Budget | The Contracting Education Academy

September 6, 2019 By cs

Budgets require industry-government cooperation

We should all celebrate the recent passage and signing of the 2019 Bipartisan Budget Act that ended the federal budget impasse and did away with the destructive spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Thankfully, the way legislators wrote the budget deal and its two-year coverage means the threat of sequestration has finally passed.

Observers will note, however, the budget deal hints at the feared decline of defense resourcing going forward. While the defense topline grows by 2.64 percent in 2020, that growth slides to 0.33 percent in 2021; and these percentages do not consider inflation. That is well below the 3-5 percent real growth after inflation called for by former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. He saw that growth level as a requirement to regain readiness and make the necessary investments in modernization and recapitalization to ensure the U.S. military can carry out the National Defense Strategy.

While defense experts, think tanks and the Defense Department all call for fully resourcing the strategy, harbingers of flatter defense budgets yet again call for the hard thinking required to get the absolute most out of every defense dollar spent. One critical avenue of that approach is better government-industry collaboration. The more government can work with industry to identify key technology and workforce investments, telegraph future requirements, and develop innovative contracting vehicles, among other things, the more efficiently and cost-effectively industry can provide the best services and products to our warfighters over time.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/8/29/ndia-perspective-budgets-require-industry-government-cooperation

September 5, 2019 By cs

Lawmakers expect a stopgap spending measure to avoid an October shutdown

Despite the two-year budget deal, agencies are likely to receive a continuation of current spending levels well into the fall, Congressional aides say.

Agencies probably won’t receive new appropriations by the start of the 2020 fiscal year. With current funding set to lapse on Oct. 1, lawmakers appear resigned to pass a continuing resolution to give themselves more time to iron out the details of line-by-line appropriations bills.

The two-year budget deal hammered out primarily between House Democrats and the White House in late July set top-line spending levels, but Congress still must approve a package of 12 funding measures—or pass a CR—to avoid another government shutdown before current appropriations expire.

The House has passed most of the required annual spending bills for fiscal 2020, but lawmakers still must reconcile them with the Senate, which has yet to approve any appropriations bills for the upcoming fiscal year. The upper chamber delayed work on the spending bills until top-line funding levels were established and the deal was signed by Trump. The Senate Appropriations Committee is set to begin considering the legislation upon returning from recess next month.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/08/lawmakers-expect-stopgap-spending-measure-avoid-october-shutdown/159473/

June 25, 2019 By AMK

OFPP issues 4th ‘myth-busting’ memo

The purpose of this memorandum is to improve awareness of vendor engagement strategies that Federal procurement thought leaders are using to create a more responsive buying process, modernize the acquisition culture, and deliver greater value to the taxpayer.

The memorandum also asks each Chief Financial Officers Act (CFO Act) agency to ensure it has designated an industry liaison to work with the agency’s Acquisition Innovation Advocate (AIA), the Office of Small Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU), and other key acquisition personnel to promote modern vendor communication practices and counter misconceptions that drive today’s risk aversion culture.

The President’s Management Agenda challenges agencies to deliver 21st century services by modernizing information technology, increasing transparency and accountability, and building a modem workforce. 1 To keep up with the rapidly accelerating pace of technological change, a number of agencies have sought better ways to communicate with industry so they can better understand the commercial marketplace, attract new contractors, and encourage current partners to use new processes and develop, test, and offer more modern solutions. Despite this progress, the pace of adoption has been limited relative to the total volume of activity that potentially could benefit from these efforts; only a fraction of our transactions are using these new ways of doing business. For this reason, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) is taking two steps to improve awareness of these modem communication practices.

First, OFPP is using its long-standing “myth-busting” campaign to spotlight how front line acquisition officials and managers have been challenging entrenched ideas about engagement between the public and private sectors. Attachment I highlights ten misconceptions related to innovative practices and showcases successful agency efforts. As additional myths are identified and new practices evolve, new examples will be posted on the Innovation Hub2 of the Acquisition Gateway to foster dynamic conversations among the acquisition workforce.

Keep reading memo at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SIGNED-Myth-Busting-4-Strenthening-Engagement-with-Industry-Partners-through-Innovative-Business-Practices.pdf

January 25, 2019 By AMK

No, the Pentagon did not waste $28 billion

Last week, headlines blared with claims that the Defense Department had failed to spend $28 billion in time, forfeiting all that money back to the US Treasury.

The story said the Pentagon had “let $28 billion go to waste,” with “tens of billions of dollars unspent” as “time ran out.”

This would be an awesome and scandalous story, were it true. Fortunately, it’s not. Just about all of this $28 billion in taxpayer funds will be spent. What this story really highlights is the arcane complexity of the budget execution process at the world’s largest organization. The Pentagon receives a lot of criticism on many different topics, but this is one instance in which piling on is unwarranted.

Keep reading this article at: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/01/no-the-pentagon-did-not-waste-28-billion/

November 1, 2018 By AMK

Fiscal 2019 could be ‘high-water mark’ of defense spending

With the defense budget enhanced and set for fiscal 2019, contractors should “enjoy the moment,” Pentagon Comptroller David Norquist told an industry audience on Monday.

In processing the newly augmented $700 billion spend that Congress delivered before the start of the fiscal year, many on his finance staff had no recollection, he said, of a time decades ago when the military wasn’t always coping with the uncertainty of multiple continuing resolutions and government shutdown threats.

“We’re in a very different place now,” he told 300 attendees at the Professional Services Council’s 54^th annual Vision Federal Market Forecast conference, held in in Fairfax, Va. “Under a continuing resolution, we often had to wait until spring to do some things—now we can finalize them now or do them on schedule.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/defense/2018/10/fiscal-2019-could-be-high-water-mark-defense-spending/152390

We should all celebrate the recent passage and signing of the 2019 Bipartisan Budget Act that ended the federal budget impasse and did away with the destructive spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Despite the two-year budget deal, agencies are likely to receive a continuation of current spending levels well into the fall, Congressional aides say.

The purpose of this memorandum is to improve awareness of vendor engagement strategies that Federal procurement thought leaders are using to create a more responsive buying process, modernize the acquisition culture, and deliver greater value to the taxpayer.

Last week, headlines blared with claims that the Defense Department had failed to spend $28 billion in time, forfeiting all that money back to the US Treasury.

With the defense budget enhanced and set for fiscal 2019, contractors should “enjoy the moment,” Pentagon Comptroller David Norquist told an industry audience on Monday.

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