February 15, 2006
Memorandum
To:
Chantel Boyens, Budget Examiner
Treasury Branch, Office of Management and Budget
From:
Anthony P. Scardino
FEC Deputy Staff Director for Management
Subject:
Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act Inventory for FY 2005
Attached is the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) FY 2005 inventory of commercial activities and inherently governmental positions, as required under the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act of 1998.
Summary
The FEC is a small regulatory agency, authorized at 391 FTE, whose essential mission is inherently federal and governmental: the regulation and enforcement of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), and the disclosure of campaign finance information required by the FECA to be filed and made available to the public. As a personnel-intensive regulatory agency, the Commission has one annual appropriation for salaries and expenses, of which roughly 70 percent is allocated to salaries and benefits for direct personnel costs.
As a result, the majority of our programs and activities are inherently governmental in nature, and involve the policy decisions inherent in regulating the campaign finance disclosure process, which are critical to the electoral process. There is a legitimate concern about injecting private control of functions that relate to the disclosure and regulation of campaign finance and ultimately to the election of federal officials.
Most of those functions identified in the original OMB guidance as lending themselves to commercial activity have already been outsourced. The FEC currently procures external support to augment the work of existing staff for the following four functions:
(1) Hosting Services for our e-mail, public disclosure data base and FEC Home Page;
(2) Data entry services to augment our staff tasked with data entry functions;
(3) Support for electronic filing (E-filing) help desk functions and E-filing software maintenance support; and
(4) Miscellaneous software development support to assist us in building new systems.
Additionally, in the area of administrative support, the FEC continues to rely upon the National Finance Center for our payroll processing.
The FEC believes that operations have been competitively sourced out for bidding by private vendors where possible and feasible. In many cases, the small scale of operations at the FEC argues against contracting out for services or functions. In most cases, including the functions cited above, the work involved is well below the 10 FTE floor commonly used to determine if an A-76 analysis would be cost effective to decide if a function should be contracted out. Furthermore, most FEC support staff is engaged in managing operations as well as performing the every day workload, and consistently makes policy decisions in the every day course of their activities. As such, the staff involved is inherently governmental under the definitions in accordance with either Appendix A to OFFP Policy Letter 92-1, or Appendix B to that letter.
As you will note, the attached FAIR Act inventory for the FEC for FY 2005 is similar to inventories submitted in previous years, as there has been no change in the FEC mission or FEC staffing needs that impact the inventory of commercial activities.
FEC Contacts
Anthony P. Scardino
Deputy Staff Director for Management
Room 819I
999 E Street, NW
Washington DC 20463
202-694-1215
Cheryl Kelley
Director, Office of Budget, Planning & Management
Room 819G
999 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20463
202-694-1225
Attachments
The documents with extension .xls may be open using EXCEL from Microsoft. The documents with extension .doc may be opened using WORD from Microsoft.
