Congress | The Contracting Education Academy

November 4, 2019 By cs

Is Congress in the dark on supply chain risk?

Top senators on the Senate Homeland Security Committee have warned the Office of Management and Budget that IT professionals in Congress and the federal judiciary may not be getting all the supply chain risk information they need to secure their computer systems and networks as they make acquisitions.

The senators wrote to OMB Director Mick Mulvaney ″urging” the Federal Acquisition Security Council (FASC) to develop a strategic plan for sharing supply chain security information with Congress and the judiciary. The letter is signed by Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.; Ranking Member Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

The FASC is responsible for increasing information sharing within the federal government regarding supply chain risk and creating guidelines and practices for risk management. The FASC distributes the intelligence community’s supply change risk management (SCRM) threat analysis to federal civilian agencies making acquisitions decisions. But the senators said that the information from FASC is not reaching the other two branches of government and supply chain solutions that work for executive agencies don’t necessarily work for the “whole of government.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fifthdomain.com/civilian/omb/2019/10/11/is-congress-in-the-dark-on-supply-chain-risk/

October 28, 2019 By cs

Congress mulls spring continuing resolution to avoid government shutdown

With impeachment proceedings looming and budget talks stalling, Congress will likely need a stopgap spending measure for February or March, the Senate’s top appropriator said last Thursday.

A continuing resolution, or CR, would avoid a government shutdown when the last funding patch expires Nov. 21, just before Congress takes its Thanksgiving recess.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said that if the House passes a resolution to impeach President Donald Trump, it will indefinitely dominate the the Senate’s business, forestalling budget talks.

“It takes a lot of oxygen out of the air, and some business is transacted, but it will slow everything down,” Shelby told reporters, adding that a continuing resolution could be needed into February or March.

The Senate last week voted to advance the a package of fiscal 2020 domestic spending bills passed by the House, which would include nearly one-third of all nondefense discretionary spending. The Senate is set to resume consideration of the package today.

That package excludes Department of Defense appropriations, which has been snagged in a fight over border wall funding. Democrats are likely to withhold support for defense spending until a larger spending deal is reached.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/10/25/congress-mulls-spring-cr-to-avoid-government-shutdown/

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

July 3, 2019 By AMK

Why OMB is ushering us into the second golden age of acquisition

Welcome to the second golden age of federal acquisition reform.

The frustration and the technology are aligning for the Trump administration, the Congress and industry to come together to make the first set of significant, almost seismic changes since the 1990s.

“We are in that rare moment when we have the combination of factors, the customer demand for speed and agility, the congressional receptiveness for acquisition reform legislation, the strong push from OFPP on the importance of innovation such as their creation of acquisition innovation councils, category management memos and the myth busters four memo and strong actions from a number of agencies really propelling acquisition innovation,” said Jeff Koses, the senior procurement executive at the General Services Administration, at the Coalition for Government Procurement’s spring conference in Falls Church, Virginia. “Across GSA we have a number of things that I regard as innovation plays in contracting and policy domain, in the communication domain and in the technology domain.”

To that end, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy sent six legislative proposals to Congress at the end of April to clean up a few things, but more importantly to ask for permission to test and spread innovative acquisition concepts across government.

Keep reading article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2019/05/why-omb-is-ushering-us-into-the-second-golden-age-of-acquisition-reform/

June 13, 2019 By AMK

Federal online shopping platform coming soon – GSA to issue prototype RFP within the year

In the latest step towards delivering on the long-promised “Procurement Through Commercial e-Commerce Portals” program, the General Services Administration has announced plans to build a proof-of-concept for federal online shopping, aiming to issue an RFP by the end of the year for web-based acquisition platforms.

According to GSA’s notice, the platforms will be based on an “e-marketplace” model — one that connects federal customers to a range of competing vendors, similar to online shopping websites in the private sector. These “e-commerce portals” will carry “routine commercial items found on today’s commercial e-commerce platforms (with office supplies and industrial products being amongst the most common)[.]” Purchases will be limited to the micro-purchase level, which is currently set at $10,000.

The agency expects to award multiple prototype contracts, and it indicated that further proof-of-concept contracts may be needed to test other online purchasing models. These other purchasing models include an “e-commerce model,” under which each portal provider would serve as the seller of goods, and an “e-procurement model,” under which the acquiring agency would manage the platform using software supplied by a contractor to facilitate sales through multiple vendors. On this point, GSA explained that “the one model that best fits GSA’s priorities for an initial proof of concept is the e-marketplace model.”

Keep reading article at: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2019/05/federal-online-shopping-platform-coming-soon-gsa-to-issue-prototype-rfp-within-the-year/

With impeachment proceedings looming and budget talks stalling, Congress will likely need a stopgap spending measure for February or March, the Senate’s top appropriator said last Thursday.

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.

Welcome to the second golden age of federal acquisition reform.

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