GSA has been given more of the government’s contracting authority

As Nextgov/FCW reports, the General Services Administration is likely to take over the two most important — and longstanding — GWAC’s outside the agency’s control: NASA SEWP and NIH CIOSP. This is a further expansion of the philosophy outlined in a Trump executive order directing agencies to centralize procurement at GSA.

As I have written recently, getting GSA more involved in contracting is a back to the future approach that harkens back to the period between the establishment of GSA in 1949 and the procurement reforms of the 90’s, when GSA did a lot of the buying for the federal government. The changes in the 90’s were designed to give the agencies and their contracting officials more power and to tame GSA.

Although I was involved in these changes as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy from 1993 to 1997, I was actually less enthusiastic about them than other officials I worked for because I was worried that neutering GSA would make it harder for government to get price discounts and better service from large buys.

But another change in the 90’s worked to alleviate these problems: the growth of non-GSA governmentwide acquisition contracts. The first of these was proposed by the Transportation Department, whose procurement officials there came to me, as OFPP administrator, to bless. They came up with the innovative idea that an agency outside GSA could award a contract open to the whole government. I approved the idea, and the GWAC was born. 

As it happened, Transportation’s GWAC never took off. But two of the contracts a ..

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