Senator asks federal CIO to resolve USAJobs crisis
With the USAJobs website technical problems extending into a third week, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts is calling on Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel to get involved.
As the technical problems plaguing the new USAJobs website continue into a third week, Sen. John Kerry ( D-Mass.), called on Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel to intervene and to consider putting the website operation out for competitive bid.
The federal job search Web portal, which is the third version of the site, was launched on Oct. 11 after the Office of Personnel Management spent 18 months developing it in-house. Since the debut, the agency has been addressing thousands of user complaints about operation of the site.
In a letter on Oct. 26, Kerry asked VanRoekel to “intervene, investigate and resolve the problems with USAJOBS as soon as possible.”
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“Since OPM took over and re-launched the USAJOBS site two weeks ago, agencies and job seekers have encountered great difficulties, facing repeated outages and numerous glitches,” Kerry wrote in the letter.
“Disgruntled constituents have used Facebook and the media to express their frustration. These breakdowns again raise real questions about the decision to take this operation in-house, and in light of the poor transition and launch, I am renewing the recommendation for the Administration to seek a vendor through a competitive bidding process to manage this service,” added Kerry, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.
From 2004 to September 2011, OPM contracted with Monster.com, based in Maynard, Mass. to operate the USAJobs website. Kerry said he previously had recommended in a letter to OPM Director John Berry in August 2010 against insourcing USAJobs and advised maintaining it as a competitively-bid contract.
Kerry, in his letter to VanRoekel, acknowledged that Monster.com is headquartered in his state, but he said his concerns were not merely parochial.
“While Massachusetts remains very proud of Monster.com, this is a bigger issue than a single constituent concern,” Kerry wrote. “There are many commercial firms with expertise and experience far beyond the federal government in designing and successfully managing online job websites and any number of them is better equipped to manage this service than the government.”
Kerry also questioned OPM’s decision to insource USAJobs and to raise fees paid by federal agencies to OPM for its operation by 19 percent this year. OPM officials previously have said that moving the system inhouse would save the federal government $5 million over five years.
“While OPM has assured me that its decision to a government owned and operated system would save us money, at a time when Congress and the Administration are focused on decreasing spending, OPM is imposing a 19 percent increase in fees charged to federal agencies using the site. It seems to me that if it was going to cost less to operate the service, then the fees to agencies should not be going up,” Kerry wrote.
Angela Bailey, associate administrator of OPM, previously had offered additional details about the cost of USAJobs, saying the fiscal 2011 cost for development of the 3.0 version was about $6 million, about the same as what was paid to Monster.com.
“The cost savings to the agencies by bringing the site in-house is a projected $5 million cost savings over a five year period,” Bailey said in a statement. Furthermore, asked about the costs of additional servers and personnel time to fix problems associated with the launch, Bailey said federal agencies “will not bear the cost of additional servers or other costs associated with the launch.”
Options for resolving the immediate problems with USAJobs might include asking federal agencies to post jobs on their own websites, taking USAJobs offline or utilizing private job search boards during an interim period, industry sources have suggested. OPM has said that reverting to the 2.0 version on the Monster.com servers is not possible because too much computer code has been rewritten.