Spending | The Contracting Education Academy

August 19, 2019 By AMK

Money spent through OTAs surges to more than $4 billion

Other Transaction Agreements are an increasingly popular contracting tool, and they’re affecting overall government contracting numbers.

OTA purchases across the government surged from $2.3 billion in fiscal 2017 to over $4 billion in fiscal 2018.

The numbers come from the BGOV200, an annual ranking of the top 200 federal contractors created by Bloomberg Government.

“While multiple-award contracting is expected to dominate spending for years to come, agencies are also leveraging new acquisition methods to buy goods and services more quickly and easily in ways they haven’t before,” the report states.

The OTA authority, which was expanded by the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, allows agencies to sidestep the Federal Acquisition Regulation and work with innovative, small companies that don’t normally do business with the government.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/otas-contracting-fiscal-2018-bgov/

August 15, 2019 By AMK

OMB, GSA to oversee ‘technology business management’ buys

The federal government is taking concrete steps to require agencies to use Technology Business Management (TBM) methodology and data standards to measure IT costs and create a cross-agency framework for understanding IT spending.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA) are teaming up to create a review board to supervise agency procurement of TBM tools and services. Agencies are required to adopt TBM and to go through the coming Task Order Review Board (TORB) as part of the acquisition process.

At stake is how $80 billion to $90 billion in federal IT spending is measured and managed.

The TORB is set up to exercise considerable authority over TBM acquisition, providing technical expertise and documents to support procurement and ultimately approval to proceed with an acquisition or revisions to an agency’s TBM plans “to address deficiencies or concerns,” according to contracting documents.

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/articles/2019/08/07/tbm-review-board-mazmanian.aspx?m=1

August 13, 2019 By AMK

OTAs primed for growth

Increasingly the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are looking to “other transaction authority” agreements to acquire emerging technologies.

Procurements made under OTA are exempt from many Federal Acquisition Regulation rules and are typically limited to research, prototypes and in certain cases follow-on production.

The authority dates back to the 1958 Space Act, passed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch, but in recent years it has heated up as the military and DHS have tried to leverage the innovation of tech startups that haven’t typically looked to the federal market for growth.

According to contracting intelligence firm Deltek, OTA spending hit $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2018, up from $2.1 billion in 2017. Because of increased interest in OTA procurement, Deltek recently began breaking out OTA opportunities and spending as a separate category in its GovWin database.

Part of the reason for renewed interest in OTAs is the need to innovate on the defense side faster than our adversaries.

Keep reading this article at: https://defensesystems.com/articles/2019/08/05/otas-set-for-growth.aspx

December 19, 2018 By AMK

USASpending.gov needs better search and better data, watchdog says

The Treasury Department needs to build more search functionality into its online government spending database and do a better job highlighting what data might be inaccurate, according to a congressional watchdog.

The department must do more to secure the site and comply with federal open data policies, the Government Accountability Office said in a report published last Thursday.

Treasury is mandated by Congress to report quarterly agency expenditures on USASpending.gov, which offers the public a detailed breakdown of the more than $4 trillion the government spends every year. While publishing spending data promotes government transparency and oversight, auditors found the site lacks a number of features that would give citizens greater insight into how taxpayer dollars are being spent.

The site doesn’t provide structured, machine-readable metadata on agency contracts and obligations, going against recommendations from the Office of Management and Budget, the report said.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/12/usaspendinggov-needs-better-search-and-better-data-watchdog-says/153561/

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

Other Transaction Agreements are an increasingly popular contracting tool, and they’re affecting overall government contracting numbers.

The federal government is taking concrete steps to require agencies to use Technology Business Management (TBM) methodology and data standards to measure IT costs and create a cross-agency framework for understanding IT spending.

Increasingly the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are looking to “other transaction authority” agreements to acquire emerging technologies.

The Treasury Department needs to build more search functionality into its online government spending database and do a better job highlighting what data might be inaccurate, according to a congressional watchdog.

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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