One fear with the initial OMB proposal was that executive branch agencies, released from requirements to use GPO for procurement, would start pumping work into their own in-plants—or even create new in-plants. Printing Industries of America was especially concerned about this potential loss of work to the commercial printing industry.
So OMB addressed this in its new Federal Acquisition Regulations. A provision requires agencies to use the private sector unless they determine the in-plant offers the best combination of price, quality and service, taking into account all in-plant costs.
This provision was a main reason PIA swung from opposing to praising the OMB proposal."We're tired of losing contracting opportunities," says Cooper, who not only wants the government to stop creating new in-plants but to shut down the existing ones. "We think that any large enterprise needs some copy capacity, but we do not think that there's much justification for printing facilities or using digital printing for copy services," he says. "We've had federal agencies that have bought so much equipment that it exceeds all the needs of their agency, and so they advertise for other agencies to send them their work. That, to me, is a misuse of taxpayer money."
GPO's Andy Sherman agrees. "Agencies are fertile grounds for sales of equipment manufacturers," he says. "Once you buy these things you've got to keep them running. When there's only a limited amount of work available, you'll start pulling stuff out of the procurement stream."
Still, he doesn't think OMB's idea of asking agencies to consider all in-plant costs will work.
"Full cost accounting is very foreign to most federal agencies," he says. "Is OMB going to go in and monitor the cost of every job to make sure that full cost has been done?" He predicts work will continue to flow to these in-plants.
All this begs the question: Should these government in-plants be supported by the in-plant community?
If in-plants are truly not saving their parent organizations money—and are in fact costing them money—then there's no justification for keeping them. In fact, several state government printing operations were formed by consolidating and closing the many scattered, inefficient in-plants that had sprung up over the decades.
"If an in-plant operation is able to run efficiently and at a competitive cost...then it probably should be justified," concedes Cooper. "But that's a rare circumstance."
