"We believe in the National Park Service and its values—values which are, of course, all gathered together in the person of the park ranger. People expect rangers to know just about everything, and they usually do. The typical park ranger works as a historian, resource manager, law enforcement officer, curator, teacher—and sometimes paramedic and rescuer."
—Vice President Dick Cheney, April 27, 2001

The Issue

The public has long admired the staff and work of the National Park Service. Yet, the administration's Office of Management & Budget (OMB) and Department of the Interior may hand over to low-bidding private contractors more than half of all jobs in the already understaffed, financially strapped National Park Service, including archaeologists, biologists, museum curators, and maintenance workers. Privatization would adversely impact our national parks and the experiences of millions of park visitors, and would further limit the ethnic diversity of the Park Service workforce.T

The protection of our national parks must be acknowledged as an inherent responsibility of government and Park Service employees recognized as key to the preservation of our national heritage for present and future generations.

Privatization in the Parks

The National Park Service already provides significant opportunities to the private sector where appropriate. The concessions program, which generates annual revenues of $800 million, has long been a private undertaking. More recently, architectural, design, and printing work throughout the National Park System has been and continues to be contracted out. In individual parks, both large and small, superintendents currently make decisions as to what jobs can, and should, be outsourced. Thus, without intervention from political appointees in Washington, D.C., the Park Service has already outsourced positions, when appropriate, while retaining the positions and functions that are key contributors to its core mission to protect the national parks and connect the American public to their history and cultures.

Working in America's national parks is for many park staff more than just a job—it is a calling. Unlike nine-to-five contract workers, park staff frequently goes above and beyond the call of duty because of an extraordinary sense of commitment, which provides an extra benefit to the national parks and park visitors. Contractors with the lowest bid simply cannot replicate the personal dedication, expertise and historical perspective of Park Service staff. In fact, the administration's privatization efforts have already jeopardized the esprit de corps of the Park Service and could undermine its mission.

As Vice President Cheney observed in 2001, "People expect rangers to know just about everything, and they usually do. The typical park ranger works as a historian, resource manager, law enforcement officer, curator, teacher¾and sometimes paramedic and rescuer." In fact, a typical Park Service position does not fall neatly into any single category. The multi-tasking nature of such positions cannot easily be reproduced in a contract mechanism, potentially subjecting the federal government to much higher expenditures of already scarce resources and resulting in a net loss of services.

Unfortunately, it has been the experience of the Department of Defense and other agencies that commercial contracts often end up costing as much or more than government employees. In fact, the National Park Service estimates that bringing in consultants to help run the private-public competitions may cost between $2.5 million and $3 million. This is money that the Park Service does not have, as national parks are already operating, on average, with only two-thirds of the needed funding-a shortfall of more than $600 million annually. The Park Service has even raised the possibility that funding these studies could force parks to reduce the number of seasonal rangers they hire during the summer months-the very people who serve summer visitors-thereby diminishing the experience of the public.

Additionally, privatization threatens to further limit the ethnic diversity of the Park Service workforce since many of the jobs targeted for outsourcing are located in metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Santa Fe, and are held by minorities. The Park Service has made great strides recently in increasing the diversity of park staff; privatization will destroy this momentum at the expense of providing opportunities for the private sector.

Background

Originally established in 1955, and codified by the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act of 1998, the privatization policy described in OMB Circular A-76 was created to ensure that activities performed by the government are as cost-effective and efficient as possible. The policy outlines the procedure for deciding whether commercial activity done by a federal government employee will be contracted out, kept in-house, or performed by a separate government agency.

The term "inherently governmental function" defines a function that is so intimately related to the public interest as to require performance by government employees, and therefore not be subject to A-76. OMB's controversial rewrite of the A-76 Circular, which was made public in December 2002 and may be finalized in May, includes changes that threaten our national parks. The most problematic aspects of the revised Circular are that it:

• Redefines what is included in the definition of an "inherently governmental function" by deleting the provision that includes jobs involving the "regulation of the use of space, oceans, navigable rivers, and other natural resources,"
• Presumes all federal activities are commercial, and subject to contracting, unless an agency can prove otherwise,
• Designates a political appointee to approve or reject a career professional's justification that a particular job is inherently governmental, the key test for whether a job is considered commercial, and
• Requires that all competitions be completed within one year.

Congressional Action on Privatization

Senator Harry Reid (D-N.V.) and Representative Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) introduced the Park Professionals Protection Act in the 108th Congress to prohibit the Department of Interior from studying for implementing any plan to privatize, divest, or transfer any part of the National Park Service, and would reallocate outsourcing study funds toward the operations and maintenance accounts of the Park Service.

Additionally, the U.S. House of Representatives preserved bi-partisan language in section 335 of H.R. 2691, the Fiscal Year 2004 Interior Appropriations bill, that stops the administration's plan to privatize government agencies under the Department of Interior, including the Park Service, until Congress could develop a better understanding of the costs and consequences of the administration's privatization plan. Proponents of a motion to strike the language from the bill withdrew their amendment as it became clear that they would likely lose a vote because of significant bi-partisan concern about the administration's plan.

The more narrow Bereuter/Boyd amendment, which prevents funds in the Interior Appropriations bill from being used to implement privatization studies at the Midwest Archaeological Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, or the Southeast Archaeological Center in Florida, overwhelmingly passed the House with a vote of 362 to 57.

Floor action in the Senate will likely occur in late September. Senator Reid plans to introduce an amendment to the Interior Appropriations bill that would mirror the language in the House version of the bill to protect Park Service staff from the administration's privatization mandate.

NPCA's Position

The administration's privatization juggernaut jeopardizes the National Park Service and the national parks. As proposed, OMB's rewrite of A-76 threatens, in the name of privatizing government, to undermine the ability of the strongly committed, mission-focused National Park Service staff to continue to adequately protect the nearly 400 park units. Our national heritage and the experiences of nearly 300 million visitors annually are being put at risk.

The National Parks Conservation Association strongly supports the bi-partisan provision passed by the U.S. House of Representatives to delay for one year the administration's privatization proposal for the national parks and other land management agencies. OMB must recognize national park protection as an inherent responsibility of the government, and leave park superintendents, not political appointees, with the latitude to make staffing decisions that best serve the protection mission of the national parks. This will ensure that staffing decisions are driven by what is in the best interests of the national parks, rather than by the political process.

For Additional Information:
Please contact NPCA's Vice-President for Government Affairs, Craig Obey, at 202-223-6722, extension 234 with any questions.