U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

I am a Federal employee and have worked as a Contracting Officer's Technical Representative on IT contracts. While I agree that in many cases we want continuity of employees when a contract changes hands, there are cases where the reason the contract changes hands is because the government wants different people performing the work. If a group of contract employees has been providing marginal or sub-standard service, the last thing we want is to force the new Contractor to hire the same slackers. Better would be to allow the government to identify any key contract employees we'd like to keep and recommend those people (anonymously) to the new Contractor. It makes no sense to me to make offering right of first refusal mandatory for a new Contractor. While we have an interest and should have some control over who our Contractors provide for our contracts, we should not be dictating how our Contractors manage their workforce. I believe I understand the intent of the order: reduce disruption in the fraction of the job market associated with providing services to the government. The issue is whether or not preventing workforce disruptions are more important than getting best value services from our contracts. That's not my call, but I do know which one is more important to me as a provider of government services. Please don't tie my hands, or those of any other Federal manager. If a contract employee is worth keeping, we make sure the new Contractor knows that. But if we're replacing the Contractor because the employees are idiots please don't force the new Contractor to rehire them and perpetuate the disfunction. Thank you for your consideration.