The Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton announced earlier this week the department will be setting up a program to determine what services could be outsourced to private contractors. This action is seen as partial fulfillment of President Bush's campaign promise to subject federal services and jobs to competition from the private sector in order to cut down on costs. The American Federation of Government Employees has questioned Norton's insistence that cost-cutting and increases in performance are the sole motivations in the decision, and point out that the department does not have in place accurate methods for tracking either decreases in costs or increases in performance.
See "Bush Initiative Has Employees Feeling Exposed at Interior", Stephen Barr, The Washington Post, November 27, 2001