The General Services Administration both creates procurement trends and tries to keep up with them. Balancing the legitimate interests of the government, and taxpayers and industry has been the mantra of administrator Robin Carnahan, who spoke last week at the annual ACTIAC executive leadership conference. Afterwards, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin caught up with Carnahan to discuss several issues, starting with GSA’s artificial intelligence buying guide, which sound a lot like recent White House AI memos.

Interview transcript:

Robin Carnahan That wasn’t an accident. It’s because actually across government we’re working on this as a high priority. And many times, as you know, Tom, GSA is sort of the tip of the spear on these things because people want to buy things. They want to deploy things. And so there’s a lot of pressure to get that out the door. And so we’re trying to help with that, to have very practical steps that agencies can take to make sure they get the right guardrails in place.

Tom Temin And are you watching for one of two phenomena? One: AI becomes something that people sell as a service versus something that is incorporated into their offerings. Either way, the agency is, for lack of a better word, ingesting AI with the same risks, whether they buy it as a product service or embedded in some larger service.

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Robin Carnahan That’s exactly right. And part of the buying guide discusses that, that  there are issues that ought to be raised and considered, whether it comes about data access, whether it comes about APIs and reusability. And what happens with data that has been worked on within the government and how you do data attribution. So there are lots of issues that we think are important for agencies to understand and ask about before they sign up.

Tom Temin And you mentioned the idea — and maybe this relates to AI — that you want from vendors several characteristics, security being one of them. But responsibility, and I’m not sure what you meant by that.

Robin Carnahan Well, it’s not just about being ethical and playing by the rules. That goes without saying. But it has to protect people’s data. Data privacy matters. And responsible in the way that we use that data. I think people expect that from government, and so we expect that from our vendors.

Tom Temin And so can you see a CMMC type style program migrating over to, say, the GSA offerings, or…

Robin Carnahan Yeah. Look, we are trying to collaborate more and more on these things. It’s obviously a good idea to learn from each other, but it’s better for businesses so that they have one set of guidelines that they can use. So yeah, there will clearly be collaboration. How much overlap? I can’t say right now.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Robin Carnahan. She is the administrator of the General Services Administration. And a couple of really down in the weeds things you talked about. There’s a bill, and trying to get this into the Senate as well from the House, best value basis for the multiple awards schedule system. And of course, every administrator takes on the mess one way or another. And it has changed a lot over the years, but it’s still a roughly $20 billion program. So it matters, best value. I mean, that could have a lot of ramifications on the way vendors have considered pricing over the decades.

Robin Carnahan Absolutely, and it should. But ultimately, we know that a lot of these rules were were put together in an era where it was like paper catalogs that procurement people were going through. And so it made sense at the time to have the cheapest price be the thing that drove a buying decision. But we know today that that’s not how it works in technology, that there are long tails on whatever you buy. And that’s not always just about the initial price. It has to be the lifetime cost of these issues and how they get integrated into your system. And so we think it’s high time that best value be the new standard. Good news is, as I said, members of Congress are agreeing with that as well. There was a unanimous vote in our committee for that in the House in September, which we were very pleased about. So we’re eager to see some progress on that before the end of the session.

Speaker 3 And the other bill was the cloud services payment. These are payments that have to be ongoing. They have to be because of the nature of the service and lastover CRs and that kind of thing. Is that the issue there?

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Robin Carnahan Correct. And we just think that there is a way to save a ton of money for the government if we do this change and make it easier for vendors to have more predictability. And so, again, a lot of these rules were put in place way long time ago before any of what’s been happening in technology and these new business models. And so we just need to like tweak a few things to keep up and we’ll all be better off.

Tom Temin And another spend control issue, of course, is software licensing. We haven’t gone totally to consumption software model with a lot of the major vendors. And so there is that [Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act] bill to try to get some kind of software account licensing management systems in place, which people are looking to GSA to initiate. You’re looking at that? Thoughts about that?

Robin Carnahan Christina Prado’s here and spoke just a few minutes ago about the better contracting initiative. So this whole notion that we need to do better when it comes to procurement around the new business models and pricing models for software is obviously true. And so as you said, it’s not always set up for that to succeed in our current system. And so we are looking all the time at innovative changes we can make for that.

Tom Temin Because a lot of agencies are still in the old fashioned licensing mode.

Robin Carnahan That’s right.

Tom Temin And they have these true ups and that litany.

Robin Carnahan Yep.

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Tom Temin So can you see GSA being the clearinghouse for license management expertise?

Robin Carnahan That is a heavy lift. But we are obviously going to do our part to see what we can do to streamline that and save money.

Tom Temin One thing I wanted to ask you about is the transitioning of technology that might be developed, whether for cyber programs or whatever the methodology is for the Defense Department. You mentioned a couple of things coming over to civilian agencies in the the drone or unmanned activities.

Robin Carnahan Yeah, that was just an example of how we really are trying to leverage each other’s work. It’s the same as FedRAMP, by the way, that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel on these things. And that was an example of a contract with the Defense Innovation Unit where they had already approved the drone use, had gone through their system. Let’s leverage that and get that kind of good product out there for the Coast Guard, for FEMA, that need it for disaster relief and coastal security. So it makes sense. But it’s just a matter of finding more opportunities to do that.

Tom Temin And does that require memorandums of understanding and a lot of elaborate agency agreements?

Robin Carnahan There’s some agreement someplace about that. And I could probably find you a person who could talk to you about it.

Tom Temin All right. Well, we’re coming to a transition pretty soon one way or another. Have you enjoyed the job?

Robin Carnahan Yeah. GSA is the only place I wanted to be in the Biden administration. And it has been gratifying to be able to work with a team of professionals that really are there to serve the public. GSA, as you know, is not a high policy agency. We have to actually just deliver. We’ve got customers who expect things from us, whether it’s tenants in buildings or agency partners who were looking to buy things. And I’m proud of the team and the work that we do there and feel like we are doing our part to build trust and and show government can actually be effective, save money and do what we ought to do, which is help spur American business. And so I talk about these things all the time as a triple win. I think our team understands that that’s the role of GSA. As you know, we celebrated our 75th anniversary this year. Truman established GSA back in 1949, and the whole purpose was to serve people better and save money doing it. And that continues to be our mission today. And I think that our team is really focused on that. So I’m proud of that work. And I know it’ll continue.

Tom Temin And by the way, with that transition coming, of course, GSA provides transition services that were already underway. Have both sides signed on to what they need to to make sure that they’re good with GSA.

Robin Carnahan So as of today, I haven’t I haven’t spoke to my team this morning. But as of today, one of the transition teams has signed. And I know we’re in discussions with the other.

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