Senior GSA official announces departure

Neal Fox, a senior General Services Administration official who has managed the agency's popular schedules contracts, said Wednesday he would leave GSA and pursue work in the private sector.

"I have given notice that I will be leaving GSA in the near future," Fox said in an e-mail sent to journalists. "It has been fun, but after nearly 30 years of public service, 26½ active duty military and 3 years at GSA, that seems like plenty."

Fox joined GSA as the assistant commissioner for commercial acquisition after a celebrated career in procurement at the Air Force. Under his stewardship, the service's Commercial Information Technology Product Area Directorate (CIT-PAD), was considered innovative for its use of governmentwide contracts to secure low prices on a variety of technology goods. Fox negotiated blanket purchase agreements with companies on the GSA schedules, allowing agencies to form agreements with one or more schedule holders.

At GSA, Fox advocated merging all the schedules into a single contract, with multiple working areas based on the type of good or service provided. He described the plan as "One GSA," and believed it would help mitigate a number of procedural and scope-of-work problems vendors have said they face.

Under a new plan to reorganize GSA's main contracting units, the schedules will be split up among various "business portfolios," each responsible for a broad range of goods and services that GSA sells now. Some have worried that this will make the schedules harder to manage and could lead to confusion among vendors.

Larry Allen, the executive director of the Coalition for Government Procurement, said in a prepared statement, "We appreciate [Fox's] efforts to work with industry to streamline and modernize the procurement process." The coalition represents more than 350 federal contractors.

Fox leaves the agency as the Federal Technology Service and the Federal Supply Service-which controls the schedules-are being merged. The new organization, the Federal Acquisition Service, will be headed by Barbara Shelton, a political appointee who previously served as GSA's regional administrator in Philadelphia.

Last week, GSA administrator Steven Perry announced that the Defense Department's procurement chief, Deidre Lee, would come on board as an assistant commissioner. Privately, a number of procurement observers have said that Lee may eventually take over the top slot from Shelton, who is regarded among insiders and some on Capitol Hill as being too inexperienced to run the government's central procurement arm. Lee, by contrast, has decades of experience and is considered one of the savviest procurement executives in government.

"At a time of reorganization within GSA," Allen said, "we have enjoyed working with the GSA of the past, and now we look forward to getting to know the FAS of the future."

Fox, who is a retired Air Force colonel, had never publicly expressed a desire to take on a management position in the new FAS. In his e-mail, he said he felt he was leaving government at an opportune moment. "There is something to be said," he wrote, "for going out while you are on the top of your game."