Breaks out appropriations under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, by department, agency, and account/program, and to the extent available, funding mechanism. more »
Outlines federal organizations' options for hiring acquisition professionals, including direct hire authority, reemployment of annuitants, excepted service appointments, hiring veterans and individuals with disabilities, and student employment. more »
Provides a summary of the major reporting requirements mandated by the Office of Management and Budget related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. more »
Summarizes the major actions and activities required by the Office of Management and Budget related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. more »
Agency inspectors general (IG) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) audi tors perform important functions in federal governance and the checks and bal ances that are part of it. That said, many in the acquisition and program com munity dread the auditors coming--not only because of the potential for criticism, but also because they know that an already crushing workload may soon be increased by the weight of the remedial activities needed to correct any identified problems. Opera tional work also is delayed while files are pulled for review, relevant procedures and policies are organized, and prompt responses are given to the IG's questions. Because of the everyday pressures of getting the work out, managers may fail to respond to the oversight process until the audit results are in. By doing so, they may miss significant opportunities to make the process more effective, and actually make the results more painful than they need to be.
Acquisition managers and program managers need to become more active and en gaged in the oversight process. Indeed, they need to manage their participation in the process in an informed and purposeful way to help ensure the accuracy of audit find ings, as well as to construct meaningful recommendations to address them. Managers who fail to do so are, in our view, more likely to feel victimized by the process as op posed to being active participants in continuous improvement. In general, managers need to approach their response to oversight in the same purposeful and strategic way that they (hopefully) manage their acquisition programs.
We interviewed several former acquisition and program managers to learn how they were able to manage the oversight process effectively. This Advisory shares their in sights and offers some practical advice on how to better manage your participation in the oversight process. more »
In today's global economy, contracting officers increasingly face questions regarding the federal government's ability to award contracts to non-U.S. companies and purchase products or services from specific countries.
The Buy American Act, Trade Agreements Act, and free trade agreements, as implemented by Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) part 25, and the Berry Amendment (unique to the Department of Defense) provide a sometimes confusing set of guidelines that contracting officers must interpret to properly solicit, evaluate, and award contracts for products and services partially or fully produced or performed in foreign countries.
This Advisory explores what acquisition professionals need to know to navigate and apply the complex requirements of the Buy American Act, Trade Agreements Act, free trade agreements, and--for Department of Defense buys--the Berry Amendment. more »
The administration is going to expect you to award economic recovery-related infra structure contracts quickly-and competitively-to generate jobs in the economy as rapidly as possible. How will you do that? And how can you best do that in a way that will not only achieve the objective of creating jobs but also ensure that the objec tives of the infrastructure project are met and that the project delivers value to govern ment and to the American people?
Strategic planning is key and should be started now, if it hasn't begun already. For the most part, agencies already should be anticipating the size and scope of the proj ects that are the priorities. The next step is to dive deeper into the details, analyze the collective needs, group the projects into like requirements, and develop a strategy tar geting both speed and effectiveness.
Our recommended strategy for achieving both goals on infrastructure construction projects: A "design-build" approach combined with a strategic use of indefinite-deliv ery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts. Design-build is a performance-based approach that can be effectively applied to infrastructure requirements to achieve results tied to specific objectives.
In this Advisory, we explore the concept of design-build and offer specific sugges tions on how agencies can get started immediately to prepare for the most efficient and effective execution and management of these projects. more »
As President Obama was signing the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law on February 17th, Acquisition Solutions assembled a group of six federal acquisition and program executives along with six of our own former federal acquisition officials to discuss the challenges ahead, share lessons learned, and to engage in creative thinking around how the promises of the Act can be met, given that the size of many agencies' discretionary budgets will have grown exponentially in the blink of an eye. Together, the group represented defense and civilian agencies, program offices and contracting organizations, as well as grants and financial assistance organizations.
The result is a compilation of collective lessons learned, successful practices, and creative ideas worth considering. We share the group's thoughts and observations as follows, without attribution. more »
There are nearly a dozen bills presently pending in Congress that deal with com-petition in contracting in one form or another. Competition in contracting is a "hot topic" if there ever was one. The Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, together with the Federal Acquisi-tion Streamlining Act (FASA) and the Federal Acquisition Reform Act (FARA) in the 1990s, establishes the ground rules for competition in federal contracting. The current procurement laws enable a fair and open system using a variety of competitive pro-cedures, some streamlined, to obtain best value for the taxpayer. But has the acquisition community gone too far in its use of streamlined methods? Has it compromised competition for the sake of expediency? Have "the guts have been ripped out" of the Competition in Contracting Act as some have claimed? Or is this competition crisis imaginary? This Advisory examines the controversy over competition with an eye toward prac-tical suggestions for policy makers and contracting officials to consider. But, first, a brief primer on the evolution of competition in contracting over the past few decades. more »
As big as federal contract expenditures are, grant expenditures are even bigger.
Grant awards account for more than 20 percent of annual federal expenditures,
compared to 16 percent for contracts. According to the latest Consolidated Federal Funds Report, grant awards amounted to more than $460 billion in 2004.1 Despite this enormous sum, relatively little attention has been paid to grantees' performance-until recently. The time has arrived for a greater focus on grantee performance, much like that bestowed on federal contracts for decades. Once most grantees had only to spend funds in accordance with the terms of the grant and to provide reports to the granting agency, but the expectations are changing.
While several agencies are using "accountability mechanisms" another term for
performance-based techniques-in their grants, we think more can be done. This Advisory discusses the need for greater grant performance accountability and suggests techniques for ensuring that accountability. We also cite several examples of agencies that are using techniques to improve grant performance in stewardship of their piece of the nearly one half trillion dollars spent annually on grants.
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