The White House wants to bring centralized procurement back to the government, returning agencies to the pre-acquisition reform days of the 1990s for most common services and products.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order in the coming days that would put the General Services Administration in charge of buying all products and services that make up the seven areas of category management.
These include everything from IT to medical drugs and devices to professional services to seven other categories as defined by the Category Management Leadership Council.
Additionally, GSA will take over management of governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) for IT services and products with an eye toward reducing duplicative vehicles.
“Consolidating domestic federal procurement in the General Services Administration — the agency designed to conduct procurement — will eliminate waste and duplication, while enabling agencies to focus on their core mission of delivering the best possible services for the American people,” the White House wrote in a draft executive order, which Federal News Network obtained. “It is time to return the General Services Administration to its original purpose, rather than continuing to have multiple agencies and agency subcomponents separately carry out these same functions in an uncoordinated and less economical fashion.”
Two emails to the White House seeking comment on these changes were not returned.
This is the first of what is expected to be two acquisition focused executive orders the president is expected to sign in the next few weeks. Multiple sources say the second order will focus on rewriting the Federal Acquisition Regulations.
The draft EO gives agencies 30 days to come up with a plan to submit to GSA to have them “conduct domestic procurement with respect to common goods and services for the agency, where permitted by law.”
GSA then has 90 days to submit a plan for how they will implement this initiative to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Before the acquisition reform efforts of the 1990s with the passage of the Federal Acquisition Streaming Act (FASA) and Federal Acquisition Reform Act (FARA), GSA was the mandatory, governmentwide source for the procurement of goods and services and the acquisition, management and disposal of real property under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949.
In many ways, the draft EO is bringing the government back to the statute that established GSA.
What does EO mean for NASA, NITAAC?
The biggest change in the draft EO, however, may be GSA taking over the IT GWACs. OMB has 14 days to issue a memo to initiate this change and 30 days give GSA the full authority.
Currently, GSA, NASA and the National Institutes of Health’s IT Acquisition and Assistance Center (NITAAC) run these governmentwide contracts.
Under the terms of the EO, GSA will decide whether NASA and NITAAC will continue to run SEWP and CIO-SP, CS and other programs.
“The [GSA] administrator, in consultation with the director of OMB, shall defer or decline the executive agent designation for governmentwide acquisition contracts for information technology when necessary to ensure continuity of service or as otherwise appropriate,” the draft EO states. “The administrator shall further, on an ongoing basis and consistent with applicable law, rationalize governmentwide indefinite delivery contract vehicles for information technology for agencies across the government, including as part of identifying and eliminating contract duplication, redundancy and other inefficiencies.”
This authority to approve GWACs currently resides in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, which serves as the designated approval authority.
This isn’t the first time OMB and GSA tried to reduce the number of GWACs and multiple award contracts. During the Obama administration, OFPP initiated a pre-approval process for any large multiple award IT contract with a ceiling of at least $250 million in 2011 and had plans to drop that ceiling requirement to $50 million.
This effort had minimal impact in reducing duplicative GWACs or multiple award contracts.
In 2006, former GSA Administrator Lurita Doan suggested taking over IT GWACs like NASA SEWP, but received pushback from the federal community. At that time, OFPP also initiated a data collection effort to see how many interagency and agency-specific multiple award contracts existed.
Another side effect of this EO is whether GSA continues its current set of GWACs, including Alliant 3, the ASEND cloud contract and whether the future of NASA SEWP VI and NITAAC’s CIO-SP4, which is now four years since the organization released is initial solicitation.
Acquisition experts say the draft EO elicits several questions that will need to be answered with the implementation guidance:
- How will agencies pay for these services from GSA?
- With GSA Federal Acquisition Service aiming to reduce its workforce by 50% or more, will acquisition workers from other agencies transfer to FAS to help run these procurements?
- How will GSA ensure it doesn’t get complacent as the centralized procurement provider, which experts say was an issue in the 1980s?
- How does this impact the Defense Department and the categories they manage as well as agencies with their property authorities like the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs hospitals?
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