For the third year in a row, the annual Defense authorization bill the House Armed Services Committee will begin considering is chock full of provisions that are meant to reform the acquisition system – including one that would represent the biggest change in decades in the way the government buys commercial goods.
Among the more than five dozen acquisition provisions in the bill is committee chairman Mac Thornberry’s proposal to require DoD to buy its commercial-off-the-shelf products from private sector “online marketplaces” like Amazon. The chairman first floated the idea in a discussion draft a month ago, and the version the panel will consider today is 
mostly unchanged with two major exceptions: it would apply to the entire federal government, not just DoD, and it would require the government to do its buying through at least two online platforms rather than “one or more.”
But the revised version seems to have done little to satisfy industry’s many concerns with the proposal, including that it does not make clear how agencies would comply with numerous other acquisition laws and regulations – including protections for small business – and that it would bypass the Competition in Contracting Act.
Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/defense-news/2017/06/house-begins-work-today-on-another-round-of-dod-acquisition-overhauls/
