OMB Issues Guidance Boosting Interagency Purchasing
September 30, 2011
Encouraging agencies to reduce waste by leveraging their "own buying power," the federal chief procurement officer on Thursday issued guidance designed to reduce duplication in acquisitions by increasing interagency contracting and information sharing.
Dan Gordon, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, in a letter to chief acquisition officers and senior procurement executives, wrote that too often, "agencies establish new overlapping and duplicative contracts for supplies or services because the agencies have not adequately considered the suitability of existing interagency contract vehicles: governmentwide acquisition contracts, multiagency contracts and blanket purchase agreements."
Failure to exploit such opportunities for new efficiencies, he said, "results in higher prices and unnecessary administrative costs."
Beginning in January 2012, the guidance directs, agency managers should not enter into a new contract without first performing a cost-benefit analysis to "balance the value of creating a new contract against the benefit of using an existing one, and whether the expected return from investment in the proposed contract is worth the taxpayer resources," Gordon wrote on the White House blog.