The General Services Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are due to solicit proposals in the summer that would move forward efforts to reform the government acquisition process, Federal News Radio reported Friday.Jason Miller writes that the changes center on facilitating agility and efficiency in the purchase of commodity products and services and bolstering technical and program skills.
The report said GSA will release a draft request for proposals on the Alliant 2 vehicle, which will include standardized labor categories and an objective evaluation process, and a request for information on the VETS 2 contract for veteran-owned small businesses, as well as enable approximately 250 new vendors on the 8(a) STARS II program.
Meanwhile, NOAA plans to issue a draft RFP on the five-year, $3 billion Pro-TECH contract for technical and professional services across the ocean, fisheries, satellite technology, weather and enterprise function domains, Miller reports.
“[We] want to focus on creating an industrial base of firms that will work with us for the duration, and make investments in those areas of our mission that we are interested,” Mitchell Ross, NOAA director of acquisition and grant, told Federal News Radio.
Chris Cairns, director of the Office of Management and Budget‘s 18F consulting unit, also told the station that his team is working on developing a blanket purchase agreement for agile processes as well as exploring micro marketplaces to enable the government to serve in the role of program manager or systems integrator.
The government is also working to open the IT consulting and IT outsourcing hallways on the Common Acquisition Platform in May as part of category management efforts, the report said.
