“Contractors working in federal facilities are under the same orders as federal employees. Get a COVID vaccine or face a regime of having your nose swabbed every week. But agency guidance now in circulation seems to add additional burdens on the contractors companies. Federal Drive with Tom Temin got more from the president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, David Berteau…”
“Tom Temin: And David, you’ve seen some guidance coming from at least one agency, looks like the NSA, what does it look like out there?
David Berteau: Tom, it’s very confusing, it looks like a mess actually, across the board. The intentions, while not stated this way, are pretty clear. We need more people vaccinated. And that’s the way we’re going to get on top of COVID-19 and get on top of the Delta variant and whatever new variants are coming down the line. In addition, vaccines and vaccinated populations will help reduce the development and spread of new variants, which are clearly our risk here. But the government is not ready to issue a mandate, even for its own federal civilian employees. And so what they’ve done is set up a thing that makes it harder to be unvaccinated than to be vaccinated. Because if you’re unvaccinated, or if you refuse to say whether you’re vaccinated or not, you’ll get into a testing regime. Lots of questions here, and much of the guidance is not really guidance yet, right? It’s press conferences, it’s fact sheets, it’s white papers, it’s FAQ’s issued by a task force unsigned by anybody. It’s a form, that’s clearly just a template. None of this constitutes guidance. For contractors and for contract employees, you have to have a document signed by an official who has the authority to direct you. And if it doesn’t come centrally, as you know, it will come one contract at a time, one task order at a time. That’s a recipe for discontinuity. That’s a recipe for confusion. That’s where we are today…”
“Tom Temin: …And you also raise a question too, about some employees may work in multiple agencies on different days of the week, or different locations of a given agency. And there’s no real clear answer on what happens location by location. So does that mean, what?
David Berteau: Right, so the administration’s announcement, I’ll just call it an announcement until we have detailed guidance signed by an authorized official, that announcement said it covers on site contractors. Well there’s no good technical definition of what’s an on site contractor. Is that five days a week at the same desk, at the same location? Is it somebody who goes to multiple locations, multiple times. An awful lot of the work that we have done now — touch labor work that you can’t do remotely — does depend on the location, if you’re doing maintenance, you’re going to go where the maintenance is needed, and you may not know at the beginning. We had one company that told us they’ve got a team that’s going to 15 separate installations over the next two weeks, and they’re going to have to be on site at each one. Now maybe they’re a visitor. Do they sign 15 attestations? If they have not vaccinated, do they enter 15 different testing programs? None of that’s been answered yet…” Read the full interview here.
Source: Contractors face vaccine mandate, additional burdens for vendors – By Tom Temin, August 10, 2021. Federal News Network.
