Tangherlini leaving GSA next month

GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini is leaving the agency. His last day on the job will be Feb. 13, he said in an email to staff.

Deputy Administrator Denise Turner Roth will serve as acting administrator, said Tangherlini, who did not reveal where he is going next.

Tangherlini’s tenure was marked by efforts to pull GSA from the depths of scandal and shape it into a model of modernized, efficient tech-centric business.

He took the helm in 2012 as acting administrator after Martha Johnson resigned in the wake of a scandal over lavish spending at a GSA regional conference in Las Vegas. A GSA inspector general report on the Western Regions 2010 conference said costs for the event were more than $822,000, with tens of thousands of dollars spent on luxury suites, and other excesses.

"He came in at a time when the agency was under heavy attack," said Roger Waldron, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement. "He did the job they hired him for, stabilizing an embattled agency. He successfully navigated the post-scandal environment."

The Senate confirmed Tangherlini in the summer of 2013, noting his proven track record of building efficiencies into government processes while at the Treasury Department as assistant secretary for management, chief financial officer and chief performance officer. He also brought years of rubber-hits-the-road operational management and budgeting experience from his years as Washington, D.C., city administrator and deputy mayor and as director of the city's Department of Transportation.

At GSA, Tangherlini pushed programs that aimed to winnow down the mushrooming number of duplicative federal agency IT contracts, in favor of consolidated, uniform, price-driven IT products and service. He consolidated GSA's Washington offices from a myriad of buildings around the city into smaller quarters in which employees share office space, pushed uniform technology and service pricing programs to federal agencies, and burnished GSA's image as the go-to source for federal IT services, hardware and software.

"Working together we found ways to leverage unused assets and began using data driven decision making processes to help better serve our agency partners and the American people," he said in his email.

Among those efforts, he noted efforts to build a more transparent and cost-effective Consolidated Acquisition Platform, Office of Citizens Services and Innovative Technology and its Silicon-Valley-like 18F development arm.

"Dan deserves a lot of credit for pushing new ideas and new thinking," Professional Services Council President and CEO Stan Soloway said in a statement. "We didn't always agree, but he was always open to dialogue and focused on delivering quality for the government."

Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president, public sector at the Information Technology Alliance for Public Sector at the Information Technology Industry Council, said Tangherlini "set the standard for open, transparent contract development."