Summaries for April 1, 2010

DAVE MCCLURE HAS GOVERNMENT "IN MY BLOOD"
Even during the nine years he worked in the private sector, Dave McClure had government blood flowing through him, as he puts it. So it seemed to make perfect sense when he returned to public service last summer. Now, as Associate Administrator in the Office of Citizen Services and Communications at the General Services Administration, McClure is making an impact from a slightly different angle than from his 18 years at the Government Accountability Office, where he oversaw systems development and IT management.  -> Read More

PROCUREMENT SCENE IS CROWDED WITH POLICY PROPOSALS
You almost need a scorecard to keep track of all of the procurement initiatives converging on federal managers, who must be scrambling to keep up. In the previous edition of FedInsider, I touched on the final reports of both the Defense Acquisition Reform Panel and the GSA Multiple Award Schedule Advisory Panel. Several other procurement reform initiatives also bear watching.  -> Read More

                                                                            Advertisements



IRMCO 2010 Kicks Off on Sunday, April 11
IRMCO, the #1 conference for senior government executives, CXO's and senior program managers, kicks off on April 11 at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, MD. At IRMCO you'll have the time to learn about other agencies and their challenges from over 250 participants, spanning 75 different government agencies while enjoying breezes off the Choptank River, a relaxed business casual atmosphere, and temperatures that promise to reach into the 60's.

When you attend IRMCO 2010 you'll hear from John Berry, Director, OPM on his first anniversary with OPM, and gain an overview of the security of America's infrastructure by Howard Schmidt, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator. At IRMCO you can also earn up to 18 Continuous Learning Points for attending the full conference.

GSA's IRMCO will take place from April 11-14 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in historic Cambridge, Maryland, a short, 2-hour drive on uncongested Route 50 due East. Since this year's IRMCO is one of the strongest in the conference's 49 year history, the room block at the conference hotel is full, but you can still attend and stay at one of the very fine hotels near the conference in Cambridge and Easton MD at or below per diem. Register today at www.irmco.gov.

NETWORX, GWAC'S AMONG GSA'S JOHNSON'S CHALLENGES
Like a persistent itch, the Networx contract -- or the seemingly slow uptake of it by federal agencies -- continues to bedevil the General Services Administration. Networx, the set of contracts covering a wide range of communications services, was made mandatory back in 2008 in an order signed by Karen Evans, then the administrator for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget. April 1 of this year was the theoretical deadline for agencies to have switched from FTS 2001 contracts.   -> Read More

STILL AHEAD: HARMONIZING ALL THE CYBER SECURITY BILLS
The Senate is in recess, so nothing is happening at the moment on S 773, the big cyber security bill sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), chairman of the Commerce Committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). The committee approved the bill last month. The legislation has been bouncing around for a year. As was widely reported, it was modified recently such that the president is explicitly not given any new authority, especially not to cut access by federal agencies and other entities to the Internet during time of cyber crisis.   -> Read More

• Dave McClure Has Government "In My Blood"

  David L. McClure

  Even during the nine years he worked in the private sector, Dave McClure had government blood flowing through him, as he puts it. So it seemed to make perfect sense when he returned to public service last summer. Now, as Associate Administrator in the Office of Citizen Services and Communications at the General Services Administration, McClure is making an impact from a slightly different angle than from his 18 years at the Government Accountability Office, where he oversaw systems development and IT management.

  "All I did on the outside was government focused," he said. After a short stint at the Council for Excellence in Government, McClure was managing vice president for research for the government arm of Gartner Inc. "It does feel like home," he said of government, except now he is closer to the execution end of the best practices he promulgated earlier. Plus, having worked on the Obama transition team, he is a political appointee.

  Two big efforts McClure is overseeing are a revamp of USA.gov and finding new and innovative ways to engage citizens.

  USA.gov, which the GSA bills as the official portal of the government, has been a consistent award winner and the object of regular technology updates since it was launched early during the George W. Bush administration.

  "But it looks like a web site of five or ten years ago," McClure said. "We're updating the look and feel and enhancing the functionality so it is also a service site." Coupled with usability testing, McClure promised, "you'll soon see a different look and feel and some new features designed to get services to citizens fast."

  The revamped USA.gov will offer mobile applications for people on the go wanting federal information on, say, a disaster or a food warning. Because it is the government's main portal, McClure said, the staff at GSA will work to keep USA.gov ahead of the proliferation of federal web sites that have been spawned by numerous administration initiatives, such as recovery.gov, usaspending.gov and data.gov; and the growing number of dashboards that threaten to become more confusing than transparent.

  McClure said that GSA has been working closely with the Office of Management and Budget, particularly in new approaches to citizen engagement. Agencies recently concluded online public dialogs for how they should improve transparency, innovation and participation. The tool used, IdeaScale, was chosen by GSA.

  "We provided a common dialog tool, and it saved a lot of time and money," McClure said. GSA also provided training on how to use the tool. Moderators received a week of training so they knew how to ensure there was real dialog between agency and public, and to guide the discussions so that the input was useful. Plus, the tool, McClure said, can automatically reject spam, profanity, and other unwanted or irrelevant material. Agency plans, based on what they learned, are due this week (April 7).

  Another initiative for McClure's shop is one that's joined GSA and OMB at the hip: the interrupted cloud computing effort, in which GSA was to acquire a governmentwide contract for cloud service. But he canceled the request for quotations, and now GSA is developing a new request for proposals. The episode shows McClure's GAO background.

  "It had been a year," since the original RFP had been developed, he said. "I felt it was a long time. We had started to develop our RFP at the early states of the government cloud. Now, agency requirements are in better shape and the market has matured. We needed to step back and develop a procurement in line with the industry and agency needs." McClure estimated a new solicitation could be on the streets in another 60 days.

  Return to top

---

• Procurement Scene Is Crowded With Policy Proposals

  You almost need a scorecard to keep track of all of the procurement initiatives converging on federal managers, who must be scrambling to keep up. In the previous edition of FedInsider, I touched on the final reports of both the Defense Acquisition Reform Panel and the GSA Multiple Award Schedule Advisory Panel.

  Neither of these reports has the force of law. But they both have gravitas, given the makeup of each panel. The MAS panel is a large set of expert, industry old-hands, while the Defense panel was comprised of members of Congress. Even with the weight they carry, one wonders if federal agencies are approaching change-management burnout, and the sweeping changes these panel findings bring to them simply beyond agencies' ability to absorb right now.

  Just consider what else is going on:

  • Both Congress and the administration are moving towards having agencies consider, in their source selection decisions, the wages, health benefits and other employment conditions of contractors. Two Democratic members of Congress, Robert Andrews of New Jersey, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions House Committee on Education and Labor, and Patrick J. Murphy of Pennsylvania sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office asking for a report on contracts that might be going to companies with labor violations or who don't provide health care benefits to their employees. It is one of many letters going to and fro on this topic, including some to the president urging support of union-friendly contractors. For its part, the White House seems to be formulating what is being called the High Road Contracting Policy, as far as I can tell first reported by The Daily Caller. Should something like this become policy, let alone law, it could vastly change the procurement system, with the potential of driving up costs in many business domains. It would make for all contracting what sometimes prevails in construction contracting, where labor- or union-friendly parameters supersede others. For the IT market, the effect might be less costly since IT contractors tend to employ some of the most highly skilled workers to begin with, generally at low or zero rates of unionization, and very few of whom earn anything close to minimum wages.
  • This week the Office of Federal Procurement Policy released a 48-page Notice of Proposed Policy Letter, which includes a definition of inherently governmental work. Actually, the definition was the simplest, least innocuous part of the guidance. It told agencies to use the definition found in the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reporting (FAIR) Act. The return to the original source was generally welcomed. But more interesting is that the document clearly gives agencies wide discretion to bring work that is not inherently governmental in-house. The proposal is open to comment through May, but the direction of the administration is clear. Take a few moments to skim the policy proposal and you'll see that it aims for an ingathering of work for government employees. However, in my opinion, it is likely to affect contractor business only marginally while having the potential to significantly improve federal oversight of contractors and contracting, and hence, overall performance. Besides, there are major challenges to wholesale ingestion of new workers at the managerial level into the government. This all makes the policy more extreme-sounding that it is likely to be in practice.
  • The Labor Department released a proposed rule of its own, regarding what happens when Contractor B wins a follow-on service contract that had been held by Contract A. B would be required to give first dibs to A's in-place workers. Never mind that one reason a new contractor was selected could well have been the performance of Contractor A and its work force. The rule implements a presidential order to the same effect. While it is true that the worker bees often get new company credentials when one management leaves and another arrives, removing contractors' discretion could be counterproductive to the aims of the agency's recompete. Like the inherently-governmental proposal, this one is still open for comment. It is hard to see how the administration, as a legal or practical matter, could compel a contractor to hire this or that set of workers.
  • Later this month, the General Services Administration will operate a database called the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System, a mashup of several existing databases.  These are the Excluded Parties List System and the Past Performance Information Retrieval System. It will toss into the mix information on non-responsibility determinations, criminal convictions and several other pieces of information. As the notice in the Federal Register (linked above) points out, OMB is considering lowering the threshold for reported contracts from $500,000, as specified in the law, to the lower, simplified purchase threshold. And OMB is considering the addition criminal information not related to federal contracting. FAPIIS was specified back in the 2009 Defense Authorization bill, and presumably it will be consulted by contracting officers before making awards. Past attempts to make comprehensive databases of contractors themselves, much less all of the performance information about them, have been less than successful. Data quality is always an issue. And contractors complain that often matters are in dispute, and it is unfair to have them listed in a database. Many of the watchdog groups are hailing the opening of FAPIIS, such as the Project on Government Oversight, which operates it own Federal Contractor Misconduct Database.

  Juxtaposed, these proposals create a complex picture. And they don't include all of the legislative proposals inching their way through Congress. More on that in the next issue.

  Return to top

---

• Networx, GWAC's Among GSA's Johnson's Challenges

  Like a persistent itch, the Networx contract -- or the seemingly slow uptake of it by federal agencies -- continues to bedevil the General Services Administration. Networx, the set of contracts covering a wide range of communications services, was made mandatory back in 2008 in an order signed by Karen Evans, then the administrator for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget. April 1 of this year was the theoretical deadline for agencies to have switched from FTS 2001 contracts.

  There is persistent probing of agencies' slowness to use Networx by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chair and rank on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. They're not asking GSA, though. They are sending queries to Homeland Security, the Defense Department, Commerce and other departments.

  Could it be customer service? There's no way to tell at this point, but at her first public speech a couple of weeks ago, GSA Administrator Martha Johnson said she specifically wants to improve GSA's customer service. She is using terms like "customer intimacy", improving the skills and performance of the GSA workforce, and results orientation. Speaking at a TechAmerica forum, Johnson laid out an ambitious program of transformation, the evidence of which will be increasing sales across its many vehicles.

  If Networx, itself a comprehensive and ambitious program, is emblematic of GSA, then it might also be a bellweather for how far Administrator Johnson is able to move the agency -- which, by the way, has been growing, albeit at a slower rate than during the 1990s. Although some agencies have obtained large telecommunications deals outside of Networx, there have been some Networx wins. In late March, the Environmental Protection Agency signed a $29 million dollar contract with AT&T under Networx to provide Trusted Internet Connection services. Besides, the agency hasn't been sitting on its hands. In February it announced plans for Connections II, a $10 billion, follow-on to the Connections contracts that will complement what is available on Networx and perhaps speed up adoption of the latter.

  Meanwhile, a truly strange story in Federal Computer Week detailed how the program manager for NASA's Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement, Joanne Woytek, wrote to columnist and former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator Steve Kelman -- via his "wall" on FaceBook. She expressed worry that OFPP might de-authorize NASA in 2012 to operate the government-wide acquisition vehicle, which last year achieved $2 billion in sales. Why? She said it was because GSA's "GWAC Director" was about to ask OFPP to de-authorize the National Institutes of Health to operate its Chief Information Officer Solutions and Partners III (CIOSP3) program as a GWAC. Kelman blogged about the wall posting from Woytek.

  I find it hard to picture GSA officials running to OFPP to try and kill off competing GWACs, or thinking that is the route to greater success that Johnson has in mind. OFPP is perennially suspicious about whether too many GWACs exist, but it is unlikely to arbitrarily end programs that are well-subscribed.

  Return to top

---

• Still Ahead: Harmonizing All the Cyber Security Bills

  The Senate is in recess, so nothing is happening at the moment on S 773, the big cyber security bill sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), chairman of the Commerce Committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). The committee approved the bill last month. The legislation has been bouncing around for a year. As was widely reported, it was modified recently such that the president is explicitly not given any new authority, especially not to cut access by federal agencies and other entities to the Internet during time of cyber crisis. Movement on it comes as cyber security not only moves to front-of-mind across government, but as the government is coming to grips with it in a comprehensive way.

  A lot of flap occurred over the provision that was inaccurately described as giving the president authority to somehow shut down the Internet. As a technical concept, the idea that the president could shut down the internet at all is a bit silly. True, the Internet is dependent on 13 root servers around the world, but that doesn't mean there are 13 little buildings you can point to and say, "There's a root server." Each logical server is comprised of hundreds of physical machines all over the place. Don't forget, the Internet was originally designed to be redundant. Regardless, the presidential power is not in the bill as it passed the committee before recess.

  In its rewritten form, the bill fosters close collaboration and information sharing between government and industry, but not federal regulation of the private sector in terms of cyber security and response to a crisis. It gives the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) the assignment of creating a long list of standards for which agencies would be audited, including standard configurations used be all government offices, contractors and grantees. It tasks the Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget to establish a federal cyber security dashboard. And it establishes a cyber security advisory panel to advise the president.

  There are also provisions for quadrennial cyber security reviews, as well as for a certification and licensing program for anyone doing cyber security work for the federal government. There is even a plan for the National Science Foundation to establish a full scholarship program for up to 1,000 students per year to obtain degrees in cyber security in exchange for federal service.

  Still, much harmonizing is yet to be done in Congress. A companion bill, S 778, still waits in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. That one contains the provision to establish a real cyber "czar" reporting directly to the president. It's doubtful the White House would care for that provision, given that the administration has established the cyber security coordinator at the level it feels comfortable with. And in February the House passed the Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2009, sponsored by Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.), and it is now with the Senate. It also aims for more research and development focused on cyber security and interagency cooperation.

  Given the earlier White House action to establish the cyber security coordinator, and active cooperation among Homeland Security, NIST, the National Security Agency and even the Defense Department, it looks as if the federal government has finally coalesced around this issue, 15 years into the online government era.

  Return to top