I suppose complaining about government is a democratic pastime. “It’s overly risk-averse. Lacks creativity and innovation. Ridiculously bureaucratic. Hidebound to rules and convention. Painfully slow and unresponsive. Sodden by middle management.” I could go on, of course.
There’s one particular arena of government held up to more ridicule than any other: federal acquisition. The barbs come from every stakeholder, including within the federal acquisition community itself. All the above-mentioned gripes — plus many others — are repeatedly applied to federal acquisition.
Here’s another gripe I heard recently: “It’s mind-numbingly frustrating.” This one came from no less than Anne Rung, the administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget. She was on a panel in October discussing the challenges of federal acquisition at the Executive Leadership Conference and this particular conversation can be viewed in a video clip at federaltimes.com. When she said that, Rung was referring to the problem of federal acquisition officers limiting their interactions and conversations about products and solutions with industry representatives due to perceived constraints or risks associated with the competitive procurement process.
There’s no question, as Rung has alluded, that effective and healthy communication doesn’t exist between government and industry except in rare and isolated cases. That’s a huge problem since the solutions and technologies that are so badly needed by government are becoming more and more complex. But poor communication with industry is only one of many problems plaguing federal acquisition.
Successive presidential administrations continually launch initiatives to improve training, education and acquisition management, but those consistently fail to move the needle. The Government Accountability Office last year included IT acquisition and management as a new category on its biennial list of high-risk things that are leading to excessive government waste and mismanagement. GAO said the government’s numerous failed IT projects “often suffered from a lack of disciplined and effective management, such as project planning, requirements definition, and program oversight and governance. In many instances, agencies have not consistently applied best practices that are critical to successfully acquiring IT investments.”
At the ELC panel, Rung assessed the problem this way: “I think we have to just sort of move away from this rules-based approach that every acquisition officer feels like that’s the way they need to approach an acquisition and really focus on what are the outcomes. … Take responsible risk.”
She called for the creation of “innovation labs” across government to test out new acquisition approaches and provide cover and support to procurement staffs willing to take measured risks. She implored agencies to duplicate the Health and Human Services Department’s Buyers Club, a laboratory that aims to develop new strategies and approaches, within existing regulations, to procure information technologies and related services with greater agility and within shorter acquisition cycles that result in better value and outcomes.
“Everything is allowed in the regulations,” Rung added. “I’m more and more convinced while none of us would have imagined in a perfect world that we’d create two thousand pages of regulations, it’s the processes and the systems and the culture and the approach that every agency puts on top of it that’s absolutely killing innovation.”
She’s right.
The picture is not all pessimistic. Three initiatives launched last year hold some promise at improving acquisition outcomes:
- The administration’s Category Management effort, which will enable the federal government to manage the procurement of common categories of products and services buy like a single enterprise.
- The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), which will consolidate IT acquisition management with the department-level CIO of each agency and push agencies more to develop iterative acquisition approaches and strategic sourcing strategies.
- The Digital Services Playbook and TechFAR Handbook, which encourage agencies to adopt best practices in the procurement and development of IT capabilities.
But more is needed.
I would encourage OMB — in conjunction with the relevant committee leaders in Congress and the agencies themselves — to develop metrics to measure what effective federal acquisition practice and outcomes look like and then start measuring agencies and publicly reporting those grades. We have that now with FITARA, but most of those metrics are focused on IT management, not IT acquisition. A report card on effective acquisition would do wonders to illustrate where priority attention from leadership is needed. And it would help cut through the considerable cultural barriers that otherwise would eat all these good reform initiatives for lunch.
