Spring Break fever was in the air today on Capitol Hill. Legislators have officially fled Washington D.C. and there will be no hearings until April 16th. But before the final votes ensued, the Senate subcommittee on contracting oversight held a hearing where Senators McCaskill, Portman and Tester grilled witnesses from the Army, The Office of Personnel and Management and The Department of Homeland Security over contractor spending. Meanwhile, Chairwoman McCaskill’s grandsons were in attendance. My guess is they are on their own Spring Break. They sat graciously through the hearing; only occasionally trying sneak into my shot. I’m sure they…
Browsing: Procurement
Two senators are making another push to lower how much the government reimburses for contractor compensation costs with a bill introduced late Thursday. Senate bill 2198, sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would limit the taxpayer reimbursement for government contractor compensation to the amount of the President’s salary — $400,000. Compensation includes wages, salary, bonuses and deferred compensation. The measure would extend the cap to all government contractor employees. “The direct taxpayer-funded salaries of government contractors clearly need to be contained,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement. “There’s no justification for these payments to be higher than the salary of the…
More than 100,000 people have signed an online petition asking the president to issue an executive order ensuring workplace protections for gay federal contractors. Administration officials will not confirm any action, but Tico Almeida, president of the Freedom to Work advocacy group, said Labor and Justice department lawyers have recommended President Obama issue a policy requiring federal contractors to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. Freedom to Work, which seeks anti-discrimination policies for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender workers, created the online petition at Change.org. More than 16 million employees of federal contractors either work for companies or reside in states that do not…
The Orlando Sanford International Airport is reattempting to opt out of using Transportation Security Administration employees for screening under new rules that should make it easier for airports to contract the work. A law enacted last month requires TSA to approve applications from airports that want to contract their passenger screening and security services if contractors can do the job as good or better than federal screeners without affecting costs. TSA has to provide feedback on the basis for any decision, including how denied applications could be improved. Four Montana airports and the Springfield Branson National Airport in Missouri applied for the …
A routine fact-check has become an excursion into the federal contracting wilderness as I try to wrangle the exact number of governmentwide acquisition contracts, or GWACs, that agencies hold for information technology products and services. The proliferation of multiple award contracts has been well documented and federal procurement officials have yet to come up with a definite count of how many exist among the various agencies. But GWACs are different because the contracting agency must first be approved to hold a GWAC by the Office of Management and Budget. That should make them easier to count, right? So far, I’ve come across…
A new inspector general report questions how much revenue the General Services Administration is setting aside for operations and future investments. GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) officials say the agency hasn’t met its goals for funding reserve accounts that pay for administering, managing and improving the schedule program. But the account thresholds have not been reviewed in several years and may not reflect actual needs, according to a report released last week by the GSA deputy assistant inspector general for acquisition audits. The inspector general last audited GSA’s revenues – earned by charging agencies for use of its schedule contracts –…
A House caucus focused on increasing the government’s use of contractors will launch next week, the Business Coalition for Fair Competition (BCFC) announced today. Members of the “Yellow Pages” Caucus believe that if the government is performing a service that is being done by private businesses in the Yellow Pages, then the service should be subject to market competition, the BCFC said in an email and Facebook announcement. “This caucus is being created by a group of like-minded members of Congress to create a forum to work together to lower the cost of government, make it more efficient and get a better idea of what government and…
The Office of Management and Budget wants Congress to reconsider a proposal to reduce how much contractors can charge the government for their executives’ compensation, an amount that is currently “unjustified and unnecessary,” the federal procurement chief said in a blog post this morning. Under federal cost reimbursement contracts, agencies pay contractors for incurred costs, including salaries for executives and other employees. These costs usually show up in the overhead rates that contractors set. OMB caps how much contractors can charge the government for executive compensation based on what top private sector executives earn. Contractors can currently ask the government to reimburse up to $693,951 for each of its top…
Taking an idea from the White House, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order Wednesday limiting how much contractors can charge the state for executive compensation. The order limits the maximum contractors can charge New York state agencies for their executive’s’ compensation to Level I of the federal government’s executive pay schedule, about $200,000. “In certain instances providers of services that receive state funds or state-authorized payments have used such funds to pay for excessive administrative costs and outsized compensation for their senior executives, rather than devoting a greater proportion of such funds to providing direct care or services…
A cap on how much contractors can charge the government for their top execs would be extended to all defense contract employees as part of the agreement reached by House and Senate leaders for the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Currently, contractors can seek reimbursement for the compensation — wages, salary, bonuses and deferred compensation — of each of the company’s top five executives. Legislation now proposed for the 2012 NDAA would extend that cap, which is now at $693,951, to all employees that work on a contract or are included in the overhead costs of a contract. The Defense Department could…