Bush names new GSA administrator

The White House on Thursday announced that a Virginia businesswoman will be nominated to become the next General Services Administration administrator.

The agency has lacked a permanent administrator since Stephen Perry retired at the end of October. If confirmed by the Senate, Lurita Alexis Doan will replace David Bibb, a career civil servant serving as acting administrator.

Doan is the founder of New Technology Management Inc., a Reston, Va.-based surveillance software applications technology firm. Once the company's owner, she sold it in September 2005 to pursue a political appointment within the Bush administration, said Laurie Deramus, her former executive assistant.

The company had contracts valued at $213 million in 2003 from customers including GSA and the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, according to its Web site.

Reached at home, Doan had no comment.

Doan graduated from Vassar College with a degree in literature and earned a master's degree in Renaissance literature from the University of Tennessee, according to a profile of her in the Vassar alumni magazine.

She is an unknown quantity for most of the metropolitan Washington information technology community. GSA faces a host of challenges, including insolvent lines of business within the Federal Technology Service and Federal Supply Service.

A new political administrator, regardless of his or her abilities, could further destabilize the agency's recovery, many GSA observers have said. Career civil servants now filling top executive positions within the agency have experience that an outsider inevitably lacks and would have little time to gain before Bush's second term expires, they said.

To succeed, the new administrator will need to eschew any political appointee hauteur about civil servants, said Frank Pugliese, a former FSS commissioner and now the government practice managing director of Wilmington, Del.-based DuPont.

"It has to be a person who comes in and immediately understands there are good folks here," he said. With the right attitude, a new administrator could reverse the agency's downward plunge, he added.