This week Federal Drive host Tom Temin has been interviewing some of the Defense Department’s acquisition workforce award winners. In this interview, he talks with someone with a title Temin said he will only pronounce: “The finance manager for the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radio-logical and Nuclear Defense Joint Assisted Acquisition team.” Here’s the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with Katie Single, the person behind that title.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin
That’s a really long title. So tell us about the organization itself and what you do there.

Katie Single
I’m gonna shorten our title, we usually just call ourselves JPEO, for short. And what we do is, we provided all the gas masks to our warfighters. That’s one of the things that we do. We develop vaccines when you’re exposed to biological agents, I think you probably remember back in the earlier days, Anthrax. And then we do a lot of the detection kits for chemical, biological, even radiological and nuclear exposure to determine how much you’ve been exposed to those type of things.

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Tom Temin
So there’s a research component, there’s an acquisition component to it. And you are the finance manager and what is your specific role in this whole complex of things?

Katie Single
I like to tell everybody, I’m the one that signs all the checks. So for the COVID mission that came through us, I am the person who accepted all the funding and then in turn, sent it off over to the contracts, pay of people. I ensured all the vendors were paid on time.

Tom Temin
Yeah, let’s talk about that project, because that’s the one that actually knitted you this award and it was COVID related. Tell us what the scope was and what happened there.

Katie Single
So the scope of the Joint [Assisted] Acquisition Team, we call that JA2, for short. So that was stood up back in early 2020. JPEO received the mission based on our records, with handling all the different biological and chemical things that have come through. And then our leadership, they went out to everywhere, they went out to private industry, public industry, [Department of Defense (DoD)], outside DoD. And they were just searching for the best and brightest talents, to make this new organization a success. And what we did was, we brought all these experts together and we accelerated the development, manufacturing and distribution of the safe and effective COVID-19 tests, diagnostics, vaccines, enablers and therapeutics for the nation.

Tom Temin
So this was really a lot more than just buying protective gear for people in the army and civilians?

Katie Single
Correct. Most of our stuff was coming directly from the President or the White House COVID-19 Response Team. They would tell us, we’re going to buy 1 billion test kits. And it was up to us to figure out, how to do it? Who could do it? How much? And get all of that executed. And then those tests made it out to, every American could have gotten a test. So that’s one big thing that we did, as well.

Tom Temin
And we’re talking about those test kits that come in the little flat cardboard boxes, those kinds of things that the USPS ended up delivering?

Katie Single
Yes.

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Tom Temin
Well getting into that project must have felt a little bit like, grabbing on to the car of a roller coaster on the way down a hill.

Katie Single
That’s a great way to describe it. There was a lot of long days, nights, weekend. One late December, right before Christmas Eve, I think it was a day before Christmas Eve, it was a Friday. And about 7.pm., I received a call from someone in the White House that said, hey, you need to award this contract, we’re getting you the money. It needs to be signed and out the door. I’m going, today? Who’s working on Christmas Eve? It’s 7 p.m. But that was quite often that we got those type of quick turnarounds.

Tom Temin
And what did you discover about the industrial base, because we all got those kits. And there’s a lot of little elements in there. Everything from a Q-tip type of thing. A little plastic molded parts, the strip itself, a little chemical vial. There’s probably 25 or 30 individual parts, that go into those kits. Was this all sourceable? In some reasonable manner, in the United States, you watch that challenge as it happened. And so as they struggled through that, then you had to watch the money.

Katie Single
Right, I had to make sure the money came in and went to the vendors. The vendors invoice correctly and we get it back out. You did talk about the industrial base. I can talk about that for some of our other efforts. When this all started, a lot of the industrial base was overseas. We weren’t able to get some of the critical supplies that we needed. And so part of this COVID mission is also, to bring some of that industrial base back to the U.S. So we funded some companies to help start them to bring it back here, with some of their costs.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Katie Single. She’s a Defense Department Acquisition Workforce award winner, for the Army’s JPEO for the CBRN team. I hope I said that right, contracting that a little bit. And let’s talk about the lessons learned. How did it change the organization? Having been through really, trial by fire, you could call it.

Katie Single
It’s used to organization, we were able to really look at the audibility of, especially, funding and coming in and out. We were able to shorten some of the red tape that we had to do.

Tom Temin
Sure. So in other words, the speed forced the issue of trying to get things done, in an auditable way, in a way that you can justify later, but yet a whole lot faster.

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Katie Single
Correct. Then also, some of the stuff that we learned through this is, being used in the Ukraine area. Being able to do these large contracts quickly and get the stuff out to our people that need it.

Tom Temin
And the work that you do is financial manager, that must end up being looked at, maybe by the Defense Contract Management Agency. There’s a lot of oversight to military spending. There’s even the Inspector General, there’s the Government Accountability Office. Have they found you to be pretty clear and clean on all of this?

Katie Single
We’ve had a few audits that’s come through already. We’ve passed those at 100%. I think one of them was 240 samples of actions and they all pass with flying colors.

Tom Temin
And tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you come to be a financial manager and end up in this really important mission? What got you here?

Katie Single
I started my career about 16, 17 years ago now, as a budget intern for the Army Research Lab. And I worked there for, close to a decade. And then I left there, moved over here to JPE. I ran some of the army programs here. Labor, I actually, left budget for about two years and went over to the manpower side. Learning that and how budget and manpower go together. And then when COVID hit, I said, my callings back a budget. So I applied for this position and got it and that’s kind of how history was made.

Tom Temin
And do all your neighbors come to you to help balance their checkbooks? If people still do that anymore.

Katie Single
It’s funny you say that. Yes. All of my family, I do all their finances for them. It’s a little different, though. Because usually I’m going, it’s only a couple 100 million. And they’re like, Katie, it’s a couple dollars. Same difference.

Tom Temin
And armies are pretty good employer, from your standpoint.

Katie Single
Yes, the Army has been a great employer. They’ve made all my work dreams come true.

 

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