GSA lowers price of HSPD-12 cards to $82

For the more than 42 agencies using the General Services Administration’s Managed Service Office (MSO) to implement Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, the cost per smart card and one year of maintenance will be $82 – almost $20 less than a previous estimate.GSA officials announced the drop in price from its estimate last week during a meeting with more than 100 agency customer employees in Washington.“There were a lot of happy people when they saw the price,” said Mike Butler, GSA’s HSPD-12 MSO program manager. “The difference between $82 and $110 is a lot of money when you have thousands of people who need cards.”Also during the meeting, EDS, the MSO contractor, demonstrated its initial operating capabilities of the enrollment station, including the card sponsor and activator processes.Butler said GSA expects to begin issuing cards by late July.Agencies will pay $49 for the card and $3 per month for 11 months for card maintenance, Butler said. Then agencies will have to pay $3 per month per card for maintenance in the following years. Every five years, employees will need to obtain new cards, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Federal Information Processing Standard 201-1.The cost for the basic FIPS 201-1 approved card is $82, but any additional containers or public-key infrastructure certificates will cost more, Butler said.Also included in the price of the cards is access to seven training modules for customer agency employees to learn specific roles under HSPD-12, including card sponsor, security officer and card activator.GSA and EDS also are giving agencies options for enrollment stations, he said.Agencies can go to an enrollment station managed by GSA/EDS or lease a station for only their employees and run it themselves.“A lot of agencies expressed the desire to lease a station and take care of their own employees so we are offering that,” Butler said. “We learned that agencies want more options so we plan to have about 100 enrollment stations managed by GSA and another 100 that agencies can lease and run on their own.”