By Teddy Kidd
PSC Manager of Legislative Affairs
PSC Manager of Legislative Affairs
In an environment of increasing budget austerity a surprising piece of wisdom was shared at a recent meeting of the House Smart Contracting Caucus: This is a time of opportunity for federal contractors to help the government save money.
Caucus Co-chair Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., contributed to the hour long discussion, raising several points about how the contracting community can support a leaner, more efficient government. He was particularly emphatic on federal contractors’ ability to provide the government with the flexibility to ramp up and ramp down operations as agency needs change.
Caucus Co-chair Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., focused on the critical issues of the federal acquisition workforce, the contributions that can be made by the mid-tier firms in federal contracting and the impact of cloud computing.
Each presenter to the caucus, which included PSC’s own Alan Chvotkin, echoed the same sentiment—the government should increasingly look to contractors for innovative, cost-effective technologies to meet its varied missions.
But helping the government isn’t without its own challenges. As Chvotkin noted, an emphasis on contracting with the private sector means more training for the government’s acquisition workforce. Chvotkin praised Connolly for his recent bipartisan legislation to make improvements to the Federal Acquisition Institute, where many in the federal acquisition workforce develop their skills to procure goods and services for the federal government. Through improved training, federal acquisition officials will have a better understanding of the tools at their disposal and will be able to make more cost-effective decisions and source-selection decisions focused on innovation and technology, Chvotkin said.
The presenters also showed how this training will come into play as they discussed the government’s shift toward cloud computing as a way to consolidate data centers and manage information, which in turns saves money otherwise spent on energy and physical space. Government can also look to small and mid-sized firms, where much of the innovative thinking lies today, to help the government save money, they said.
This meeting of the Smart Contracting Caucus in 2011 provided a good preview of the collaboration between the new Congress and the federal contracting community. We look forward to the Caucus’s next event on June 30, which will focus on educating Capitol Hill staff about federal procurement, an industry that accounts for $535 billion annually in private-sector purchases. Given the magnitude of federal spending on goods and services, and the fact that federal contractors are actively supporting the government in every state and congressional district, it is crucial that all policymakers and their staff have a fundamental understanding of how federal contracting works, and doesn’t work.
