President-elect Obama has been touting transparency on the campaign trail. Many people know he was the Democratic voice behind the legislation that created the easy to peruse contracts and grants database, USASpending.gov. But the acquisition community is already moving ahead with its own attempt at improving contract transparency: the next generation of the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. In the spirit of open government, the acquisition community is inviting user feedback concerning what improvements to the central procurement database are needed. The current iteration of FPDS is pretty hard to navigate and takes a long time to run requests. There…
Browsing: Procurement
The Air Force is looking to employ some live birds–falcons to be precise– to protect its metal ones, the Washington Post reported today. The enemy: other birds. Apparently, small birds, like songbirds, pigeons or Magpies, fly in the vicinity of U.S. military aircraft at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, posing a hazard that they’ll be ingested in the planes’ engines and disable them. The Post reports 125 “bird strikes” in the last year, up from 78 the year before. So far, other traditional means of bird control, such as firing shotguns, have not worked. If the military awards the contract,…
…is now $864 billion according to a Congressional Research Service report posted on the blog Secrecy News. That’s just a scant $164 billion more than the government is planning to spend to bailout Wall Street. To be fair, it did take the Defense Department 8 years to get to that level of spending. The CRS figure includes appropriations and supplementals made between fiscal years 2001 and 2009. Three-quarters of the war spending, about $657 billion, funded the war in Iraq. Another fifth, $173 billion, went to the war in Afghanistan. And $28 billion enhanced security at military bases. But what…
It’s Halloween on Friday and as if on cue the Defense Department has released a new acquisition regulation about the use of humans in research contracts. Maybe it’s just me, but government and human testing sounds like the makings of a horror flick or thriller. OK, so the rule is probably not that scary. In fact, the rule is aimed at enhancing protections for human guinea pigs by ensuring contracts contain a clause mandating researchers to follow a stringent set of human research rules, such as obtaining informed consent from participants and receiving approval from a review board. For the curious…
Bet your bottom dollar that the Small Business Administration’s second annual report card on the government’s use of small businesses in procurement will come out tomorrow. We say this because we’ve been told there is a press conference on that very topic, so it’s a pretty safe bet. The report cards grade agencies on how well they’ve met their individual goals for contracting with small businesses. These goals are often above and beyond the governmentwide goal of 23 percent, which is set by statute. Last year, SBA reported 12 agencies got red scores indicating they failed to reach their goals…
FedLine is attending the INPUT FedFocus today getting an outlook on Federal IT spending for 2009. GEIA Group of the Information Technology Association of America will give a similar briefing later this week. There’s lots of talk at INPUT’s event today about the economy and how that’s going to change the environment of the federal marketplace. The government’s Wall Street bailout could be a boon for contractors in the coming years if the government makes money off the deal, said Kevin Plexico, INPUT’s senior vice president. The bailout creates a rare scenario where the government will get a monetary return…
As far as federal advertising goes, you have to admit the Federal Communications Commission’s announcement that it is sponsoring a race car to advertise the mandatory conversion to digital television is pretty creative. FCC spent $350,000 on the sponsorship that will debut on car No. 38, which will be driven by David Gilliland at the Oct. 19 NASCAR race at the Martinsville Speedway in Virginia. The transition message will also appear on car No. 38 during races on Nov. 9 and Nov. 16. Given the current economic crisis, which many say  hurts NASCAR’s bottom line, some cynics might view this as a new kind of government bailout. But…