CDC | The Contracting Education Academy

May 30, 2014 By AMK

Pumping up the procurement playbook

The Department of Health and Human Services is experimenting with an innovative IT acquisition playbook that assembles templates that contracting officers could use to make quicker and more inventive buys.

HHS Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak said his agency asked a contracting officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put the playbook together using some of the more innovative procurement methods allowed under the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

“The FAR has room for some interesting things,” Sivak said during a panel discussion on innovation at the Management of Change conference in Cambridge, Md. Unfortunately, there is usually “no time for procurement officers to explore those processes,” he added.

Keep reading this article at: http://fcw.com/articles/2014/05/20/hhs-procurement-playbook.aspx

September 19, 2013 By AMK

Departments underspent on small business R&D commercialization

Several departments underspent on small business programs for the commercialization of research and development because they left out entire component agencies from the calculations used to fund the programs, the Government Accountability Office says.

Under two federal programs, agencies must spend a certain percentage of their outside research and development funding on small businesses R&D efforts that align with federal priorities.

But the Transportation Department, for instance, excluded the Federal Aviation Administration from its departmentwide calculation of outside R&D spending, GAO says in a report released Sept. 9. The Health and Human Services Department did the same with both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernment.com/story/departments-underspent-rd-commercialization/2013-09-10

October 23, 2012 By AMK

Top 20 contract awards projected to be billions of dollars smaller in 2013

Agencies are expected to open markedly smaller contracts for competition in the coming year, a new market analysis shows.

The top 20 contracts anticipated for fiscal 2013 represent about $92 billion, a 38 percent decrease from the total value of last year’s top 20, which totaled $148.5 billion, according to a report by Deltek market researchers released Wednesday.

For example, the smallest contract included on Deltek’s top 20 list last year was the Defense Department’s contract, to research threats involving weapons of mass destruction, worth $2 billion. This year, the smallest contract, for health marketing communication services at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has an estimated value of $870 million.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20121010/ACQUISITION03/310100004.

May 22, 2012 By AMK

GAO rejects protest of $70 million IT contract at CDC

The Comptroller General’s Office rejected arguments from Unisys Corp. on May 7, 2012 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tricked it into overbidding on a $70 million contract to combine the agency’s legacy information technology systems.

Unisys argued CDC officials misled the company into raising its proposed price tag from $61 million to $86 million to remedy staffing insufficiencies the agency pointed out in its original bid, according to the Comptroller General’s decision.

Keep reading this article at http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2012/05/gao-rejects-protest-70-million-it-contract-cdc/55640/.

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