By Jesse Russell

Under a Bush administration plan nearly two-thirds of the U.S. Forest Service could be outsourced. According to documents released early this week more than 21,000 jobs could be put out to bid by 2009.

[Ruch1]: What this is about is replacing civil servants who belong to public employee unions who tend to contribute money to Democratic candidates with contracts to corporations that will in turn contribute to PACs that give to Republican candidates.

Jeff Ruch is Executive Director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. He says the problem with replacing federal workers with contractors is the employees will no longer work for the United States, but will now work for a corporation.

The National Treasury Employees union rallied in New York City Wednesday to protest taxpayer service cutbacks at the IRS. NTEU President Colleen Kelly.

[Colleen Kelley] : "We have legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Simmons from Connecticut and Congressman Van Holland that would appeal the IRS's authority to do this private tax collection work."

On the heels of making a major announcement that US Forests could be opened to roads and logging, the U.S. Forest Service says it may start privatizing its public information staff. One hundred positions could be farmed out to private public relations firms pending a June 30th review. It's a sign of things to come as the Bush administration has began pushing it's Competitive Sourcing initiative. The program would make hundreds of jobs in the agency available for contract bidding. According to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility the Forest Service spent $113,000 on a campaign to convince the public to accept plans for increased logging in California's Sierra Nevada's.

As Amtrak moves into make it or break it territory, the leader of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department is calling on the rail lines board of directors to step down. The Bush administration has called for a breakup of the company so it could be run more like the nation's airlines, while the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed two bills on Wednesday that would inject $6 billion into Amtrak to improve it's infrastructure and service. TTD President Edward Wytkind says Amtrak's board is made up of large donors to the Bush administration and instead of protecting the rail have are instead serving the politician who appointed them. TTD spokesperson Michael Buckley explains:

Legislation that would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from privatizing tax collection was introduced in the House today. The bill, introduced by Representatives Rob Simmons of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, comes as the IRS moves forward with plans to do just that. National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen M Kelly explains the potential impact of IRS plan:

[Kelly]: This is going to risk taxpayer privacy as well as invite aggressive collection tactics on the part of these collection agencies. they will be paid on a bounty of being able to keep up to 25 percent of whatever the collect.

In addition the IRS recently announced plans to cut more than 700 customer service positions and close nearly 100 taxpayer assistance centers. The centers assisted more than 7 million taxpayers in 2004. According to Kelly, the IRS has already begun implementation of these changes, with some of the more drastic reform coming as soon as six months from now.

The Department of Labor is trying to block distribution of a newsletter it distributes as part of a contract with the National Council of Field Labor Locals because it contains a column criticial of Bush's plan to privatize social security. The newsletter is distributed to Department of Labor workers.