The Contracting Education Academy

Contracting Academy Logo
  • Home
  • Training & Education
  • Services
  • Contact Us
You are here: Home / Archives for EPA

June 6, 2011 By AMK

Agencies told to go green on 95 percent of purchasing

The Obama administration’s campaign to have agencies “lead by example” in sustainable purchasing became stricter this week when the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council released an interim rule on green procurement.

Following up on President Obama’s 2009 executive order on green management, the draft published Tuesday in the Federal Register would require agencies “to leverage agency acquisitions to foster markets for sustainable technologies, materials, products and services.”

It tasks the head of each agency with ensuring that 95 percent of new contract actions are for products and services that are energy efficient, water efficient, bio-based, environmentally preferable or non-ozone depleting, adhering to criteria set out by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department. With the exception of weapons systems, agencies also must aim to procure items that contain recycled content and are nontoxic.

The toughened policy is being spearheaded by the Defense Department, NASA and the General Services Administration. It requires all federal contractors to support the government’s goals in environmental management, and includes new requirements for electronic or other paper-saving methods for submitting documents required by contracts.

“In the face of changing environmental circumstances and our nation’s heightened energy demands, the federal government must lead by example to create a clean-energy economy that will increase prosperity, promote energy security, protect the interests of taxpayers and safeguard the health of our environment,” the rule states.

Agencies have until Aug. 1 to submit comment.

— by Charles S. Clark – Government Executive – June 1, 2011 – http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=47921&dcn=e_gvet

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: Agriculture Dept., clean energy, DoD, EPA, green procurement, green products, GSA, NASA, sustainability

June 2, 2011 By AMK

Obama’s regulatory chief announces reforms at 30 agencies

Fleshing out agency responses to President Obama’s push to rethink regulations, Office of Information and Regulatory Administrator Cass Sunstein on Thursday announced alterations to long-standing rules under way at 30 federal agencies that together, he said, could save billions in dollars and millions of staff hours.

In his summary of agency progress 120 days after Obama’s Jan. 18 executive order, Sunstein said current paperwork reduction efforts at the Transportation and Labor departments and the Environmental Protection Agency alone could save $1 billion and tens of millions of work hours for state and local governments. He spoke at a talk titled “A Regulatory Look-Back: A First Look” at the American Enterprise Institute, his former employer, and he published a related op-ed on “21st-Century Regulation” in the May 26 Wall Street Journal.

The Obama initiative, Sunstein said, is “a corrective to national debate on regulation that has become polarized and stylized in a way not helpful. One side,” he said, “defends reductions in deaths on the highway, fighting fraud and abuse, keeping air and water clean and our food safe. But more recently, the other side says such regulations impair competitiveness, undermine innovation and ultimately cost jobs.

“They are legitimate arguments, but we can’t be solving serious problems in the abstract. The polarized debate is stuck in the past.”

A modern regulatory approach, he said, cannot rely on “anecdotes or intuition,” but instead must move toward “real-world random testing” of the benefits and harms of regulations. This requires “a change in culture in Washington to focus constantly on what is and what is not working,” he said. In the future, “agencies must hard-wire such scrutiny into agency processes.”

Today’s professional regulators “know much more than they knew during the New Deal and the Great Society,” or even during the 1980s and 1990s, he added. “Now we have state-of-the-art technology for cataloging the impact, risks and costs of regulations. Sometimes in reducing one risk, you increase another and there are ancillary harms,” he said. “But there are also ancillary benefits, and lives are saved.” What is desirable, he said, is “free choice, which both provides liberty and costs less.” Simpler regulations and public disclosure “help produce informed choices and creative approaches,” Sunstein said.

Sunstein made a bid to bridge the partisan divide. “It’s true that people’s values differ, but when the evidence is clear, it will lead in a direction even if there is an intensive difference in values. If a regulation brings big costs and little benefit, then citizens are unlikely to like it regardless of whether they are elephants or donkeys,” he said.

Examples of agencies’ current work include 70 initiatives at Transportation, 50 reforms at the Health and Human Resources Department, and 12 short-term high-priority projects at EPA. The Treasury Department has a five-year paperless initiative that will save 12 million pounds of paper and $400 million, Sunstein said.

EPA recently decided that that classifying milk as an oil — and thus requiring precautions to prevent oil spills — was an unjustifiable burden on dairy farmers, and so the resulting easing of rules will save industry $1 billion in the next decade. Similarly, EPA determined that gas stations no longer need air pollution recovery systems because modern vehicles do the job, saving upwards of $60 million annually, he said. And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he said, will save millions of dollars by eliminating 1.9 million annual hours of redundant employer reporting.

“Many of the [reforms] focus on the small businesses that create jobs,” Sunstein said. “And some are a fundamental rethinking of how things have been done.”

He is also determined to rid the Code of Federal Regulations of references to countries that “no longer exist.”

Laying out four principles, Sunstein said modern regulations should encourage public participation through ready access to scientific and technical information; should be harmonized and simplified to boost innovation; should use quantification to catalog costs and benefits; and emphasize freedom of choice, which “promotes compliance.”

In response to a questioner, Sunstein acknowledged that some of the recent changes were expansions of regulations rather than eliminations.

The National Association of Manufacturers, which has long been critical of Obama’s approach to regulation, reacted to Sunstein’s announcement with a statement: “Manufacturers are encouraged by the Obama administration’s efforts to streamline or remove several outdated and unnecessary regulations to allow manufacturers to focus on what matters most — creating jobs and economic growth. However, manufacturing workers will not fully benefit until the crushing burden of proposed new regulations is brought under control.

“The administration has taken several positive steps recently,” the group said. mentioning EPA’s effort on industrial boilers and OSHA’s work on noise standards as indicators that the administration has heard the concerns of manufacturers. “But new burdensome regulations such as those proposed by EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and change ozone standards are a real threat to job creators and the economy. While today’s announcement is a great step, more must be done to limit the cumulative burden of regulations on businesses.”

Matt Madia, regulatory policy analyst for OMB Watch, a monitoring nonprofit, had a wait-and-see response. “There’s nothing wrong with doing a review,” he said, “but we should not lose sight of the fact that these regulations were written for a reason — to protect the environment, human health and the economy.”

Sunstein said there currently are 120 rules under review at the Office of Management and Budget and that the look back has not caused any noticeable slowdown.

The agency actions released today are for public comment, and should be finalized in “roughly 80 days,” he said.

Sunstein called his initiative “a defining moment” that will have impact decades in the future. He quoted Alexander Hamilton’s first Federalist paper, in which the Founding Father asked whether the country would be guided by “reflection and choice or be forever destined to depend on accident and force.”

– by Charles S. Clark – Government Executive – May 26, 2011 at http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=47880&dcn=e_gvet

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: DOT, economic recovery, EPA, federal regulations, HHS, manufacturing, OMB, OSHA, regulatory reform, small business, Treasury Dept.

February 8, 2011 By AMK

DoD contracts went to excluded vendors

The Pentagon obligated millions of dollars in payments to contractors that were on lists of “excluded parties” because of previous fraud, a report made public Wednesday said.

The report, produced by the Defense Department’s office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, found that between 2007 and 2009, DoD did business with at least 16 vendors who were either suspended or debarred at the time the funds were obligated. Congress mandated the report in the 2010 Defense appropriations bill.

The spending included nearly $3.4 million to five vendors who were suspended and almost $2 million to 11 debarred vendors.

DoD’s report explained that in some cases, contracting officers knowingly continued ordering from the excluded vendors “to ensure mission accomplishment and for safety and mission requirements.” In others, however, Defense officials failed to check the vendors against the governmentwide Excluded Parties Listing System.

“The Federal Acquisition Regulation was misinterpreted and/or training was inadequate with regard to EPLS – an issue subsequently addressed by commanders,” the report stated.

The report found that DoD and the justice system have adequate remedies to pursue and prosecute contractor wrongdoing, but said the review that led up to the report revealed the need for new guidance on EPLS within the DoD contracting community.

The report stated that the director of Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy’s new guidance also will include instructions for using the new Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS).

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who inserted language into the 2010 Defense spending bill mandating the report, made the information public. He seized on the report’s broader revelation that DoD had continued contracting with companies who had been subject to criminal or civil fraud judgments at some point.

The report found that DoD spent $345 million on payments to vendors that had been criminally convicted during the three-year period, $4.9 billion to vendors with civil judgments against them during that time and nearly $46 million to contractors that had reached out-of-court settlements related to fraud.

“With the country running a $14 trillion national debt, my goal is to provide as much transparency as possible about what is happening with taxpayer money,” Sanders said in a statement. “The sad truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been engaged in systemic fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.”

The government in recent years has been aggressive in combating fraud. The Small Business Administration suspended GTSI for small business contracting violations.

The Environmental Protection Agency suspended IBM in 2008 as well for alleged procurement integrity violations.

DoD said its Panel on Contracting Integrity would examine the new report and make further recommendations to Defense leadership based on their review.

– By Jared Serbu, Feb. 2, 2011, Federal News Radio

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: DoD, EPA, Excluded Parties, FAPIIS, SBA

October 27, 2010 By AMK

IG: EPA faces acquisition workload issues

Officials say they’ve had no specific contract work unduly delayed or not awarded because of the current workload

The Environmental Protection Agency’s acquisition leaders will have trouble accommodating an increase in contracting work because they lack agencywide performance measures for acquisition staff members, according to a new report.

EPA’s Office of Acquisition Management doesn’t track performance metrics, and officials need that information to modify employees’ workloads in response to changing volumes and priorities, according to a report released Oct. 25 by the agency’s inspector general.

EPA officials agreed to create overall performance measures, but they disagreed with another recommendation.

The IG recommended instituting plans for dealing with potential problems related to balancing traditional activities with projects funded by the economic stimulus law.

However, EPA officials said no contract work had been unduly delayed or not awarded. They also said mandatory action plans would limit acquisition officials’ options for striking an appropriate balance between regular contracts and those related to the stimulus law, according to a letter written in response to the report.

EPA has made stimulus law and grant awards a top priority, at the expense of non-Recovery Act work, the IG wrote. That could push activities that are not related to the stimulus law to the back burner, the report states.

EPA received $7.2 billion under the stimulus law and oversees $81.5 million in work, the report states. Although that represents 2 percent of all the agency’s acquisition activities, managers have voiced concerns about the amount of work and the agency’s ability to perform it with current staffing levels.

— by Matthew Weigelt – Oct. 27, 2010 – Federal Computer Week

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: acquisition workforce, ARRA, EPA, IG

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4

Popular Topics

abuse acquisition reform acquisition strategy acquisition training acquisition workforce Air Force Army AT&L bid protest budget budget cuts competition cybersecurity DAU DFARS DHS DoD DOJ FAR fraud GAO Georgia Tech GSA GSA Schedule GSA Schedules IG industrial base information technology innovation IT Justice Dept. Navy NDAA OFPP OMB OTA Pentagon procurement reform protest SBA sequestration small business spending technology VA
Contracting Academy Logo
75 Fifth Street, NW, Suite 300
Atlanta, GA 30308
info@ContractingAcademy.gatech.edu
Phone: 404-894-6109
Fax: 404-410-6885

RSS Twitter

Search this Website

Copyright © 2022 · Georgia Tech - Enterprise Innovation Institute