 years to diversify the federal workforce. The privatization of government jobs has been shown to have a disproportionately negative impact on female and minority workers. Women and minorities not only make up a larger share of the federal workforce than of the workforce at large, they are also more prominently represented in the ranks of professional, managerial, and technical positions in the public sector than in the private sector.