Eye on Policy

If the Trump administration does anything well, it is to keep everyone guessing. From whether to sanction Russia to energy policy, nothing characterizes this administration so much as unpredictability.

Still, for those companies in the business of federal contracting, some initiatives have taken on what looks like a sustained trajectory. Among them: consolidation of much contracting into the General Services Administration.

This started with an executive order back in March. The vague order simply called on agency heads to submit plans for having GSA “conduct domestic procurement with respect to common goods and services.”

In practice the order refers to the categories of goods established by the long running Category Management initiative. That is, it covers a wide range of products and services including information technology, travel, facilities and construction, office supplies and anything transportation related like cars and fuel.

Underscoring this drive, GSA looks to be absorbing, like The Blob of horror films, the big governmentwide acquisition contracts long operated by NASA and the NIH. NASA’s SEWP and the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center’s CIO-SP contracts have long competed successfully with GSA’s own GWACs.

You could even say the competition has sparked continuous innovation and improvement in how these programs worked. Buying agencies offered plenty of task orders to go around.

Yet in some sense they also look like duplication of effort. For vendors trying to maximize their opportunities, working to get onto, and maintaining revenue on multiple look-alike vehicles can be costly. Indeed, in an email to Federal News Network, GSA’s Jeff Koses (a long-time career manager at GSA) started, “Our shared goal is to reduce duplication and enhance efficiency.” So many questions. The law firm Miller & Chevalier pointed out big questions concerning the future of certain Defense Department Components, notably the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Health Agency, and the Army Corps of Engineers. All three buy on a large-scale of their own.

Because drugs, medical equipment and health services also fall under category management, expect the change to drastically change things for the National Institutes of Health and conceivably for the VA. 

Contractors have little they can do except continue to monitor what happens. Administrations pay varying degrees of attention to industry, but when there’s zealotry about a policy, it is hard to make much headway. 

Plus, the end result could take a range of forms. The SEWP and CIO-SP vehicles could move intact into GSA, bringing their staff with them. Or, at the other extreme, they could cease of exist as discrete entities and somehow subsume into GSA own contracting programs. At this point, the best course of action is to act fast on task orders, keep customer service high and thereby retain good will of the contracting entities that still exist and their customers. 

Big Vendors, Big Discounts

The government has a tradition of seeking pricing comparable to vendors’ biggest commercial customers. But the two recent deals are eye-popping, and they both are issued from GSA. 

Earlier this spring, Google agreed to a 71% governmentwide discount off its Google Workspace through September of this year. 

More recently, GSA signed up Adobe for a deeply discounted deal under the agency’s OneGov initiative. Again, a 70% discount, only this time through November 2025 for a bundle of Adobe online products. The products fall more in the dull utilities category—forms, digital signatures, Acrobat—than in the creative suite area. No one is getting Creative Cloud dirt cheap. 

So, the precedent was already set for GSA to supersede individual agency agreements before the potential takeover of SEWP and CIO-SP. GSA is jumping from individual contracts to whole contracting programs. For software vendors who might have a contract with one or just a few agencies, these developments might present an opening to go governmentwide—if you can tolerate the discounts.