"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," wrote Kerry.

But Berry and other agency officials today offered a vigorous defense of the decision to move the site in-house and outlined their technical fixes. The agency has added server and network capacity and hired Akamai, a Web acceleration company, to help improve performance. OPM also increased the size of its help desk to respond to trouble tickets.

Despite these efforts, USAjobs site problems persisted into this week. "We are not declaring victory today," said Berry, but "I am here to say that we have turned this around."

Thanks to the upgrades, Berry said system utilization, which had been running at near 100% immediately after the launch, is now under 20%. He also said that users have been increasingly giving the system higher marks when they are asked about performance.

The agency is using the same performance survey company as Monster, Berry said and the approval ratings are now nearing those of Monster after initially "cratering."