President Barack Obama put improving the federal acquisition process at the center of his management initiatives. Over the last three years, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy focused on three broad goals:
- Demonstrating fiscal responsibility – OFPP wants agencies to ensure competition, reduce the number of high risk contracts, such as time and materials and labor hours types, and improve the efficiency of their buying by, in part, moving toward strategic sourcing to take advantage of the government’s size.
- Strengthening the acquisition workforce – The goal is to have a better trained and equipped contracting officers and contracting officer’s representatives.
- Performance of inherently governmental and critical functions – Agencies have been reviewing the makeup of their contractor and employee workforces and figuring out the best balance of the two, paying close attention to jobs that should only be done by federal employees.
None of these areas are new. Under other administrations, OFPP’s goals would have looked very similar.
The biggest difference, however, is the attention many of these goals received from the White House. And that’s why the expectations, in some regards, were greater than ever before. At the same time, the attention to reducing agency budgets led to a more in-depth focus on better acquisition performance.
In part 4 of Federal News Radio’s special week-long multimedia series, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the last Four Years, we focus on how the administration performed against many of their top acquisition initiatives.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?sid=3020986&nid=1011.
