Acting GSA administrator backs broad cooperative purchasing plan

The General Services Administration should open up all its supply schedules to state and local governments, the head of the agency said on Thursday.

Acting GSA Administrator Jim Williams endorsed a bold, across-the-board cooperative purchasing plan that would provide state and local municipalities with access to the same goods and services that contractors sell to the federal government. "Everything we do should be open to state and local entities," Williams said at the 27th annual Government Contract Management Conference in Bethesda, Md.

The cooperative purchasing plan would require an act of Congress, but legislation hasn't been introduced yet. Currently, only a handful of GSA's multiple awards schedules are open to nonfederal governments. Cooperative purchasing is available for the procurement of IT equipment through GSA's Schedule 70, and for the acquisition of all equipment needed to prepare and recover from a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

In June, President Bush signed H.R. 3179, a bill that allows state and local governments to purchase law enforcement, firefighting, and security products and services off GSA's Schedule 84. GSA said at the time that cooperative purchasing could increase the schedule's revenue by $100 million to $200 million annually.

While the bill had bipartisan support, there has been little buzz since then about opening all GSA schedules to nonfederal governments. Williams, however, would like to build momentum for such a change. "I hope that if I keep talking about it, then it will happen," said Williams, whose tenure as administrator could come to an end in a matter of weeks, if, as expected, President-elect Barack Obama appoints his own GSA chief.

GSA should leverage its tremendous purchasing power horizontally across the entire federal government and vertically across state and local entities to provide customers with goods and services at the lowest possible price, he said.

Echoing complaints made by his predecessor, former administrator Lurita A. Doan, Williams argued against the multitude of agency-specific IT support vehicles that have proliferated in civilian agencies during the past several years. With a dire lack of contracting professionals across the government, he said resources were being wasted developing new vehicles rather than on driving value onto existing task order contracts.

These large governmentwide acquisition vehicles, such as the Homeland Security Department's EAGLE, also have created an unnecessary level of duplicity that fails to optimize a strategic sourcing mentality, according to Williams. "We have a system that is not really a system," he said. "We have stovepiped operations that are not integrated."

A veteran of the acquisition community who has worked at DHS and the Internal Revenue Service, Williams also railed against the "knee-jerk reactions" by some lawmakers to ban specific contracting types, such as cost-plus awards. He said the focus should be on beefing up the size and training of the acquisition workforce rather than on tying the hands of acquisition professionals.

"These are just tools in the tool belt," Williams said.

Obama and his Republican rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, both criticized cost-plus contracts during the presidential campaign. Lawmakers also issued restrictions on the use of cost-plus vehicles in the 2009 Defense Authorization Act.