How the Trump administration is reshaping federal procurement

Tom Temin: And I guess what is hard is to understand what do they have in mind as an end state. It’s one thing to say it’s bloated far and let’s cut it down. But it’s hard to know what they want, because I think, as you and I have discussed earlier, in the Clinton administration, more discretion on what’s actually in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) — that’s what the outcome was for their procurement reform, and it was pretty effective.

Emily Murphy: It’s good to be here with you again. And I think you’re right. When we look at the Clinton administration and the reinventing government and the reforms that were pushed by Steve Kelman at the time and Vice President Gore, we saw a lot of focus on plain language and on commercial item contracting. And at first blush, a lot of what is happening seems to echo that — in that we’re trying to return to those principles. But I think there are some important distinctions taking place. And I think when you start to read all four executive orders together, you see that’s when the differences really come into focus.

Emily Murphy: So while the Clinton administration looked at how many words are in the FAR and how do we make it shorter and concise and really plain language, when you look at what the Trump administration is signaling with the executive orders — on both the DFAR, the FAR, commercial contracting, GSA consolidation — what they’re really suggesting is that it’s not just about a plain-language version of FAR. It’s about: How are we going to embrace other transaction authorities, commercial solutions openings? How are we gonna really go in and pare everything back to the very fundamental statutory requirements? And how are we going to make sure that — they’re suggesting with this idea of having regulations that aren’t statutory lapse every few years — that they want to make sure that they’re setting in place a version that does not allow the problem to recreate itself, where we just keep piling new good ideas back into government contracting. So they are trying to put that in place instead. We’re looking at a much, much narrower construct of what government contracting should look like.

Tom Temin: And where have they stated the chapter and verse of the statutes that they want to make sure that the remaining regulations adhere to? For example, I’m thinking of the Competition in Contracting Act. That’s got to be one of them.

Emily Murphy: Oh, absolutely. And I think that when you read the executive order specifically on the Federal Acquisition Regulation, it was very clear that we’re going to go back to the statutory tenets. If you were to look at the guiding principles, competition has got to be one of the guiding principles of acquisition reform. Interestingly though, while the Clinton administration said that to commercialize we were going to take authority away from GSA and spread it out among other agencies in order to insist on commercialization, the Trump administration is actually putting everything back at GSA and giving them greater control over how contracting is done, so that they can ensure that we are really using those commercial-type contracts.

Tom Temin
Right. They want a control point that somebody — any administration — could have its thumb on, and that’s a lot easier if one agency does all of this.

But then I just question: Why are they reducing capacity at GSA so much — with fewer people and getting out of the building and all of this? Because it does take people.

Emily Murphy: And that’s actually something else, when you look back at the Clinton administration — that happened there as well. People forget in the Clinton administration that they got rid of about 350,000 federal employees, including a lot of the 1102s — the contracting officers, contract specialists. I think that the idea is that technology will be there and be able to supplement it. And then GSA has also indicated that while they’re trying to reduce the size of GSA, they’re also open, though, to adding back more 1102s.

Emily Murphy: They’ve had two different requirements go out for both contract specialists and then for supervisory contract specialists, to try and make sure that they’re going to have that ability to bring in the people to do the work. But it’s interesting to look at the consolidation taking place at the same time you’re doing the regulatory reform, because you want to make sure that what you’re hiring for is the new process — not the old process. And I think we need a little bit more clarity on what that new process is going to be and what tools are going to be there to support that new process before you figure out exactly how many people you need to do the work.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Emily Murphy. She’s former GSA administrator and now a senior fellow with the George Mason University Baroni Center for Government Contracting. And that seems to be a pattern. We know that they want to reduce and cut in so many areas, but a clear vision of the resulting architecture — that’s been a little bit harder to come by.

Emily Murphy: And if you remember the March 20 executive order on consolidating procurement, it gave us 30-, 60-, 90-day deliverables. We’ve just gotten past that first 30-day deliverable. I think we’re going to have to really wait till we get the 90-day process, the 90-day point, to see what the new structure is going to look like and what work is actually going to be moving to GSA and how they’re going to be implementing it. We’ve seen some good signals from GSA in terms of the KodiBot and GSAi and things along those lines — to try and see where they’re looking to put new technology into support. But it still doesn’t go toward what is the underlying process.

Emily Murphy: And I remember when I was at GSA, we spent a lot of time using robotic process automation (RPA), but our goal was always to make sure we had the right process before we went in and tried to automate it, rather than automating an old, outdated process. I think GSA right now is spending that time trying to make sure they understand what process they want, so they can automate that process rather than automating the existing process and then having to continually update that.

Tom Temin: Right. You can envision where for so many of the commodities that they say they want to go all commercial and consolidate with GSA, that would seem to really point to a process that can be largely automated and with just a few people monitoring it — because you want to make sure these things, especially if AI is involved, don’t drift out of what your original plan was.

Emily Murphy: And you want to make sure that you’re meeting the requirements on where things are manufactured, what technology is incorporated in them — that the government really is getting that best pricing. So there still is a lot of work for government in all of this. But maybe the work isn’t as much on the paperwork. And hopefully it’s not taking things from one system and then having to reenter them into another system, which unfortunately still does take up a lot of time for the 1102s out there — where they’re just having to do data entry.

Tom Temin: And the other thing coming up, which I think you’ve been looking at, is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program — the technology transfer — which is very big in DoD and a number of other agencies. And it seems to have benefited the government pretty well over the years.

Emily Murphy: It’s an incredible program. I first had the chance to work on SBIR in 1997 with the reauthorization back then, and I’ve been involved with it ever since. I was really proud of the work we did at GSA when I was there in the first Trump term — creating a business line around how to commercialize SBIR. And it’s been very, very successful in bringing in more and more work — and not just bringing in work to GSA, but taking the R&D that the government has funded at low dollar values. SBIR is not an expensive program at all, but getting that then reused across multiple agencies, which has always been one of the problems with the program. Now, there are two things that I’m watching, though. First, the program itself — the authorization lapses on Sept. 30. And while I’m fairly confident it’s going to be reauthorized — it has been for over 40 years now — it never seems to happen on time. And that puts a lot of work into disarray, and it takes away some even more certainty from government contracting. And those noncommercial companies that we’re trying to bring into the government — we sometimes lose them at that point because we’ve made it so hard.

Emily Murphy: The other concern I’ve got is that with the executive order that came out on commercial contracting and the preference for commercial solutions — which is a great initiative. And I say this as someone who owned a lot of old legacy systems when I was at GSA that were based in Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) and wished we had been using commercial solutions because it would have saved us time, money, energy and been much more efficient. So I completely understand why the administration is pushing that direction — think it’s the right way to be pushing. I worry that they’re going to look at something like SBIR though and say, “OK, that’s not commercialized until phase three, so does it count as a commercial solution?” And I hope that they don’t lose that, because just the incredible technology that has come out of that program — everything from the Roomba, the Sonicare toothbrush. People forget just all of the really cool things that came up because they had a government application that was then commercialized into something that we all use all the time.