GSA contract expiration reflects market needs, experts say

GSA official says many GWACs won't be renewed as GSA markets its Alliant and Alliant Small Business contracts

The General Services Administration's plan to let many of its governmentwide information technology contracts expire, largely ending the era of big governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs), reflects the evolving needs of the market, experts say.

They say the federal IT market’s sales have been driving GSA to end and merge GWACs for several years now. There are too many GWACs, causing too much overlap of services. The result is scattered sales while the cost of running the contracts still dips deeply into GSA’s pockets.

GSA will continue to support only Alliant, its small-business companion contract and a few GWACs targeted to companies in specific socioeconomic categories, said Ed O’Hare, assistant commissioner of the Office of Integrated Technology Services at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service.

For the long term, though, GSA will likely merge the GWAC program with the widely used Multiple Award Schedules program. “But that will take years, not months,” O’Hare said.

Before ending the GWAC program, GSA will first winnow down the number of marginally performing GWACs, such as Commerce Information Technology Solutions-NexGen, said Larry Allen, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement. In recent years, GSA has taken over several GWACs, such as COMMITS from the Commerce Department, and now the agency needs to streamline its efforts, he added.

GSA has said for more than a year that the overlapping GWACs are expensive for government and industry and should be pared down, said Bill Perlowitz, vice president of advanced technology at Apptis. No one should be surprised that the agency is saying it won’t renew many GWACs, particularly given the Obama administration’s desire for a more efficient government.

“GSA would be streamlining things” to close down or merge GWACs into its schedules program, said Hope Lane, officer of government contracts consulting at Aronson and Co.

Total IT sales figures have slipped slightly in the past several years. The fallout in 2004 over GSA’s mishandling of the Defense Department’s money has caused some DOD customers to turn to other IT contracts, such as the Navy Department’s SeaPort-e, Lane said.

Meanwhile, sales on GSA’s massive Schedule 70 have remained relatively flat at about $17 billion annually for the past three years, according to government figures.

The recently awarded Alliant and Alliant Small Business GWACs, which were delayed for two years, have a wide choice of services, which makes many other GWACs unnecessary, experts say.

"You can get pretty much anything you want from Alliant," Lane said.

Courtney Fairchild, president of Global Services, said GSA’s Alliant contracts, which were awarded earlier this year, were always meant to replace the expiring GWACs.

“I suppose the real question for industry is whether or not government agencies have enough faith in the Alliant contract to switch over,” she said.

Agencies that shy away from Alliant will still have the option to work with one of more than 15,000 companies in the schedules program.

GWACs offer options to agencies that the schedules program can’t, such as cost-reimbursement contracts. Unless GSA can tweak the schedules program’s rules to change that, GWACs will always have a place, Allen said.

In addition, GSA would have a tough time closing the socioeconomic-based GWACs, such as the 8(a) small-business Streamlined Technology Acquisition Resources for Services and the Veterans Technology Services GWACs.

“Would you want to stand before Congress and try to explain why you ended those contracts?” Allen asked.

On the other hand, any attempt to merge the GWAC and schedules programs would be “consistent with the spirit and message of the creation of the recent Federal Acquisition Service,” Fairchild said.

The reorganization of the Federal Technology Service and the Federal Supply Service into FAS allowed GSA to scrap dueling and repetitive contracts that might confuse customers.

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Think twice before insourcing government work

A report says the Obama administation should be careful before taking jobs from contractors and giving them to agencies

The Obama administration and Congress should proceed cautiously as they attempt to take work away from contractors and hand it to agencies' employees, according to a report released today.

“A rush to insource thousands of positions, while trying to take on ever more government programs, can end in disaster,” wrote Raj Sharma, president of the Federal Acquisition Innovation and Reform Institute, in a report titled "The Move to 'Insourcing'…Proceed with Caution."

Agencies should concentrate first on removing contractors from jobs already defined as inherently governmental and duties central to agencies’ missions, the report states. At the same time, officials need to consider insourcing other jobs in longer-term phases, he wrote, adding that the government can handle the shifting load much easier in stages rather than all at once.

“Rushing to undo what has been in the making for years — perhaps decades — will be counterproductive,” Sharma wrote.

Moreover, taking work from contractors must be done deliberately and based on facts, not innuendo and rhetoric, he wrote.

President Barack Obama often depicts contractors as taking advantage of the government.

However, contractors are a major component of how the government operates, Sharma said, and they often perform work that requires specialized expertise, Sharma added.

“The current rhetoric that demonizes all contractors, instead of those few that are guilty of fraud and abuse, will only deter the best suppliers that we so badly need from competing for government business,” he wrote.

He added that an essential component of success for Obama’s plans for health care reform, energy independence and social innovation will be the technical expertise, innovation and scale that industry can bring.

Meanwhile, experts say experienced federal employees are attractive to private-sector companies, which often offer more to those employees than the government does. Also, a large number of government employees are nearing retirement, and agencies’ acquisition jobs are remaining vacant because few people are seeking those jobs.

Obama’s calls to join public service can only do so much to help find people to do the work, Sharma wrote. The government needs to reconsider its recruiting efforts, pay and professional development policies to make them competitive with the private sector before agencies dramatically insource jobs.

“While it may be feasible to hire thousands of people during the current economic downturn, it will be difficult to retain this talent unless systemic human-capital issues are addressed,” he wrote.

Sharma said officials should answer the following questions before bringing work in-house:

Which positions should be insourced?
How and when should they be insourced?
What will attract the people needed to do the jobs once they are brought in-house?
How will the government retain the employees who are doing the insourced jobs?

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Experts: Acquisition jobs offer few incentives

Federal contracting careers losing appeal

Federal acquisition employees have no good reason to continue their careers in government procurement, a panel of experts said May 19.

Contracting specialists have been relegated to ordinary positions at agencies after once being held in high esteem, said Steve Kempf, assistant commissioner of acquisition management at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service.

“I think we’ve lowered them in the food chain,” said Kempf, a career acquisition employee. When Kempf entered the field two decades ago, contracting officers were revered and had their own offices. He said today though they’ve been downgraded to cubicles.

His point was an underlying theme of a discussion among eight government acquisition experts hosted by the congressional Smart Contracting Caucus. They said the acquisition community is being criticized by Congress and the news media, which pounce on mistakes regardless of whether they are fraud or honest errors.

“Contracting officers get beat down a lot,” Kempf said, adding that one mistake could end a career.

“Frankly, they have every reason to fear for their careers,” said Steve Schooner, an associate law professor and co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University.

Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, said oversight and accountability aren’t punishment. However, overseers inside and outside government need to determine when an error is fraud or an honest mistake.

Despite the fear of making a career-ending error, contracting officers today focus on accomplishing as much as possible in a short time, the experts said.

“Their incentive is volume,” said John Needham, director of acquisition and sourcing management at the Government Accountability Office.

Government spending has increased dramatically in recent years — nearly doubling since 2000 — and the size of the overall workforce has increased only minimally. The workload pressures are stressful for acquisition employees. They hope they don’t make a major mistake, but they don’t have time to check all the details of each acquisition, experts said.

There are few other incentives for acquisition employees to stay with the government. The private sector can offer them more money and benefits. Furthermore, the government retirement system creates incentives for employees to leave for the private sector, said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a caucus member and ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Experts also said it takes months to get a job with the government because of its broken hiring system.

Overall, the field has lost its luster because it’s now an administrative job, the panelists said.

Members of the younger generation recognize that and are not attracted to the acquisition field. Schooner said the descriptions of government openings on USAJobs.gov are generic and boring. “The jobs just don’t smell good,” he said.

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The hidden force in acquisition

Some of the most influential people in the federal acquisition community are also the least well known.

They make critical decisions at every step of the acquisition process, yet the Federal Acquisition Regulation does not mention them. Any reform initiative that does not take them into account is bound to fail, yet the Office of Federal Procurement Policy rarely takes note of them in memos.

But that is beginning to change. Slowly but surely, federal agencies are coming to realize that contracting officer’s technical representatives (COTRs) play an essential — if underappreciated — role in government contracting.

Even the Government Accountability Office is trying to get a handle on the community.

“We have no really clear picture of how many of those there are, what their training and skills are, and so forth,” said John Needham, director of acquisition and sourcing management at GAO, during an April 28 congressional hearing on the Defense Department’s acquisition workforce. “That’s one area we saw as a need.”

COTRs serve as a vital link between their better-known colleagues — program managers and contracting officers — and help translate operational requirements into executable and manageable contracts.

“They’re the principal people who bring these worlds together,” said Robert Burton, former deputy administrator at OFPP and now a partner at Venable law firm.

COTRs also keep tabs on how well contractors are meeting their requirements. Agencies have learned the hard way that they cannot hand that task to new employees or pile it on an already overworked acquisition staff.

So as contracting spending rises and the complexity of contracts increases, COTRs have become the linchpin of government contracting.

Performance pressure points

Agencies are finally beginning to appreciate COTRs because agencies are spending much more money on services compared to a decade ago. For example, DOD spent $202 billion through services contracts in 2008, compared to $92 billion 2001.

“There are a lot more moving parts to keep hold of and a lot more contracts to manage today,” said Mary Davie, assistant commissioner of the Office of Assisted Acquisition Services at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service.

Davie took a job as a COTR in 1989, when she was 23 years old. It was a good way to get some on-the-job training, she said. She made sure that products came in on time and in good condition. “They were sort of turning to me for getting what was needed and keeping the project on schedule,” she said.

In recent years, agencies have been under pressure from the White House and Congress to determine whether they are getting their tax dollars’ worth from contracts, said Elizabeth Miller, vice president of Government Horizons, a nonprofit acquisition training organization.

Therefore, they are trying to develop more sophisticated ways to measure contractor performance. Those metrics and disciplines such as earned value management can get complicated when it comes to technical services contracts.

COTRs are responsible for building such metrics into contracts and sounding the alarm when contractors go astray. Communication must happen early and often, Miller said. “It’s not about waiting for the monthly progress report to find out, ‘Oh, we have a problem.’”

Davie said COTRs also explain to contractors what the program managers need and what the contracting language requires of them.

In addition, COTRs must keep in close touch with contracting officers about progress and suggest modifications if things are off kilter, experts say.

“The COTRs go back and forth,” Burton said.

COTRs come of age

With President Barack Obama’s push to put more contracting information online for public consumption, several experts said COTRs’ duties will become more visible, which will force them to manage projects even more carefully.

With billions of stimulus dollars to spend, the increased burden on COTRs worries many inspectors general. They know agencies will have their hands full managing that money, which comes with new demands from the administration to track where the money is going and what it yields.

Numerous IGs have issued reports recently detailing their concerns about their acquisition workforces. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s requirements seem to demand larger acquisition workforces than agencies have. Existing employees are already struggling to manage increasing sums of money and transactions, even without the stimulus funds.

Procurement officials expect that actions associated with the stimulus funding will be complex, requiring more rigor and oversight. That will, in turn, increase the demands on COTRs and other contract specialists, according to a recent report from the Energy Department’s IG.

In today’s environment, COTRs can’t be young people fresh out of college, as they often were in the past, officials say. They must be savvy and experienced experts in their fields who understand both the procurement and program management sides of acquisition.

In recent years, “there was a shifting expectation for a higher level of competence in understanding and collaborating on the ‘how’ versus the ‘what,’” said Chuck Harris, a former Air Force contracting officer and now president and chief executive officer of Inflection Point Solutions, a training and consulting company.

It hasn’t always been that way. DOD, the world’s biggest buyer, has not always filled the slots for contracting officer’s representatives -- DOD's equivalent to the COTR -- with the best people. It is not uncommon for CORs overseas in war zones to have no training. And generally, all COR training is geared for times when operations are slow, so it is barely adequate when situations get tense, the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote in a report last year.

Assigning a soldier to the role of a COR would seem like a good way to boost someone’s career by providing a launching point into the contracting field. But too often, the soldier who takes on that role doesn’t have any relevant experience, the committee wrote. Then the situation gets worse.

“The COR assignment is often used to send a young soldier to the other side of the base when a commander does not want to have to deal with the person,” the committee wrote.

The Army wants to correct the situation. Officials are spreading the word about CORs’ role in contracting and are teaching Army commanders, staff members and people outside contracting the value of CORs.

“The COR’s role is key to ensuring that the government is getting what it is paying for with appropriate oversight,” Edward Harrington, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for procurement, told a House subcommittee in March.

In April, Jeffery Parsons, executive director of the year-old Army Contracting Command, said an entire division is dedicated to fixing its COR program. And the Army published the “Deployed COR Handbook” to supplement CORs’ training when they’re out in the field.

Sizing up the COTRs

But even as COTRs grow in importance and receive more recognition, officials are still struggling to form a clear picture of the community.

One official called it a mysterious group because agencies and analysts know so little about them. They’re often hidden behind full-time jobs in areas such as information technology or engineering.

In its 2008 report on the acquisition workforce, the Federal Acquisition Institute said it couldn’t identify COTRs because agencies’ records and official guidance about them are so ambiguous. It deferred analysis of COTR demographics until the role is better defined and agencies keep better records.

Officials recognize that the COTR’s role is also growing in importance because the future of government contracting will likely mirror the recovery act rules.

“The program managers rely on them, and the contracting officers rely on them,” Burton said. “They’re really the bridge.”

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Making noise for small business

Small-business advocates seek to change the government’s contracting culture from within

The Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization sounds more bureaucratic than practical — especially when referred to by its acronym OSDBU or “oz-duh-boo.”

Although the Defense Department has changed the name of its organization to the Office of Small Business Programs, the term OSDBU has stuck at many agencies. And if the offices’ directors have their way, the term will become increasingly familiar to their agencies’ program managers and contracting officers.

The goal is to change the way procurement leaders think about the role of small businesses. In one case, at least, that involves handing out statues of ducks.

“The OSDBUs are a very vocal group,” said Robert Burton, former deputy administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. That’s a necessary trait for them to fulfill their role of advocating for small businesses, he added.

Their challenge is to go beyond reminding people about contracting rules and regulations and instill new attitudes in an entrenched government culture.

Contracting officers typically understand regulations about small-business set-aside contracts and might be aware of contracting goals, said Teresa Lewis, director of the Treasury Department’s OSDBU. But program managers — who are central players in acquisitions — are accustomed to a certain way of working, she said.

The way they often see it, their existing contractors understand their needs and expectations, so they question why they should give that up for a small-business contract, Lewis said. But the OSDBU directors try to convince them of the value of giving work to small businesses and, if needed, remind them that regulations require it.

“The job certainly has it challenges,” said Kevin Boshears, OSDBU director at the Homeland Security Department.

One problem is that OSDBUs often get little support within their agencies, said Theresa Alvillar-Speake, OSDBU director at the Energy Department.

That’s where the OSDBU Directors Interagency Council comes in.

OSDBU directors and small-business specialists started the council on their own initiative. Although it can’t make policy, it has become a forum for sharing ideas and talking about new ways of working with small businesses.

“It’s the good old OSDBU network,” Alvillar-Speake said. “We get together and commiserate and share.”

Signs of progress
Small-business contracting still doesn’t receive the same amount of attention that other initiatives do, but agency leaders are recognizing its importance, observers say.

In 2007, the Small Business Administration published its first Small Business Procurement Score Card, which graded agencies on how many of their contracting dollars went to small businesses in various socioeconomic classes. Half of the 24 agencies graded earned the lowest score because they didn’t award enough dollars to small companies.

After SBA announced the scores, agency executives began asking about the contracting goals. Several OSDBU directors — including Lewis and Jeanette Brown, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s OSDBU — now report directly to the agency’s secretary as the chief adviser on small-business matters.

“Typically, if it flows down from the top, it’s going to have a more positive impact,” said Anthony Martoccia, director of the Office of Small Business Programs at DOD. He reports to the Defense secretary.

Brown said she gained support from her agency’s leaders when Marcus Peacock, EPA’s deputy administrator, added small-business procurement goals to program managers’ performance measures. She even began giving regional offices and program managers who meet their goals an award in the form of a crystal duck.

As the small-business goals become more prominent for acquisition planners, OSDBU directors have offered their expertise to contracting officers and program managers.

“They don’t live it and breathe it every day so they don’t understand the intricacies,” said Debbie Ridgely, OSDBU director at the Health and Human Services Department.

In part because of the growing interest in regulatory changes related to small businesses, OSDBU directors have been included in discussions in which the acquisition officers and program managers are planning future contracts. And more than one agency requires that the OSDBU be part of early discussions.

For example, DOE’s regulations stipulate that acquisition-planning teams give the OSDBU director an opportunity to review upcoming programs to determine whether any of the work could go to small businesses. The director must sign off on the strategy for it to move to the next stage of the process.
“We back them in,” Alvillar-Speake said. “They kind of listen then.”

Officials who issue governmentwide procurement policies have also given more authority to OSDBUs. Burton said one of the most prominent efforts on behalf of small businesses was OFPP’s policy to require an agency to get its OSDBU to approve strategic sourcing plans.

“You must ensure that the OSDBU had input into it,” he said. It puts small-business considerations at the top of procurement officials’ agendas as they enter into long-term contracts with vendors.

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State turns buyers into strategists

The state of Georgia is rethinking how it buys things.

For decades, the state relied on people called order-takers to handle purchases. When a purchase request arrived from a state agency, the order-taker posted it for the public to read. Soon, proposals would arrive, and after opening all bids in public, the order-takers chose the bid with the lowest price.

They considered few details surrounding the initial purchase request.

“They didn’t read it, they didn’t look at it, they didn’t analyze it,” said Brad Douglas, commissioner for Georgia’s Department of Administrative Services, which is leading the change in thinking. “That price had no bearing on what the price could have been or should have been.”

Georgia’s buying process lacked strategy and information. The result was a procurement system from the Dark Ages. It left officials with no insight on who was buying what or from whom. But a revolution has been happening in the Peach State’s procurement programs over the past three years. Officials are pushing order-takers to be strategists when buying, rather than simply awarding based on price alone.

“Purchasing has always been the place that people went to when an organization didn’t know what else to do with them,” Douglas said. But during recent economic declines, officials noticed that smart acquisition adds to the bottom line. “That’s when I think you saw purchasing as a profession change its colors.”

In 2003, when Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue took office, he urged agency officials to think differently about how they operated. He wanted them to run their organizations like businesses — to know where their money goes and find ways to save it.

In an interview with CIO Magazine in 2007, Perdue said the primary business principle he wanted to bring to Georgia was fact-based decision-making.

“Heretofore, I think our state had been run on a lot of emotional, political, ‘who’s-in-power’ decisions rather than on data,” he told the magazine. “I don’t consider myself particularly gifted from an intuitive standpoint. Therefore, I have to rely on data and facts to make decisions.”

The data
Douglas and the Administrative Services Department are hunting for any available spending data and are bringing about new ways to grab it.

In 2005, when Douglas arrived at the department, he found state employees
didn’t keep records of their suppliers and contracts, so his department couldn’t review what was happening in the more than 120 agencies and 35 public state universities that spend the state’s money. The last audit was done in 1991, he said.

“My best source of spending data today is by asking a supplier, ‘What did you sell to the state of Georgia?’ ” Douglas said. “That’s not a good position to be in.”

Officials continue to restructure the procurement system to capture information on purchasing for better buying decisions, such as through strategic sourcing. Strategic sourcing allows organizations to save money by buying large quantities of goods or services from a single vendor. Sometimes multiple organizations will pool their requirements to negotiate the best volume discounts the vendor will offer.

In developing that strategy, the department created a knowledge center, which will handle the procurement analyses. The vision for Georgia’s procurement overhaul is to aggregate spending across its agencies and organizations that typically operate independently. Agencies use different types of software to gather data. There are at least 34 different instances of PeopleSoft, Douglas said. In July, Georgia signed a contract with SciQuest, an e-procurement management company, to bind together the agencies’ incom patible software programs.

SciQuest intends to give the state a buying system that will become the hub and spoke for the state’s procurement system, said Stephen Wiehe, president and chief executive officer at SciQuest.

SciQuest’s software will give the state an online shopping center that integrates the various PeopleSoft instances, he said. Officials expect to gain insight into how the state spends money while eliminating paper-based processes and driving spending to pre-negotiated contracts.

The law
One other barrier stood in the way of Georgia’s procurement reformers: The state’s procurement law. It obstructed good buying practices, not always for any clear reason. For example, agencies weren’t allowed to negotiate with vendors on the contracts. Douglas said officials knew each round of negotiations saves an average of 4 percent to 5 percent from the initial proposed price.

“It was stunning to me,” he said.

The time
The law now allows agencies to negotiate. That was one of several changes that resulted from reform legislation in 2005.

Not long after taking their positions, Douglas and Tim Gibney, assistant commissioner at the State Purchasing Division of the Administrative Services Department, started talking to legislators about the procurement system and the need for reforms.

They found that the season was ripe for change. While Perdue pushed new thinking on agencies, state officials explained the procurement problems for the legislators in the Georgia General Assembly. In 2005, the assembly easily passed legislation granting more flexibility to state agencies.

State Rep. Allen Freeman, a Republican who sponsored the legislation that ultimately changed procurement policies, wasn’t surprised by the rigid rules that oversaw purchasing.

“I’ve seen it from every side,” Freeman said. In the early 1990s, he managed a state park in southwest Georgia with an archeological museum on Indian burial mounds. “I had to use the contract book, just like everyone else,” he said. That book told state employees which vendors they could buy from and what price they had to pay.

The 2005 law gave the Administrative Services Department a lot of authority to improve acquisition. It allowed the department to canvass all sources of supplies and to have general supervision of all storerooms and stores operated by the state.

Douglas said the essential ingredients for making the transformation are top-down belief in the changes, resources and money to do the job, and legislative reforms to do what is necessary to bring about the transformation.

Officials set up pre-negotiated contracts for purchasers and are now collecting more data, but Gibney said the work isn’t easy. The state has a $34 billion annual budget, and its agencies and universities are unaccustomed to culture shifts such as this. “But we’ve been given the tools to go at it,” he said.

The people
In the knowledge center, there are advocates for the agencies’ buyers, as both consultants and listeners, who bring back complaints and suggestions to the knowledge center to improve overall operations. The center is training those buyers to think differently and see their individual purchases as part of a whole buying system.

“We felt not only did we need to have strong buying and contracts in place, we also wanted to improve the quality of work being performed and to train and educate folks,” Gibney said. Their work in procurement and understanding the profession overall is critical to an agencies’ success.

“My major goal — as Rodney Dangerfield said — has been to get some respect for the profession,” Gibney said.

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Restrictions seen hurting disaster recovery

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials should work with chief procurement regulators to avoid limits to subcontracting that could strain efforts to respond quickly to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, according to a new report.

Richard Skinner, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, wrote in a report released Aug. 4 that legislation passed by Congress in 2006 that restricts subcontracting by prime contractors could inhibit disaster responses and recovery work by FEMA or other DHS agencies.

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Committees want reports on contractors

Leaders in the intelligence community would have to keep closer tabs on what contractors are doing in their agencies under bills pending in Congress.

Some members of Congress have proposed one-time, comprehensive reports on contractors under the House and Senate versions of the fiscal 2009 Intelligence Authorization Act, H.R. 5959 and S. 2996.

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GSA expects schedules office by July

The General Services Administration could set up a new office as early as July to oversee its multiple-award schedule contracts, a GSA official said today.

Leaders of the offices in charge of various schedule contracts are still negotiating the details of the new office’s role, said Steven Kempf, assistant commissioner for acquisition management at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service. However, he added that the new office likely wouldn’t play a heavy-handed role in supervising the $36 billion program.

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GSA reshapes office for efficient operations

General Services Administration officials are creating an Office of Infrastructure Optimization to handle several technology programs, a GSA official said June 4.

The new office, which would be in the Office of Integrated Technology Services, will combine several governmentwide initiatives and various enterprisewide operations, such as handling data-at-rest and antivirus software offerings through the SmartBuy program. Officials are also creating an Identity Management Division by combining GSA’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 program management office and e-authentication division, said John Johnson, assistant commissioner for ITS at GSA's Federal Acquisition Service.

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A void in the community

Less than a day after Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) decided not to run for reelection in 2008, the longtime procurement and technology advocate already had his successor in mind.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Davis’ choice, is unknown to most in the acquisition and technology community.

Davis said last week in an interview with Federal Computer Week that he tapped Issa as the one to fill his shoes after the current term ends. He said Issa understands the private sector and how it relates to government.

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SBA rule aims to protect employee e-mail

Managers at the Small Business Administration now must have several levels of approval before accessing an employee’s e-mail inbox.

On Dec. 21, SBA officials approved the rules regarding when managers can look at SBA employee e-mail messages after a report from the agency’s inspector general showed SBA had no clear policy about accessing e-mail messages without authorization. Now managers must have written authorization from the chief information security officer before looking at e-mail messages, the notice said.

The notice comes after a report from SBA’s inspector general, which was released in October. The IG said managers looked at an employee’s e-mail inbox after that employee gave testimony anonymously.

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Lawmakers to micromanage more

Lawmakers, frustrated by the Office of Management and Budget’s practice of putting federal projects on various watch lists without explaining why, have decided to do something about it.

In the fiscal 2008 Omnibus Appropriations bill President Bush signed into law Dec. 26, Congress included a governmentwide provision that requires OMB to publish in its annual budget request the specific reasons why a project is on its High-Risk and Management watch lists.

“The information will help [the Government Accountability Office] and Congress to spot trends, track progress and recommend corrective action,” lawmakers wrote in the legislation.

The new requirement follows two years of debate between OMB and lawmakers about the use and effectiveness of those lists.

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Army: Bolstering acquisition workforce could take 10 years

Building up the Army’s acquisition workforce into an adequately staffed, experienced labor force will likely take as long as 10 years, a top Army officer told a Senate panel Dec. 6.

The Commission on Army Acquisition and Program Management in Expeditionary Operations stated in a report released Nov. 1 that the Army should add 1,400 employees to balance the dramatic increase in defense spending since the 2001 terrorist attacks against the 25 percent of the acquisition workforce cut in the 1990s.

Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said it would take about three years to fill 400 positions with military contracting officers and 1,000 jobs with civilian contracting officers.

But getting contracting officers training, certification and essential hands-on experience will require the most time, he told the Senate Armed Service Committee’s Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee.

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Agencies overlook disability rule

Agencies often forget about making information technology purchases that meet the needs of people with disabilities, as shown by the tiny number of solicitations that include references to accessibility standards.

Governmentwide, only 3 percent of solicitations for electronic and IT products properly include Section 508 accessibility standards, according to a recent General Services Administration assessment of solicitation notices on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

About 75 percent of IT solicitations failed to mention any of the standards that reduce barriers for disabled employees, said Terry Weaver, director of the Office of Technology Strategy’s Information Technology Accessibility and Workforce Division at GSA.

“I’d hoped for better,” she said.

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IG: DOD wasted money by placing orders with GSA

The Defense Department wasted more than $600,000 when it turned to the General Services Administration for help in placing orders on an Air Force task-order contract, according to a new report from DOD’s inspector general.

The IG said the officials should have sought assistance from DOD’s procurement officers, not GSA, for the orders placed under the Network-Centric Solutions (NetCents) contract.

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Contracting officers need training in critical areas, survey finds

Many government contracting officers say they or others in their organization lack training in critical contracting areas, according to a new workforce report.

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Denett: Proposed bills include "poison pills" for competitive sourcing

Lawmakers are working on several major bills that could undermine the Bush administration's competitive-sourcing initiative, according to the government's top procurement official.

Language in those bills would make it difficult to create a fair environment in which federal employees and private companies compete for non-inherently governmental work.

Read the rest of the story: FCW.com News - Denett: Proposed bills include "poison pills" for competitive sourcing

Last-minute spending hurts IRS, IG says

The Internal Revenue Service’s end-of-year spending increased dramatically in the past five fiscal years, according to a new report.

The overload of work coming at the last minute caused problems in acquisitions. On 15 percent of 92 purchases in August and September 2006, TIGTA found that IRS violated appropriations regulations on four acquisitions, and contracting officers may have skipped steps in the procurement process on 10 others, the report states.

Read the rest of the story: FCW.com News - Last-minute spending hurts IRS, IG says

IGs may have to hunt for redundant programs

Inspectors general may have to report redundant programs to Congress and the president each year, according to an amendment to legislation the House passed today.

Then the IGs would have to include with those reports proposed legislation to encourage Congress to do something about the redundancies, according to the Improving Government Accountability Act. The House passed the legislation 404 to 11. The bill now goes to the Senate.

Read the rest of the story: FCW.com News - IGs may have to hunt for redundant programs