“Federal executive agencies are required to provide a forecast of expected contract opportunities, including those that small businesses can fulfill. Learn about potential contracting opportunities early in the acquisition process.
The Forecast tool allows you to view forecasted opportunities before the formal requirements are posted in SAM The tool gives businesses a searchable list of anticipated Federal contracting opportunities for the current and future fiscal years.”
“As a small business, it is helpful to examine what agencies are forecasting to purchase. Use this information to prepare your strategy and take hold of the opportunity when it posts.
How To Access The Forecast Tool is available to the public athttps://www.fbf.gov. You do not need a username or password to access the information.
Potential suppliers can see if the expected opportunity is planned for award to an “Other than small business” or if it will be set aside for a small business or socioeconomic small business.
Final decisions on the extent of competition or small business participation will not be made until a solicitation is posted to [The System for Award Management] SAM.
Point of Contact Name and Email
Direct questions on a planned procurement to the point of contact in the listing. Always reach out to the point of contact (POC) listed in this section with your questions regarding the acquisition. You should obtain asmuch information as possible to give yourself time to prepare for when the opportunity is published as a Request for Information, Request for Proposal, or a solicitation. Include the Listing ID in the correspondence to help the point of contact quickly identify forecast records.”
“The General Services Administration is failing to properly manage performance-based service contracts while struggling to resolve longstanding contract administration challenges, according to an inspector general’s audit.
The report claims GSA contracting personnel are not adequately fulfilling performance-based contract oversight, which could result in underperforming contractors and wasted government funds.”
“In some cases, quality assurance surveillance plans, or QASPs, meant to ensure the government receives the services it paid for have not been established or enforced. Contracting personnel for the Federal Acquisition Service also failed to comply with an internal policy aimed at improving contract administration within GSA.
The Federal Acquisition Regulation requires GSA to produce performance reports for contractors and enter those reports into the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System. But the reports “were often incomplete or not available at all,” the audit found, and in cases where the reports were available, the materials “lacked clear measures for success or failure” and did not indicate that QASPs were employed to track contractor performance.
The IG report recommended GSA implement improved management oversight for contracting personnel and update its policies to ensure personnel produce comprehensive QASPs in compliance with regulations.
The report also recommended contracting personnel to produce more comprehensive materials when filing Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System assessments, and to complete refresher training on any new policies associated with the audit.
The IG office has considered GSA’s contract administration a significant management and performance challenge since fiscal year 2020. The agency has documented its work in recent years to address specific issues associated with its contract management practices, from establishing an effective, enterprise-wide internal control environment to improving supply chain risk management and enhancing competition at the task order level.
GSA Associate Administrator Krystal Brumfield wrote in response to the IG report that the agency agrees “more must be done” to address its contract administration challenges. GSA is planning to develop a Corrective Action Plan to address all of the IG recommendations, Brumfield added.
GSA awarded over $8 billion in internal contracts in fiscal year 2021, while FAS supplies over $84 billion to agencies in assisted acquisition services, information technology products and solutions and more.”
“About a decade ago, the General Services Administration (GSA) commenced with the implementation of the One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) professional services contract vehicle. At the midpoint in the program, this blog provided a review of what, to that point, had been a highly successful.
Five years hence, we find that the program continues its great success. Virtually every segment of the socio-economic business space has participated significantly in OASIS―8A, Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Businesses, Woman Owned Small Businesses, Veteran Owned Small Businesses, and on.”
“This program consists of Multiple Award Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (MAIDIQ) vehicles for the acquisition of complex professional services divided between Unrestricted vehicles (OASIS U) and Small Business (OASIS SB) vehicles for the following services:
Program management
Management consulting
Logistics
Engineering
Scientific services
Financial services
Under the program, awardees are selected based on a technical evaluation of their capabilities, experience, and past performance, using a weighted, point scoring methodology. Cost/price is evaluated only for fairness and reasonability. Task orders are competed in accordance with FAR 16.505 and can be performed on a cost, fixed price, time and material, or labor hour basis.
At the midpoint in the program, this blog provided a review of what, to that point, had been a highly successful, best value contract management program. We pointed out that, since its inception, with an estimated total value of almost $21 billion, growth in OASIS demonstrated that the market embraced the program. We also highlighted the substantial obligations going to small businesses (48 percent or $4.7 billion) at the time. Five years hence, we find that the program continues its great success.
As shown in the charts below, give or take, obligations under both OASIS channels doubled since the midpoint of the program. In fiscal year (FY) 2022, cumulative OASIS obligations exceeded $12 billion, which represents a 12 percent increase from FY 2021. OASIS SB accounted for 40 percent of the total obligations under the program. Specifically, OASIS obligations increased 8.9 percent from FY 2021 to FY 2022, and OASIS SB obligations increased 16.4 percent. Since FY 2015, the program has grown over 1900 percent.
More impressive than this raw data, however, is the story that lies underneath. For instance, regarding small businesses, there is healthy participation across the spectrum of the socio-economic space that comprises the explosion in small business obligations, $394 million to $5.025 billion, over the life of the program. Virtually every segment of the socio-economic business space has participated significantly in OASIS―8A, Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Businesses, Woman Owned Small Businesses, Veteran Owned Small Businesses, and on.
Equally important is the data surrounding the federal customer’s acceptance of OASIS. The breadth of the federal market space, civilian and defense customers, participates significantly in OASIS. Indeed, the Department of Defense and its constituent agencies make up the single largest source of OASIS expenditures at $5,411,560,957.33. Additional evidence of the acceptance of OASIS in the federal market space is found in the comparison of OASIS obligations to other Professional Services Spending (PSS). In FY 2015, PSS spending was $10,838,703,981, and total OASIS obligations were $616,131,751. By FY 2022, total OASIS’ obligations had grown to $12,614,029,207, and PSS spending was $8,936,898,697.
Overall, OASIS has been a good news story for the government and for GSA as the program’s managing agency. GSA should be complimented for its good work here, as it holds the promise of building on demonstrated success to create success in the future. Coalition members are encouraged to see again the identification of an opportunity channel for small business and the reference to OASIS in the planned follow-on program, OASIS+. Coalition members look forward to working with GSA and all stakeholders in ensuring the success of OASIS+.”
“WASHINGTON TECHNOLOGY” By Nick Wakeman, Editor in Chief
“While the Small Business Innovation Research program is often hailed as a success, too many technologies fail to advance beyond phase two of the program.
GSA is working on a government-wide contract vehicle that would give agencies access to these emerging technologies.“
“Research is underway to build a contract that could give agencies easier access to new technologies emerging out of Small Business Innovation Research programs.
Many call it the “Valley of Death” — that seemingly uncrossable chasm between early prototyping of a new technology and getting it into the hands of government users.
Phase three is a challenge because it requires an agency to fund further development work to get that technology or solution into production, said Jim Ghiloni, acting innovation sector director and IDIQ labs group manager at the General Services Administration.
At our Washington Technology Power Breakfast, Ghiloni said GSA is working on a government-wide contract vehicle that would give agencies access to these emerging technologies.
No final sign-off has happened yet. Ghiloni and his team are still working on a business case to present inside GSA, but he sounded optimistic.
Market research is still going on. A source sought notice went out this summer. More requests for information are likely and Ghiloni expects a draft solicitation in the spring of 2023. The vehicle could be in place by next fall, he said.
Part of the plan is that the contract would function like the GSA Schedule program, in that it would always be open to companies that finish phase two of an SBIR contract and have a technology they are ready to sell. Those companies would then submit a proposal to get a spot on the vehicle, then market that technology to government agencies.
The idea for the vehicle came about because too many technologies failed to make it beyond SBIR phase two.
All SBIR contracts have three phases, starting with the first phase of developing a proof-of-concept. Phase two continues the research-and-development efforts to prove that the technology is commercially viable.
Phases one and two are funded by the SBIR program. But the company needs to find an agency buyer so it can continue to phase three and commercially develop the technology.
That gap is difficult to cross because there has not been an easy mechanism for agencies to use, even if they were interested in the technology.
Given the structure of a government-wide contract, Ghiloni said the vehicle will become familiar and trusted by agencies.
The idea is to make it easy for agencies to leverage some of these emerging technologies. It will also be a way to draw new entrants into the government market, Ghiloni said.”
“In just one year, more than $300 million earmarked for small businesses ended up going to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3Harris, and other top defense contractors, according to a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
“Experts say this misuse of funds threatens to force more small companies out of business, eliminating competition and empowering defense giants to drive up prices.
And since the program uses middlemen, taxpayers end up paying extra for gear from companies that have no problem selling directly to the Pentagon.
The sheer size of the program also allows officials to make big claims about supporting small businesses while pumping money toward traditional defense giants, according to Robert Burton, a lawyer who previously served as a high-level federal procurement official.
“We don’t generally have $33 billion contracts over 10 years,” said Burton. “This one is special because the DoD is getting credit for all $33 billion going to small business.”
David Goodreau, the president of the Small Business Aerospace Industry Coalition, said small businesses that contract with the Pentagon are tired of big promises with little payoff.
“There’s all kinds of reasons to exercise supply chain contraction, but not at the expense of telling everybody in your marketing materials and at your conferences […] about how you’re doing more for small business,” Goodreau said. “It’s a lie.”
Not your mother’s small business
The Tailored Logistics Support (TLS) program is administered by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which conducts acquisitions for military services. The program manages the $33 billion small business contract, which it subcontracts to four intermediaries. The resellers are in turn supposed to fulfill their orders by purchasing from small business manufacturers. But not all of that money is getting where it’s meant to go.
To understand how this is happening, let’s look at one of these four intermediaries: Atlantic Diving Supply (ADS), which gets the vast majority of its revenue through the TLS program. At first glance, it might be hard to consider ADS — a corporation with more than $1 billion in annual revenue — a “small business.” But it plays a key role in the program, according to Nick Schwellenbach, the POGO report’s author.
“The idea of the program is that all sorts of federal agencies […] can go to DLA and say, ‘We have some special ops guys, we have some troops who need knives or rifle scopes or new boots, and we don’t want to go through the traditional contracting process. We want to do this quickly,’” Schwellenbach said.
Intermediaries like ADS, which have the know-how to work smoothly with the Pentagon, can in turn seek out small businesses to produce the gear and then sell it to the government. As Schwellenbach argues (and the Pentagon implies in its marketing), contracting to small businesses speeds up procurement, generates new ideas, and keeps prices low by encouraging competition.
But there’s a loophole in the system: ADS can contract out to businesses of any size if it gets a waiver approved by the Small Business Administration.
POGO found that, in one year alone, ADS funneled at least $150 million of its small business funds to L3Harris, the 11th largest federal contractor. The result? Equipment prices go up, and money meant for small businesses ends up in the hands of big corporations.
“L3Harris does plenty of business directly with the Pentagon… so why does this gear need to go through a small business intermediary which tacs on its own costs,” wondered Schwellenbach. “The more middlemen you have, the worse the deal is for the customer.”
A rubber stamp
As the ADS example shows, a big part of the problem is the waiver process. SBA is increasingly approving waivers that allow money designated for small businesses to end up in the coffers of large corporations.
In 2017, the SBA only granted about half of the waiver requests it received. In 2021, the agency’s approval rate for waivers jumped to 93 percent.
“Why is SBA just sort of rubber stamping these waiver requests?” asks Burton. “It’s a rule that’s not working.”
In this case, DLA may have gotten a little too used to SBA’s rubber stamp. The DLA initially asked for and received a waiver for a $1.3 billion contract, but it later applied that waiver to a $33 billion contract for the program.
In response to questioning from lawmakers, the SBA said “waivers apply only to the items waived, not to the entire contract,” adding that DLA’s view of the waiver was too expansive. The SBA says that this violates its regulations, while the DLA argues their wider application of the waiver was necessary to meet Department of Defense requirements.
In the end, the question is not necessarily whether this loophole was illegal. As Schwellenbach points out, this is not a criminal violation, so no one can be held individually accountable.
In any case, this problem goes beyond the actions of any individual, according to Burton, who considers such a misleading use of funds to be an indictment of the small business procurement process.
“Either there’s a violation of current rules, or the system allows for that,” he said. “Either one is wrong.”
“The General Services Administration is providing more details on how it’s aiming to launch a new blanket purchase agreement for cloud commercial technologies that will serve as a major one-stop shop for the entire government.”
“The General Services Administration is seeking advice from the private sector on how to move forward with the rollout of its new one-stop shop for government-wide secure cloud commercial solutions with its release of a draft performance work statement.
GSA previously announced its intention to launch a multi-purpose, multi-award blanket purchase agreement for cloud technologies last year, aiming to reduce administration costs and streamline procurement and forecasting processes across agencies.
The presolicitation information provides details on how the new BPA will work, featuring authorized vendor responsibilities that include cybersecurity assessments and evaluations, as well as mitigation, remediation, disclosure and authorization to operate requirements. The document also includes a range of responsibilities around the operations and maintenance for Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service cloud services.
The goal of Ascend is to provide agencies with “more effective system integration and managed support services for the delivery of flexible, diverse, and secure cloud solutions,” GSA said. The new BPA will be categorized in pools and additional sub-pools as it matures and requirements change, including infrastructure as a service and Platform as a Service, Software as a Service and Cloud Professional Services.
Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, told FCW’s Cloud Summit in April that the new initiative, called Ascend BPA, will “allow agencies to acquire and implement secure commercial cloud service offerings” and “have built-in minimum thresholds for security, data ownership, common terms and conditions.”
“The driving factor around this is going to be demand signal generation,” Hashmi said. “We want to make sure that we understand deeply the commonality across the government of requirements, expectations, minimum capabilities … those kinds of things that are common for all agencies – we want to make sure they’re baked into the foundation.”
GSA said it encourages all stakeholders interested in partaking in the Ascend BPA acquisition to respond to the presolicitation notice by June 6.
The agency hopes Ascend will serve as the go-to stop for others interested in procuring secure cloud offerings, but it isn’t the only one working on streamlining processes for commercial cloud products and services. The Department of Interior recently released a draft solicitation for a contract worth up to $1 billion for enterprise-wide cloud hosting solutions.”
Chris Riotta is a staff writer at FCW covering government procurement and technology policy. Chris joined FCW after covering U.S. politics for three years at The Independent. He earned his master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he served as 2021 class president.
“General Services Administration is partnering with the Federal CIO Council on zero trust playbooks set for release in the coming months, featuring methods to take the conceptual security framework into the implementation phase, an official from the agency’s IT modernization office said.”
“Kiran Balsa, deputy director of the IT modernization office of governmentwide policy at GSA, said the agency plans to publish approximately six playbooks around zero trust implementation methods, with some explaining the base capabilities required to establish a zero trust architecture, and others focusing on identity, devices, network applications and other areas.
“There’s a lot there, and it can all be distilled down in simple terms,” Balsa said at a Digital Government Institute event on Thursday. “That’s what we’re trying to do – and then provide actual guidance to agencies.”
While agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a wave of guidance around zero trust in recent years, including NIST’s SP 800-207 and CISA’s zero trust maturity model, Balsa suggested those materials lack concrete steps to implement agency-wide zero trust security measures like continuous verification, preventing lateral movement and automated context collection and response.
The CIO Council began leading a multi-agency effort earlier this year to develop the zero trust playbooks, and is partnering with GSA to issue the guidance across the federal government.
Thomas Santucci, director of GSA’s Data Center and Cloud Optimization Initiative Program Management Office, detailed the CIO Council’s effort on zero trust at an FCW event in February, before the partnership with GSA was announced.
Santucci said at the time that the council was spearheading a multi-agency effort to develop playbooks featuring “technically and organizationally oriented” methods for implementation.”
“Complex commercial satellite communications solutions contract, which has climate change risk language, and mitigation has a contract deliverable to prepare and update, as needed, a corporate climate risk management plan.
Sustainability requirements are also in the contract for government strategic solutions for desktops and laptops. Those now have a mandatory electronic product environmental assessment tool (EPEAT) that provides a standard configurations and minimum requirements for desktops, laptops, tablets and client devices”
“The General Services Administration sees a shift in contract obligation and business volume data where sustainability is concerned. Agencies increasingly rely on as-a-service models for enterprise IT infrastructure, requiring less owned physical infrastructure hardware.
Laura Stanton, assistant commissioner for IT Category at GSA, said agencies are buying the capabilities they need through industry, and letting industry manage things on the back end. That shrinks the footprint of data centers, which consume about 2% electricity in the U.S., according to the Energy Department. She said sustainability is built into contracting language more regularly, which aligns with the Biden administration’s strategy to harness federal procurement power for the sake of environmental sustainability.
In GSA’s enterprise infrastructure solutions contract for network infrastructure, “We’ve added sustainability criteria into that contract, requirements for climate change and adoption, sustainability and green initiative, supporting environmental sustainability practices through the use of energy efficient, virtual and streamline technology that facilitates agile and expansive network communications,” she said on a panel as part of GSA’s Data Sustainability Summit this week.
“So we’re building it in to make sure that we have sustainable equipment that we’re making available to the federal government, so that this means that the agencies don’t have to add in those requirements when they’re putting their task orders together,” she said.
She referenced a report from technology research and consulting firm Gartner, which predicted that by 2025, more than 85% of organizations will use a cloud-first principle and that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, compared to 30% in 2021.
Following that trend, the upcoming cloud-focused blanket purchase agreement, Ascend, which Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Sonny Hashmi shared on Wednesday, aims to reduce burdens for agencies and build in minimum thresholds for security, data ownership, and common terms and conditions. Stanton said GSA is also writing climate goals into that BPA.
“We’re in the early stages, through this BPA, of writing the environmental directives related to carbon-pollution-free energy for data centers, and will provide those cloud capabilities,” Stanton said. “So we’re looking at geothermal, hydroelectric, hydrokinetic, nuclear, solar, wind and the like, as [well as] looking at how do get to carbon-pollution-free energy in the data centers provided through this vehicle.”
Speaking at Thursday’s summit, Ben Levin, senior manager of Technology Assessment and Resource Development at the Green Electronics Council, said the full lifecycle of IT products needs to be considered when talking about “green” electronics. That includes the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, processing and assembly, product longevity, greenhouse gas emissions through each of those phases, and protect of the labor force in the supply chain.
As one of the most famous proponents of green electronics, the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program. An ENERGY STAR-certified server saves on average about 30% of the energy compared to a non-certified server, or about 650 kilowatt hours per year. Servers are measured for efficiency in the active state, according to Ryan Fogle, ENERGY STAR Data Center Product Development and Marketing manager.
“So how much work can you get done per watt of energy, which means that you, in essence, can complete more work with less hardware,” he said. “So if you can do more work with less energy, that means that there’s potentially less servers that you need to get that same amount of work done. Less servers tends to mean that there’s less support dollars needed for things like licensing and software fees, and between those fees, the actual cost of the servers, which tend not to be cheap.”
Multiple tools and guidance from EPA and GSA exist to help agencies procure more sustainable IT.
The Sustainable Facilities tool has a Procurement Professional section with template steps to ensure agencies are evaluating the total value when it comes to sustainability, plus with Federal Acquisition Regulation. The GSA Advantage catalogue lets users search for products by eco-friendliness, said Paul Morris, IT Hardware Category manager at FAS. In addition, ENERGY STAR has examples of procurement language on its website and its commercial and industrial offers designations to data centers, Fogle said.”
“The General Services Administration has announced a major increase in annual goals to support contracting with small disadvantaged businesses (SDBs) as the Biden administration aims to steer $100 billion worth of expanded contracting opportunities to historically marginalized firms by 2025.
GSA said it was hiking up its contracting SDB goals for fiscal year 2022 to 21%, representing a four-fold increase from the agency’s goals set last year.”
“The new goal for GSA is significantly higher than the government-wide statutory goal of 5% for fiscal year 2021, and reflects the administration’s increased commitment to expanding federal contracting opportunities with SDBs.
Exodie Roe, associate administrator for the GSA’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU), said in a statement that the agency obligated just over 20% of its overall spend in fiscal year 2021 to SDBs, while allocating more than 46% to small businesses.
“This is an ambitious goal,” he added. “But ambitious goals are exactly what we need to promote equity and increase small and small disadvantaged business participation in the federal marketplace across all categories.”
Last year, President Joe Biden announced plans to leverage federal procurement authorities to increase the share of federal dollars going towards Black and brown small businesses, among other marginalized firms, to 15% of every dollar spent. If successful, the administration will perform the largest increase in SDB contracting outlays in the entire 30 years that data on contracting opportunities for SDBs has been collected.
The announcement follows an executive order the president also signed last year directing agencies to expand access and opportunities to federal contracting opportunities for underserved communities.
While federal spending with marginalized firms has increased since 2009, rates have plateaued over the last four years as experts warned of factors complicating the process of gaining entry into the federal marketplace, including consolidation and a government-wide centralizing of procurement functions to departments with preferred contractors. “
Chris Riotta is a staff writer at FCW covering government procurement and technology policy. Chris joined FCW after covering U.S. politics for three years at The Independent. He earned his master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he served as 2021 class president.
“The relaunch of the federal IT dashboard represents its most significant overhaul since the Office of Management and Budget first unveiled the site in 2009, offering agencies, stakeholders and the public a comprehensive overview of federal technology projects and spending.”
“The General Services Administration has officially relaunched the federal IT dashboard, a one-stop resource with information on federal agency information technology projects.
“The new federal IT dashboard is a significant milestone in a more than decade-long effort to provide greater transparency and accountability around federal IT modernization,” GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said in a statement announcing the relaunch on Monday. “By making information about federal IT management and spending more accessible and user-friendly, this new dashboard will incentivize agencies to be more efficient and effective, and offer valuable insights to our federal partners and the public.”
GSA assumed control of the federal IT dashboard from OMB and began developing a modernized version of the site nearly two years ago through investments included in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The updated dashboard has been released internally within the agency since September 2021.
The IT Dashboard is just the front end of a new API-based system used by agencies to submit Capital Planning and Investment Control data. The overhaul is included in a five-year, $70 million ceiling contract awarded to Booz Allen Hamilton in Nov. 2021.
In order to implement the updates to the dashboard, the public-facing site went offline earlier this month for several weeks. A spokesperson for the GSA told FCW at the time that the old version of the dashboard “relied on outdated technology, which has led to growing maintenance costs and other performance issues.”
The dashboard also includes links to reporting on progress made by agencies in adopting the $50 billion governmentwide Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions telecommunications contract and on agency achievements in data center closing and consolidation.
Washington Technology senior reporter Ross Wilkers contributed to this article.“
Chris Riotta is a staff writer at FCW covering government procurement and technology policy. Chris joined FCW after covering U.S. politics for three years at The Independent. He earned his master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he served as 2021class president.
ROSE COVERED GLASSES 