Back to the future at GSA with contracting executive order

The recent executive order about “centralizing” procurement in GSA brings back memories to old timers like me about what procurement used to be like decades ago. And the memories are not so pleasant.

The 1949 law that established the General Services Administration made the agency a mandatory source for agency purchases of products and services, though from the very beginning there were some exceptions and carve-outs, and in fact procurement was never done only by GSA. For IT purchases during much of the period, agencies could buy for themselves, but only after going to GSA with a “Mother, May I?” request and getting approval for the specifics, which generally delayed procurements by several months or more.

The idea for doing this was that centralizing procurement would produce big buys with quantity discounts and good terms for the government. The problem, though, was that GSA had a procurement monopoly. 

And guess what? GSA behaved like a monopoly. They were notorious for slow and indifferent service. Folks in other agencies generally disliked them. And GSA was not an aggressive negotiator, so frequently the prices the government received were not that great.

Big changes came with then-Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government effort in the 1990s, with which I was involved as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy from 1993 to 1997.

Gore wanted to support the program officials who used the products and services the procurement system bought. He wanted to get them quick, easy access to the things they wanted to buy. They were — to use a phrase that began to be spoken within government for the first time in those days — the “customers” of the system. Reinventing Government aimed to reduce the power of GSA as the centralized buying agency.

In Release 1.0 of Reinventing Government, both GSA and the procurement officials who were actually doing the buying were seen as an enemy. They were agents of “micromanagement and control,” who imposed and policed the voluminous procurement regulations — a compliance function. Officials within the Clinton administration did not like the tradition of centralized procurement that had grown out of the 1949 legislation. It slowed things down and imposed a source selection system that often did not make it easy for program folks — the customers — to get the products and services they wanted. Their ideal was to give individual program officials a credit card — which was first used in a big way then — and let them “go shopping,” often literally to go to a local mall.

Although I was a senior administration official, I had a somewhat different view. I frequently said at the time, “The federal government is the largest buyer of goods and services in the world. Can’t we do better than how I would do as an individual consumer paying retail at a mall?” 

My solution to get the advantages of being a big customer was another major innovation of the 1990s: governmentwide acquisition contracts, or GWACs. The government would do big buys to get good prices and terms. People could then purchase specific things they needed off a GWAC catalogue and receive them quickly. For the IT community, the main GWAC vehicle in those days was GSA IT Schedule 70. With Schedule 70, GSA negotiated the contract, but didn’t do the buying itself.

As OFPP administrator in the 1990s, I discovered, to my surprise, that many frontline procurement officials did not want to be procurement police and actually supported the pro-customer reforms. I started working as closely with procurement folks as program folks, and established a so-called “Frontline Forum” for contracting officials to meet with me every quarter to report on changes they were introducing and seek advice from procurement colleagues.

Under this system, agencies were generally free to use GSA or one of the other GWAC providers such as NASA SEWP, or to buy for themselves using the agency’s procurement folks, who were often regarded as closer to the customer than GSA. Although the system is not perfect, and I suspect many program officials still believe the procurement officials are too much of a procurement police, it is much better than it used to be.

Trump’s latest EO seems to be saying — though I will confess that the language is not fully clear — that the option to do procurement in an agency will no longer be available, and that agencies will be required to use GSA. It is not clear whether they will only be required to use GSA contracts or whether the actual buying will be done by GSA. 

That the head of GSA has spoken about quadrupling the size of the agency suggests the idea is the latter. The generous version of why this is being done is that the larger volumes will allow the government to get better prices. The less generous version is that this is a power play by the Trump political leadership within GSA to reduce the role of the career civil servants in the agencies. And the risk of all this is going back to the bad old days of an unresponsive, slow and expensive GSA.