Doan: Grassley 'Flat-Out Wrong'

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan took to the airwaves Tuesday, appearing on Federal News Radio to respond to allegations by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, of improper influence on her part (and that of other GSA officials) with contract negotiations involving Sun Microsystems. Her response:

"I will say flat out to my knowledge I do not believe there was, but I'll tell you that I'm a glass half full kind of person, so I'd like to just kind of talk about some of the positives first -- which is that Sen. Grassley and I are both saying that we need to leave the contracting decisions to GSA's professional contracting staff. And I could not agree with him more on this issue, and truthfully, I welcome his change of mind on this. Because you know just a few weeks ago, he sent me a letter demanding that I cancel the Sun contract, and had I done so, I would've been the one who was improperly influencing the decisions of a warranted contracting officer. And quite bluntly, I refused. And so I commend him for recommending that no contracting officer should be improperly influenced, but he is just flat-out wrong when he states that I improperly influenced a contracting officer."

Doan has already publicly accused Grassley of using "false innuendo to impugn the motives of GSA management."

In her interview Tuesday, Doan also had some thoughts on the future of the federal contracting workforce:

"We cannot get young, smart people to go into the contracting profession, and I'm telling you, it's not because it's not interesting work, and it's not because of the pay or benefits. It's because we tell our contracting folks to be innovative, we tell them they need to be responsive to the needs of our government customers, but the minute they do something that looks different, we rake 'em over the coals."

You can find a link to the interview here.