Roth's SAM deadline paves way for confirmation

Responding to a key senator's demand, Denise Turner Roth defused a potentially contentious delay of her confirmation as administrator of the General Services Administration by imposing a deadline to have a long-delayed contracting database in place.

Roth was confirmed as GSA's 39th administrator by the Senate the evening of Aug. 6 and will lead the agency's workforce of 11,500 full-time employees and oversee a $24 billion budget supporting the agency’s Public Buildings Service, Federal Acquisition Service, and technology services programs.

During a mid-July confirmation hearing, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) pressed Roth for a firmer project completion date and other details on the perpetually lagging System for Award Management (SAM) contractor database system, threatening to hold up Roth's confirmation until the information was provided.

Sources told FCW that Roth informed McCaskill that the final SAM system is now scheduled for integration on Aug. 23, 2017, seven months after the end of the Obama administration.

The Senate voice vote on Aug. 5 came just a few weeks after Roth’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where she discussed her vision for moving the agency forward. In that hearing, McCaskill grilled Roth on the SAM, saying the program to unite a dozen acquisition databases was going on six years old with little result other than a price tag that had ballooned from an estimated $96 million to an expected $181 million.

Roth stepped into the role of deputy administrator just over a year ago, after former Administrator Dan Tangherlini left for the private sector.