Purchasing Power

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is indignant. The "federal government lacks any means of tracking what it buys and what price it pays for goods and services," he said yesterday after holding a hearing on Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. That's rather hyperbolic. The FPDS-NG system is far from perfect, but it does collect data on hundreds of billions of dollars in purchases. And Dr. Coburn himself seems to have a far from perfect understanding of the system. His statement about it contained a couple of key errors:

• Coburn said FPDS-NG "is not universally used by government agencies. The Department of Defense, which is responsible for 60 percent of federal procurement, is not using the system." Not so. Defense is reporting data to the system, it's just not yet feeding it electronically in real time.
• Coburn said "it took the federal government until 2003 to begin collecting even this minimal amount of data." In fact, the General Services Administration collected the procurement data itself for many years before outsourcing the function with the creation of FPDS-NG.