Summaries for January 1, 2009

WITH ALLIANT SMALL BUSINESS, GSA AVOIDS MISTAKES OF ALLIANT FOR LARGE BUSINESS
There's no more frustrating story in government than to have a major contract award overturned on protest, forcing the agency to start over. But sometimes, to get it right, an agency is agile enough to pull contract awards before they are protested. Mary Powers-King, Director of GWACs and IT Schedule 70 at GSA, did just that with the Alliant for Large Business and Alliant Small Business programs.  -> Read More

TWO WEEKS TO GO, AND STILL NO CTO?
President-elect Obama is the world's biggest drive-in movie screen. Every interest group and constituency is projecting its fondest hopes on this screen. Locally, speculation continues over who will be Obama's choice for federal chief technology officer, if indeed there is to be one at all, and what a federal CTO would do. -> Read More

CONTRACTORS: BATTEN DOWN THE OVERSIGHT HATCHES
Welcome to 2009 and the 111th Congress. Federal contractors no longer have the sympathetic ear of Tom Davis, and may have been a bit relieved that Henry Waxman gave up his chairmanship of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. But Waxman's successor, Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) appears equally energetic about stringent oversight of federal contractors. -> Read More

GOVERNMENT-INDUSTRY PARTNERING GETTING MORE SPECIFIC
Social networking will have its place in government, but there will still be applications where extremely robust privacy and security requirements apply. This is especially true for the growing class of applications in which government is partnering with narrow segments of industry for highly specific purposes. The Social Security Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Transportation Security Administration are all enlisting the aid of industry to help achieve individual objectives. -> Read More

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• With Alliant Small Business, GSA Avoids Mistakes of Alliant for Large Business

  Mary Powers-King

  There's no more frustrating story in government than to have a major contract award overturned on protest, forcing the agency to start over. But sometimes, to get it right, an agency is agile enough to pull contract awards before they are protested.

  Such was the case at the General Services Administration, which has been trying to award two major government-wide acquisition contracts (GWACs) with similar names: Alliant and Alliant Small Business (SB). Both are omnibus, multiple award, indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity contracts for a wide range of IT services.

  Mary Powers-King is director of GWACs and IT Schedule 70 at GSA. She joined the agency a year ago after 28 years at the Transportation Department, where she'd held a variety of IT positions in several component agencies. She managed the FAA's program to prepare for the year 2000 computer conversion.

  Alliant SB contracts went to 72 offerors in December, with a notice to proceed with task orders expected this month. Powers-King points out that GSA had awarded 62 offerors contracts for Alliant SB in December of 2007, but it pulled the awards. Why?

  "It was because Alliant "big" protests were sustained. There were weaknesses in the evaluation of past performance," a methodology also used for Alliant SB, Powers-King said. She was referring to GSA's Alliant program for large contractors, also awarded last year but successfully protested such that GSA redid the evaluations. (The agency says it expects to have the Alliant large business program on track with awards expected in March.)

  "Small Business had four protests, but they were dismissed after we pulled back. There were no task orders" for the original awards, she said. Part of the problem stemmed from GSA's use of a contractor to collect past performance information from the offerors, and in the documentation for justifying the evaluations, Powers-King said. Although the contractor didn't actually evaluate the information, the second time she simply had government personnel collect it. Offerors' cost-plus and contracting plans were not re-evaluated the second time.

  Powers-King said that GSA lets offerors see bad past performance reports that may have been filed and gives them a chance to rebut the reports.

  But what about COMMITS NexGen, a Commerce GWAC using small IT contractors that was taken over by GSA? Powers-King said that the two programs are structured differently. Neither Alliant SB nor COMMITS has no functional areas defining contractors, but COMMITS has dollar threshold tiers for distinguishing contractors. COMMITS encompasses 53 awards, only five of which overlap with Alliant SB contractors. Because they were separate procurements, GSA cannot blend the two programs, she said.

  Then there is 8(a) STARS, but this program limits contractors to certain specified functional services, whereas Alliant BP contractors can bid on everything, Powers-King said.

  Looking at the Schedule 70 program overall, Powers-King cited GSA's Vision 2010 for revitalizing it. This involves "how to improve the efficiency of our IT Center, including training the workforce, better contract management, and faster awards and modifications."

  With better communications between the agency and contractors, and more senior management oversight of Schedule 70, Powers-King said the venerable program, whose growth has slowed recently along with that of federal IT spending, can stay viable.

  As for GWACs, not surprisingly Powers-King said the GSA isn't thrilled about a proliferation of IT GWACs throughout the government.

  "They take time and resources, whereas this is a core competency for GSA," she said. "It's unclear why anyone would go anywhere else."

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• Two Weeks To Go, and Still No CTO?

  President-elect Obama is the world's biggest drive-in movie screen. Every interest group and constituency is projecting its fondest hopes on this screen. A quick perusal of Change.gov shows a widespread and fervent belief that nearly every institution in the U.S. is a failure that can only be repaired by a large and costly federal effort. Whatever faith may still exist in private enterprise, states' rights or limited federal government is certainly not evident there.

  Locally, speculation continues over who will be Obama's choice for federal chief technology officer, if indeed there is to be one at all, and what a federal CTO would do. So as the incoming team keeps fairly close counsel on its specific plans, the questions create vast echo chambers. Typical is an interview with Google's Vint Cerf, a developer of the internet protocols, in National Journal.com. Key takeaway Cerf quote:

  • "Here's the problem: CTO is a very general term. It's chief technology officer. And for a number of people, the definition has tended to be narrowed down to information -- chief information officer and information technology."

  He goes on to say that a CTO could also have a broad job, given that technology can affect a wide range of government initiatives.

  Also the object of intense speculation is whether Change.gov will morph into something the Obama team uses to govern.

  Exciting as these questions are, the Obama team will face some prosaic and lingering IT challenges that can't be solved with social networking, hive thinking - or even a federal CTO.

  For instance:

  Defense logistics . A recent GAO report - one of several on the same topic - pointed out that the Navy has trouble keeping track of spare parts, and inventorying the right ones. Nearly $2 billion in parts have no discernible use. And, as FCW reported, the Defense Logistics Agency is giving contractors until the middle of this month to respond to a request for proposals on updating DLA's distribution system.

  Without a more efficient logistics supply chain to support it, whatever military doctrine the new administration adopts would be hard to implement. Even the switch of emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan is hampered by lack of supply chain visibility and accuracy.

  Development of the National Health Information Network. Last month the Social Security Administration said it would be the first agency to use NHIN. It hopes the network, by letting it receive records electronically, will speed up the processing of disability claims.

  A kind of specialized value-added network, the Health and Human Services-driven initiative is sure to be closely examined by the Obama administration, which made healthcare reform an important component of the campaign. (More on health IT below.)

  Broadband and public safety network . The FCC's Kevin Martin has been much criticized for tying the sale of the so-called D-Block of soon-to-be-unused television spectrum to a requirement that the auction winner make a portion of the bandwidth available to first responders nationally. A group called the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST) is urging the Obama administration to spend $15 billion of its planned economic stimulus package on development of a nationwide, 700 MHz broadband network. The PSST notes, it is how many years since the 9/11 attacks and still there is no interoperable, national network?

  If a federal CTO thinks it will be all fun and games on Web 2.0 - he or she will have to think again.

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• Contractors: Batten Down the Oversight Hatches

  Welcome to 2009 and the 111th Congress. Federal contractors no longer have the sympathetic ear of Tom Davis, the 7-term Virginia Republican who retired from the House and is now working at Deloitte.

  Contractors may have been a bit relieved when Henry Waxman, the ultra-liberal California Democrat, gave up his chairmanship of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee so he could take over chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

  But Waxman's successor, Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) appears equally energetic about stringent oversight of federal contractors. In an interview with Federal News Radio, Towns emphasized contracting and waste, fraud and abuse. And besides, given the broad reach that Waxman assumes for Energy and Commerce, he is by no means out of the picture.

  Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) was recently elected ranking minority member of Oversight and Reform, replacing Davis . A fierce combatant of Waxman, he is forming his own investigations group to bird-dog programs in the Obama administration.

  This committee personnel change occurs against a backdrop of growing pressure for greater contractor accountability. The think tank of Obama's transition team leader, John Podesta, last month put out a report calling for more data gathering on contractor activities - including wages - by agencies. The report views government contracting in light of its labor rights implications.

  Here's a sample of what the priorities for contractors might be:

  "Due to massive increases in federal contracting coupled with inadequate oversight, the twin problems of contractors treating their workers poorly and ripping off taxpayers have grown in importance... The government's lack of knowledge about the contracted workforce is shocking and unacceptable."

  Contractors might also find themselves caught in a crossfire between administration progressives and agencies on what work should be done by government and what by contractors in the first place. The Obama team seems partial to Transportation Security Administration workers, promising to let them unionize. In a November letter to the American Federation of Government Employees, it criticized a $1.2 billion TSA contract award to Lockheed for personnel services support.

  Meanwhile, thanks to a provision in the 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy is supposed to be rewriting and streamlining the definitions of work that is inherently governmental and should therefore not be outsourced.

  The reality behind all this is that contracting is likely to change only slightly around the edges because - as the Podesta report itself points out, citing the Congressional Budget Office - "the federally contracted workforce is estimated to be 'more than twice as large as the combined total of all three branches of government, the U.S. Postal Service, the intelligence agencies, the armed forces, and the Ready Reserve.'" Facing a pair of trillions in the deficit for 2009 and the estimated size of the stimulus package, no government agency has a realistic chance of growing by the number of people required to replace contractors.

  But, given the very real waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq contracting, the government has plenty of room for improvement.

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• Government-Industry Partnering Getting More Specific

  Social networking will have its place in government, but there will still be applications where extremely robust privacy and security requirements apply. This is especially true for the growing class of applications in which government is partnering with narrow segments of industry for highly specific purposes.

  Here are three recent examples:

  As noted above, the Social Security Administration is testing the National Health Information Network to receive medical applications for disability claims. As Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt recently stressed, strict privacy rules must govern these and any health records, whether the rules and standards enabling them originate with government or the private sector. And make no mistake-personal, electronic health records are starting to gain ground outside of government with services like nomoreclipboard.com or PassportMD.com building applications independently or on top of other providers of online records such as Microsoft and Google. Thus HHS and DOD's Military Health Systems are using such companies in trials this year.

  Related to health IT, the Food and Drug Administration, as first reported in the Wall Street Journal, entered into a contract with Entelos, a company that describes itself as a leader in predictive disease simulation. The company will work with FDA to assess cardiovascular drugs. Here, too, a highly specific technology application will combine government and industry data with large health and commercial implications.

  In the homeland security domain, the Transportation Security Administration is still dealing with the issue of air cargo screening. A 2007 law requires TSA to screen 100% of air cargo by 2010.

  Clearly, this is beyond the resources or capability of the agency to do on its own. So it is enlisting the help of companies in the chain of supply ending up as air cargo. It wants companies to test various technologies such as X-ray and substance detection. Facilities would eventually become certified by TSA in terms of their own security. Clearly this increases the degree to which the federal government and industry share the risk of what might be in an airborne container.

  P.S. - A recent published story concluded that passenger screening by TSA amounted to nothing more than what the author termed "security theatre." To be sure, it often seems silly. But for another point of view, visit a little corner of TSA's web site it calls Terminal Madness. Yes, Virginia, people really do try to get knives and mace aboard airplanes.

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