The Obama administration has yet another dashboard on the way. Dan Gordon, head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, told Federal Times in a statement that the administration will launch a dashboard to track agencies’ progress on acquisition reform later this summer. The administration has had its much-ballyhooed IT dashboard up and running for about a year, and is working on another dashboard to track agencies’ progress toward “high priority performance goals.” Dave McClure at GSA is also working on something called a “citizen dashboard” that we probably won’t see until sometime next year. Some agencies, apparently realizing that…
Browsing: Procurement
The water metaphors were flowing at yesterday’s Senate Budget Committee hearing on federal contracting. In his opening statement, Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator Dan Gordon mentioned the massive growth in government contracting over the last decade. He said that acquisition workers “couldn’t cope with this tsunami of buying that was taking place.” Not to be outdone, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse later said that “more than half a trillion dollars a year and climbing is clearly a geyser of taxpayer funds that needs to be carefully watched.” Either way, it sounds like taxpayers are taking a bath.
Corruption in the Afghanistan government is a well-worn topic, and Afghan subcontractors were singled out by a House subcommittee recently for extortion and corruption. But according to a New York Times article published this week, U.S. contractors deserve a share of the blame as well. The story says Afghan companies are accusing American contractors of not paying them for supplies and services, and leaving the country with unpaid bills of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. An unnamed military official with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan told the Times that “American contractors are contributing to fueling…
Corporate Responsibility Magazine released today its list of the top 10 “best corporate citizens” in government contracting. The magazine took the top 100 contractors listed on USAspending.gov and applied the same methodology it uses to produce its annual “100 Best Corporate Citizens” list. (The necessary information was available only for the 37 publicly traded companies on the list.) Firms are judged on their environmental impact, employee relations, corporate governance, financial responsibility, philanthropy, and human-rights policies. And, drum roll please … the best corporate citizen in government contracting for 2010 is … Hewlett-Packard!!! Well, good for them. Rounding out the top…
The Office of Management and Budget is going to announce today that it’s halting all financial systems modernization projects across the government. That means 30 projects worth $20 billion are now effectively on hold until OMB can come up with a way to improve the procurement process in this area. The most well-known failure in this area is the Veterans Affairs Department’s CoreFLS project (since replaced by a new program called FLITE that hasn’t gone much better). The department has spent a total of about $300 million on this boondoggle over 10 years and has seen no tangible benefits. Jeff…
Government contractors and subcontractors are now required to post signs that “inform their employees of their rights as employees under federal labor laws.” Acquisition workers will have to write the provision into every contract they write from now on. The rule went into effect yesterday, about a month after the Labor Department published it in the Federal Register. It’s based on a Jan. 30, 2009 executive order from President Obama. The president wrote at the time that his order was “designed to promote economy and efficiency in government procurement. When the Federal Government contracts for goods or services, it has…
Stan Soloway and Alan Chvotkin over at the Professional Services Council expressed their displeasure with Defense Department insourcing efforts in a May letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Recent congressional attention to the issue hasn’t done much to assuage their concerns. In a conference call with reporters this morning to discuss the Senate and House versions of the 2011 defense authorization bill, Soloway and Chvotkin said PSC supports an amendment by Rep. Jim Langevin that would prohibit DoD from setting quotas for its insourcing efforts. However, two other amendments passed by the House seem to conflict with the Langevin amendment,…
The fireworks might come a week early for President Obama’s interagency task force on small business contracting. The group, formed in April, will hold a public meeting June 28 to discuss ways to get small businesses more involved in federal contract opportunities. Given the recent grumbling about Obama’s acquisition reforms and their impact on smaller firms, some might see this as an opportunity to vent their frustrations. The public meeting announcement emphasized “removing barriers to small business participation” as one of the task force’s goals, but there’s a strong argument to be made that the administration has added significant barriers…
The Wall Street Journal speculates on possible punishments for BP, saying that the government could go beyond fines and bar the company from receiving federal contracts. BP is the single biggest supplier of fuel to the Department of Defense, with Pentagon contracts worth $2.2 billion a year, the Journal reports. BP has plenty to be worried about right now, but losing the right to bid on U.S. government contracts is probably fairly low on the list. The Gulf spill doesn’t have anything to do with a federal contract, so a suspension or debarment action would just be vindictive — and…
So yesterday at the GSA Expo, Administrator Martha Johnson was walking around in a black and white outfit, if I remember correctly. But by the time she arrived at the Coalition for Government Procurement dinner to announce GSA’s new goal of eliminating the government’s carbon footprint (good luck with that, by the way), she had changed into — you guessed it — a green jacket. Johnson’s speech received what sounded like polite applause last night, from a crowd made up mostly of vendor representatives. And CGP president Larry Allen was fairly critical of Johnson today, even after he’d had a…