Congress and the executive branch have worked for years to improve the quality of and reduce costs for federal acquisition, but some problems continue to hamper many agencies, according to a Sept. 12 Government Accountability Office report.
“Acquisition reform has been on everyone’s agenda for many, many years, decades. There have been proposals in the Congress, there has been changes to the regulations. This has been a very, very active area for a long time,” said Bill Woods, director on the Contracting and National Security Acquisitions Team at GAO, in an agency podcast.
The report evaluated federal agency acquisition improvements against 89 recommendations made by the Acquisition Advisory Panel in 2007 and divided the areas of improvement into three “buckets” that represent the acquisition life cycle: requirements and definitions; competition and pricing; and contractor oversight.
“One is in the requirements, definition process of actually deciding. What is it does the agency want? What does it need, and what’s the best way of getting what we need?” said Woods.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/09/17/3-big-problems-continue-to-dog-federal-procurement/
Think about what is considered “innovative” these days. Reverse industry days? Vendors and agencies are supposed to talk.
Its list of high-risk programs, which encompass such disparate management areas as the national flood insurance program, the 2020 Census, Defense contract management and the security clearance process, reflects how widespread the problem is.
At the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee’s sparsely attended but provocatively titled hearing, “Regulatory Divergence: Failure of the Administrative State,” officials espoused the need for federal agencies to adopt a unified cross-agency framework for developing regulations, rather than the “siloed” fashion in which rules are typically crafted.
