July not only marks the half way point of the year, but it also marks the time when a lot of federal executives retire or change jobs internally to get some time in place before the beginning of the next fiscal year.

Over the course of the last few months — since the last time I wrote about people on the move — the federal community has seen State Department and FEMA chief information officers leave for the private sector and deputy federal CIO Maria Roat retire after a successful 41-years career.

You’ve seen new CIOs coming to the FCC and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS).

Here are a few changes that may have flown under your radar over the last few months.

Let’s start out with a few changes at the General Services Administration.

Just a few months after Sonny Hashmi, GSA’s commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, shuffled the chairs of most of his senior leadership team, another piece to the puzzle falls into place.

Sam Navarro became the director of customer services for the Technology Transformation Service’s Centers of Excellence. He had been the director of the customer strategic solutions division in FAS’s IT Category for two-and-half years and then a strategic advisor for ITC since May.

Among the projects Navarro worked on during his time with ITC was the recent agreement GSA and the Defense Innovation Unit signed to make it easier for non-traditional companies to do business with the government.

“We could Fastlane them [onto the GSA schedule]. They have a sponsor so we could get them on a lot faster. We’re looking at least from 15, anywhere to 30 days getting them on schedule so they’re readily available for government competition,” Navarro said in May.

He joined GSA in 2014 and previously worked as a civilian for the Army in technology support roles.

In GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, Alex Cohen, the director of emerging technology, announced in June he was leaving federal service.

“I will be leaving government service at the end of the week for a new adventure in the private sector. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with so many talented and hardworking people over my 10+ years in the government,” Cohen wrote on LinkedIn. “Government service is not easy. Sometimes the challenges can seem insurmountable. I have been known to describe innovation in government as a willingness to bang your head against a brick wall until the wall goes away. However, the work we do matters. The progress we make matters. The continued success of the government is a testament to all the federal employees and contractors that work tirelessly everyday to make America a better place. To anyone considering federal employment, I urge you to do so. It has been some of the most rewarding work of my life. It may be hard but it is critical!”

During his two-plus years at OGP, Cohen led the policy efforts around everything from credentialing of artificial intelligence (AI) tools on federal networks to cyber insurance to edge computing to agile and dev/ops development.

Cohen hasn’t said where he is heading next in industry. He previously worked at the Census Bureau and the Energy Department as well as in the non-profit and industry sectors.

Former FSS commissioner passes away

And finally some sad news related to GSA. Donna Bennett, the long-time executive in the Federal Supply Schedule, passed away July 2 at the age of 74.

Bennett served as the commissioner of the FSS from 2000 to 2005 when she retired. She worked for GSA for 21 years and in federal service for more than 35 years.

After retiring, Bennett joined the Logistics Management Institute as a senior vice president. She worked there for eight years until fully retiring in 2013.

She is survived by Randy, her husband of 33 years, and their daughter Kathy Fumagalli (Bennett).

Over at the Education Department, Margaret Glick became the CIO for the Office of Federal Student Aid in May. She replaced Mia Jordan, who left in October to join Salesforce.

She has been with FSA since 2016 starting as a program analyst and then rising to be the director of the Next Gen program for the last year.

Before coming to FSA, Glick worked at DePaul University in Chicago and for Sallie Mae.

Cyber QSMO gets reinforcements

Chad Poland moves into a new role for the Quality Service Management Office for cyber as a project lead at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in DHS,

Poland had been CISA’s associate CIO for IT investment and compliance since 2018.

He also worked at DHS headquarters CIO office for eight years before moving to CISA.

NOAA and the FBI also joined the fad of naming new senior technology leaders.

Tonya Ugoretz, who you may know from her time leading the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, became the new assistant director of the FBI’s intelligence directorate in May.

She is the first FBI intelligence analyst to lead the directorate.

“As a law enforcement and intelligence agency, the FBI occupies a unique and vital place at the intersection of foreign and domestic threats, criminal and national security authorities, and public and private sector engagement. This is a proud moment for our intelligence workforce, but I stand on the shoulders of thousands of FBI employees in dozens of job roles over the years who have collected, analyzed, and acted on intelligence since decades before the National Security Act of 1947,” Ugoretz wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m excited to lead our talented intelligence workforce into our next chapter, which will be full of challenges, opportunities, and risks that we will weigh according to the FBI’s mission: Protect the American People and Uphold the Constitution.”

She returned to the FBI in 2018 after three years leading CTIIC where she was the deputy assistant director of the intelligence directorate.

NOAA named Frank Indiviglio as its new chief technology officer.

He has worked at NOAA since 2011 and most recently served as the deputy director of the high performance computing center.

“It is an honor to be able to serve in this capacity, and I am looking forward to working with my colleagues and partners to advance NOAA’s scientific mission through the effective adoption of technology,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m also looking forward to continuing to work with all of my colleagues at the Federal CIO Council – Innovation Committee, Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem, and NITRD, which allows me to be part of the larger community that is addressing interagency challenges.”

There is a new unwritten rule at the Department of Homeland Security these days: Don’t use the word pilot or demonstration program in public or in official documents.

Seems a little odd?

Calling something a pilot in government is like shaking someone’s hand when you first meet them. It’s a well-worn and appreciated custom.

But at DHS these days, the words are verboten thanks to a little noticed provision in the Department of Homeland Security’s section of the fiscal 2022 omnibus spending bill.

Yes, Congress included in new language that requires DHS to submit a report on any pilot or demonstration program that “uses more than 5 full-time equivalents or costs in excess of $1 million.”

That requirement has caused a lot of consternation across DHS during fiscal 2022, according to multiple sources.

“This caught a lot of folks by surprise. It wasn’t seen until mostly after the fact that this was going to be problematic for the department after reading it,” said Chris Cummiskey, the former acting undersecretary for management at DHS and currently CEO of Cummiskey Strategic Solutions. “This is going potentially stifle the innovation that you often get with pilots to test out different approaches. It will apply limitations on advancing the pilots without approval from appropriators and that will make it difficult to operate these programs.”

To be clear, lawmakers aren’t forbidding any pilots or demonstration programs, but they do want a lot more data from DHS than they had been getting.

“Congress doesn’t know if there are a lot of programs. It had become apparent to some members of Congress over time DHS was doing things that were pilot in nature and they would ask questions like what are the metrics or goals or time frames, how many personnel are involved and at what point will it go from a pilot to regular operations,” said a source familiar with the provision, who requested anonymity to speak about the House Appropriations Committee’s thinking. “Very consistently, Congress would not get the responses and that there didn’t seem to be a lot of forethought or a lot of documented language about the pilots.”

So House appropriators added a host of new requirements for DHS to address in their reports that are due 30 days before the pilot or demonstration program begins, including:

• Objectives that are well-defined and measurable;
• An assessment methodology that details — the type and source of assessment data; the methods for and frequency of collecting such data; and how such data will be analyzed;
• An implementation plan, including milestones, a cost estimate, and schedule, including an end date; and
• A signed interagency agreement or memorandum of agreement for any pilot or demonstration program involving the participation of more than one Department of Homeland Security component or that of an entity not part of such department.

The source said DHS shouldn’t have been surprised by the provision. Lawmakers included similar language in the 2021 appropriations bill, but it ended up being only in the statement language versus being statutory in 2022.

“The department ignored it in 2021. Now it could’ve been a new administration coming in late and not having access to transition stuff when they should’ve and it stopped them from hitting the ground running. But lawmakers also wanted to make a point that this was something they wanted DHS to do,” the source said. “There were a lot of conversations in 2021 about the statement and lawmakers didn’t get a lot of feedback from DHS about the 2022 language. They seemed to say they could execute on the request.”

Multiple requests to DHS for comments about the provision and its impact were not returned.

Senate Appropriations Committee spokesman said the provision originated in the House.

“Its purpose is to provide oversight of ‘pop-up’ pilot programs at DHS, which typically did not track performance and impacts but largely acted as a justification for expanding the pilot itself,” the spokesman said.

Threshold for pilots is low

Cummiskey and other former DHS executives say the data call and putting together the reports shouldn’t be a huge lift for agency leaders.

Rafael Borras, the former DHS undersecretary for management and now president and CEO of the Homeland Security and Defense Business Council, said Congress created a low threshold for reporting and it will cover quite a large number of programs. But, at the same time, he said it shouldn’t too difficult to pull that information together.

“If you own the pilot or demonstration program, you should have that information available. The bigger question is why does Congress want the information and how will they use it,” Borras said. “Congress may not look at 100 reports, but they will look at the one or two and that may create some challenges for DHS.”

Cummiskey estimated it could be as many 40 different pilot or demonstration programs across the entire agency.

Troy Edgar, the former CFO for DHS and now a partner for federal finance and supply chain transformation with IBM Consulting, said another concern is how these requirements will slow down pilot work, which, in turn, can slow down departmental transformation and modernization.

He said the five full-time equivalents and $1 million thresholds seem low for an agency with a budget of over $82 billion.

Provision not about stopping innovation

Borras added that his big concern is adding this to the dozens, or even, hundreds, of other reporting requirements DHS already has to deal with.

“The department must uncover what is root of this and then address the root problems Congress is worried about,” he said. “If it is because they are not transparent and open enough, the DHS must deal with that. A simple report from the undersecretary for management doesn’t get at the root issue.”

The source said lawmakers want DHS to be innovative and to transform, but have the discipline and rigor associated with spending millions of dollars.

“It’s the kind of discipline that the department needs to make sure it has when it does a pilot. It has to make sure these pilots are effective in way DHS can learn whether or not the pilot achieved the goals intended,” the source said. “It’s beside the point if lawmakers look at all of them, but if it’s hundreds I think we all would be surprised. But lawmakers will look at some of them and ensure the requirements are institutionalized in a way that will result in better pilots going forward.”

The fact that the language isn’t “punitive” or a reaction to something DHS did, as some experts surmised, is a positive thing.

The question Borras, Cummiskey and others asked is whether requiring reports will have the intended affect Congress wants, which is better oversight, accountability and general management of pilot programs. It’s unclear whether new reporting requirements, by themselves, in any federal management realm really changed agency behavior.

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Just when you thought government contracting was about to get fun, again, the General Services Administration decided boring is the right approach.

That’s right, I’m saying government procurement and fun in the same sentence because we had an upcoming contract that had so many possibilities intertwined with it. GSA has been planning the follow-on to its highly popular and successful OASIS contract for the past year. It started by calling the vehicle BIC MAC—best-in-class multiple award contract. Oh the possibilities there!

The agency moved to Services MAC for the last few months. And with both of those names, unlike its more traditional and unexciting names like Alliant or Millennial or 8(a) STARS, these names had so much potential for fun in headlines and leads and so much more.

But GSA decided — and I’ll blame the lawyers here, only because it’s always fun to blame lawyers — to pick the name OASIS+, or maybe Oasis-Plus, for the new governmentwide contract, ending any real chance of bringing fun back to federal procurement.

“The name echoes a successful brand that our customers have come to know and trust, reflects the expanded scope of services that will be available through the new program, and embodies the contract’s flexible domain-based structure,” wrote Tiffany Hixson, the assistant commissioner in GSA’s Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories in the Federal Acquisition Service, in a blog post from June 15. “The new program will have a broad scope. As their respective ordering periods conclude, the new program will be able to fulfill requirements currently met by GSA’s One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS); Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCaTS); and Building, Maintenance, and Operations (BMO) contracts. In addition, new scope areas include environmental, intelligence services, and large enterprise solutions. Plus, we’ll build-in the flexibility to expand scope as customers identify new federal services needs.”

All kidding aside to the good folks at GSA, the decision around OASIS+/Oasis-Plus is seems small, but important. It’s clear there is recognition in FAS that the current contract is popular, in part because GSA has spent the better part of a decade promoting, creating a brand and working with everyone from the Air Force to the Homeland Security Department to the Army to commit to putting hundreds of millions of dollars through OASIS.

Since 2015, agencies have spent $48.8 billion on OASIS, OASIS small business and OASIS 8(a) through more than 3,200 task orders.

The Air Force remains the largest user, issuing more than 1,000 task orders worth more than $28 billion. The Army is the largest user by total sales with more than $30 billion across 458 task orders.

The updated vision for OASIS+ also recognizes the struggles of the HCATS contract.

GSA awarded HCATS to 109 vendors in May 2016. The 10 1/2 year contract has a ceiling of $11.5 billion and replaced the Training and Management Assistance (TMA) contract run by the Office of Personnel Management for the last two decades. After a series of bid protests, GSA finally issued the notice to proceed for HCATS in September 2016. Over the last almost six years, agencies have not used the contract like may believed they would, awarding 300 task orders worth $764 million.

Six contracts with five for small business

Sheri Meadema, the acting assistant commissioner of GSA’s Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories in the Federal Acquisition Service, said during the Coalition for Government Procurement spring conference that the changes to OASIS-Plus also acknowledges what GSA’s customers have said about the draft details of the new contract over the last few months.

“We had originally envisioned one contract with small business reserves, and working closely with the Small Business Administration and our Office of Small and Disadvantage Utilization Office and our customers, quite frankly, we ended up switching that strategy. So the plan is to now award six separate contracts, five of those being for small businesses and the six being unrestricted,” she said. “The second change is scope. Oasis will cover all of the scope areas in Oasis currently today, plus HCATS and building maintenance and operations as those contracts expire. In addition, in the initial stages of the contract, there are additional scope areas that we’re adding on to include environmental intelligence services and a domain we’re calling enterprise solutions, which will be unique to the unrestricted vehicle. That domain is for very large, complex, high-dollar value, non-commercial type work.”

The domains is another change for OASIS+. GSA will add or remove domains based on customer needs and usage throughout the life of the contract.

That gives us a lot more flexibility as things change and customers’ needs change to introduce new scope areas,” Meadema said. “We are trying to keep the solicitation open continuously after we initially close it to deal with solicitation protests. This is all about our ability to onboard industry partners at any time during the contracts life.”

The onramp for OASIS was far from a smooth process, beset by protests and delays.

Meadema said the new contract will make it easier for companies who grow out of the small business size standard to apply to get on the OASIS+ unrestricted version.

“The evaluation criteria will drive the highly qualified pool of vendors that we’re trying to attract. We’re not recreating the Multiple Award Schedules. We are setting the bar relatively high,” she said. “That being said, we are giving careful consideration to how high we set the bar for unrestricted. So again, we can allow companies who re-represent their size to move on to another vehicle.”

Price not a key evaluation factor

As part of the evaluation factors, GSA will be applying the authority it received under Section 876 of the 2018 Defense Authorization bill, where price is most important at the task order level, not at the main contract level.

GSA stated in recent answers to industry questions that OASIS-Plus will not have a total dollar ceiling attached to it, joining Polaris as the only other contract do deviate from the Federal Acquisition Regulations in the last nine years.

Meadema said GSA expects to release some new or updated draft sections of OASIS-Plus for industry comment over the summer and then release the full draft request for proposals in early fiscal 2023. GSA expects to issue the final solicitation in the second quarter of 2023.

The new name, scope and domain changes are important steps for GSA in this journey, but they still don’t necessarily answer all the questions about how OASIS+/OASIS-Plus isn’t just creating a new type of schedule contract. The Coalition has expressed concern over the last year about possible duplication with the schedules, cross-walking what OASIS+ will include and what the schedules already provide.

The next key stop in this journey is when GSA releases the draft RFP for industry comments to see how it differentiates from the schedules and whether it alleviates any concerns in industry about duplication. Most would agree that last thing industry or government needs is another contract that doesn’t add value and meet agency needs.

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The return of in-person conferences still is a bit weird. As most attendees will say, it’s great to see people in person, but it’s less fun to wear “real” clothes and shoes. The “business on the top and vacation on the bottom (dress shirt and shorts)” doesn’t work well when you are in a hotel or conference center for most people.

Maybe the best part of the return to in-person events, at least for intrepid reporters, is the ability to ask follow-up questions after a presentation or speech. That is when you turn a story that is likely to be a lemon into sweet lemonade.

At the recent Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference sponsored by ACT-IAC in Cambridge, Maryland, the lemonade was flowing thanks to the bevy of speakers who were willing to talk about all the good things happening in their agency.

From Army chief information officer Raj Iyer offering an update on his digital transformation efforts to Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service in the General Services Administration, talking about the latest contract to buy cloud services, to Stacie Alboum talking about her new job at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as deputy director of enterprise strategy, the news flowed like, well lemonade.

But here are three items you may have missed from the event.

AFWERX moving back to DC

The Air Force’s innovation arm missed the Washington, D.C. metro area after all.

AFWERX closed its offices in Arlington, Virginia during the pandemic, figuring it would use its offices in Las Vegas and Austin, Texas as places to recruit innovative companies.

But like in Godfather Part III, AFWERX may have been screaming  “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” to Washington, D.C.

Garrett Custons, a Spark cell director at AFWERX, said the organization is looking for new space in the D.C. metro area.

“It’s really a blank slate with what it could look like,” Custons said. “We want to build out an incubator in the D.C. area. We’d love it to be co-located with other organizations in the government innovator space. We don’t just the space, but a place where tools and products can be tested.”

AFWERX, which the Air Force launched in July 2017, focuses on accelerating agile and affordable capabilities by teaming innovative technology developers in the private sector with Airman and Guardian talent.  In 2020, the Air Force split AFWERX into three different branches: AFVentures, Spark and Prime. The Spark branch is focused on empowering innovation at the operational edge.

Custons said the decision to rethink the need for an office in the D.C. area is based on two factors. The first is internal growth of staff. The second is number of vendors in D.C. metro area.

“This is where the decision makers are,” he said. “It’s a logical progression of the lifecycle of AFWERX to help companies get into the federal market.”

AFWERX has money set-aside for the office space, but isn’t against the idea of sharing space with other agencies or innovation cells.

Custons said one option would be to share space with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the National Security Innovation Network in Arlington, Virginia.

“If a government organization has office space, we’d like to talk to them. It’s hard to know what is available and what’s out there,” he said. “We are talking to the General Services Administration because they have collaboration space that isn’t being used as much as they thought, so maybe partnership play there.”

Commerce BIS sprint to the cloud

You’d think moving to the cloud would by now would be passé. Agencies have been talking about it for more than a decade.

For the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, cloud services represent an entirely new way of doing business.

Mike Palmer, associate chief information officer for BIS, said the goal of moving to the cloud is, of course, IT modernization. But the bigger win will for BIS is how the cloud services will free up data and break down silos.

“We’ve focused over the last six months on upgrading our infrastructure. In January, we decided to take our entire infrastructure to the cloud and out of this archaic on-premise based infrastructure,” he said. “By July 1, our six month move of our entire infrastructure to the cloud should be complete. In the meantime, in parallel, we are starting to do some interesting things with data. It gives us more flexibility to make quicker decisions.”

Palmer said BIS is launching a pilot program around a data warehouse and data sharing platform to improve how they work with the intelligence and law enforcement communities as well as conducting a pilot to take some of its data from licensing offers and turn it into export control impact.

“One of the things we believe in is trying things on a smaller scale and expand it from there so  quick, small investment to prove out a concept,” he said. “The next phase of our product lifecycle modernization effort is to do a lot of user research over the summer as part of our enterprise modernization activities.”

A BIS spokesperson offered a few more details by email.

The spokesperson said the move to the cloud will set the foundation for a broader modernization journey that includes creating new data sharing capabilities, public-facing digital services and a zero trust cybersecurity architecture.  The move to the cloud is expected to improve BIS’s operational resiliency and security, reduce costs, and provide modern tools for developing new software applications that will improve the BIS customer experience.

Palmer said at the event that one of the biggest challenges for BIS is getting the workforce comfortable with using cloud services and no longer being in a physical environment.

BIS expects the infrastructure modernization to save money, but Palmer said the CIO’s office still is finalizing those details.

Coast Guard less disconnected

The Coast Guard Commandant’s tech revolution will not be televised, but it now will be on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

That’s right, major cutters now have enough bandwidth to use video teleconference platforms.

Brian Campo, the Coast Guard’s deputy CIO, said the service recently upgraded the communication bandwidth for all major cutters, which are out to sea 180 to 200 days a year.

“The Coast Guard has been going out with Navy fleets for the last several years into places like Indo-PACOM and around the horn of Africa, but also going up into the Arctic. These are places were communications are really challenging. So one of the thing we have been trying to do is upgrade equipment, working with industry partners and looking at different communications links we could use,” he said. “One of the most amazing things have done in about the last year is we’ve doubled connectivity to the major cutters. What we have been able to do is upgrade them so that they have enough bandwidth so now on the morale side in some of the mess decks and personnel areas, they can actually get what we would call ‘dirty’ internet to be able to send email back to loved ones. Just recently we just doubled their internet again so they can actually do video teleconferences using Teams and Zoom to actually reach back and talk with their loved ones.”

Former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz, who retired on June 1, made the increase of bandwidth to cutters a central part of his Tech Revolution plan.

The Tech Revolution Plan includes four other priorities: Data to decisions, software, mobility and the cloud, cyber readiness and command, control, communications, computers, cyber and intelligence (C5I).

Campo said the Coast Guard now is adding two new lines of effort command and control and navigation.

“Each of those two new systems are game changing to the Coast Guard. They are systems we have been leveraging from the Defense Department that we will be retiring in the next few years,” he said. “We are trying to build out some new replacements for those systems and taking a different approach. We are leveraging what we did in the first half of the tech revolution bringing in things like data, making data part of what we do for our C2 systems, making sure as we develop navigational systems we are leveraging the technology through commercial satellite communications. We are thinking about how we can use artificial intelligence to actually build out navigation systems that can manage these over congested ports and work with the shippers to give them more information as they come into a port.”

The Defense Department has always prepared to fight in an environment that is austere, stretches supply lines and unfriendly, to put it mildly.

But that preparation focused mainly around kinetic warfare where Marines or soldiers would have to face an enemy that was, relatively speaking, close and understood.

Todd Harrison, a senior associate in the Aerospace Security Project and Defense Budget Analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Security (CSIS) wrote in a 2021 report that “For some types of non-kinetic attack, third parties may not be able to see that an attack has occurred, or the party being attacked may not know right away who is attacking. For these reasons, non-kinetic attacks may be perceived as less escalatory in some situations, although this remains a point of debate. It can be difficult to determine if some non-kinetic forms of attack are effective, particularly if the effects are not publicly visible. And some methods of attack — such as exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in a cyberattack — may have a limited period of effectiveness before an adversary develops defenses against them.”

The non-kinetic attacks are not limited to just weapons systems, but logistics to move supplies and troops, communications to make data sharing more difficult and GPS jamming and spoofing.

Today, the Marines are preparing for an environment that is disconnected, denied, intermittent and/or with limited bandwidth (DDIL) where the enemy could be hundreds of miles away, behind screens and impacting both kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities.

The Marine Corps awarded General Dynamics IT (GDIT) a task order under the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract to test out how they can receive Microsoft Office capabilities both on-premise and in the cloud in a classified environment approved at the secret level.

The Defense Information Systems Agency and the General Services Administration awarded GDIT the 10-year DEOS contract that has a $7.6 billion ceiling in August 2019. DISA began migrating users to DEOS in January 2021 after protests and corrective action delayed the implementation.

Navy leading DDIL working group

Jim Matney, vice president and general manager of the DISA and Enterprise Services Sector for GDIT’s defense division, said in an email to Federal News Network that GDIT already is supporting an unclassified environment for these services that is rated at impact level 5 (IL5). He said through this proof of concept that mainly will be done in a lab environment, the Marines will be able to see how the enterprise collaboration tools can work in DDIL environments.

The six-month project is worth under $1 million.

The Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity (MCTSSA) has put together a DoD DDIL lab environment where GDIT will evaluate these proposed architectures and developed capabilities.

GDIT says it also will partner with Microsoft to test capabilities, investigate scenarios and provide applicable recommendations for mission partners deployed in a DDIL environment.

“[T]hese collaboration services must also operate on-premises. As cloud service providers are providing more software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to support collaboration, such as Office 365, users must have access to the cloud to leverage these capabilities,” Matney said. “The challenge then becomes ensuring the on-premises solution used to support DDIL in an outside the continental U.S. (OCONUS) environment can interface with the enterprise capability that is being used in CONUS.”

Matney said the on-premises collaborative capabilities, such as Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint, must remain and integrate with the cloud-based services.

GDIT says the proof of concept will include testing several different scenarios to access capabilities including word processing and spreadsheets, email and calendar and file sharing and instant messaging.

All of this is helping the DoD figure out how to deploy DEOS in DDIL environments, where reliable and timely connectivity to warfighters at the tactical edge is critical.

Refine requirements, develop use cases

This task order proof of concept with the Marines is part of the DoD chief information officer’s effort to find technology capabilities that provide seamless operations in denied, degraded, intermittent and limited bandwidth environments.

In 2021, the DoD CIO designated the Department of Navy CIO as the executive agent to lead a cross-service joint working group focused on DDIL.

“These low bandwidth and high latency conditions are prevalent at the tactical edge and experience regular disconnects from the broader network, including cloud services, often for substantial periods of time,” the DON CIO’s office wrote in late 2021. “Network server software and hardware exist at the tactical edge to provide critical IT services and data in these DDIL environments, along with a variety of spectrum communications and unclassified and classified network transports leveraging satellite links and low-Earth Orbit (LEO), Wi-Fi, cellular/4G LTE, millimeter wave/5G and others.”

The working group is leaning on industry for help in refining DoD requirements and use cases to develop standardized architectures and capabilities in these austere environments.

“These tools operate as a hybrid capability, which will allow users access to the full feature set when cloud connectivity is available, but remain productive locally within the DDIL environment,” the DON CIO wrote.

Matney said GDIT is currently supporting multiple agencies across the DoD, civilian, and intelligence sectors with on-premises collaborative capabilities that may be considered and tested as potential DDIL approaches.

The challenge that the Marines are trying to solve isn’t just a Marines or DoD challenge. It’s one nearly every agency from the departments of Treasury to Homeland Security to Justice face. And with so much dependency on email communication and collaboration tools, having access no matter the network environment is critical.

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Clarification: Several smart readers pointed out that GSA’s OASIS multiple award contract was actually the first governmentwide contract not to have a total dollar ceiling. GSA issued a FAR deviation for that vehicle in 2013. 

For most of the past 18 months, the federal contracting community has expected the Polaris small business governmentwide acquisition contract to have a ceiling of $50 billion. It’s unclear whether it was an estimate from a market research firm like Deltek or Bloomberg Government, or just a rumor that took off on its own, but for much of the past year, every story and every discussion about Polaris by multiple media organizations highlighted this $50 billion number.

Then a few weeks ago, the General Services Administration suddenly asked for a correction on a story about Polaris that says it has this $50 billion ceiling. The request was a bit surprising given the 18 months of stories and discussion, and never a request for a correction previously.

Well like any good journalist, I put on my investigative hat and found out why.

GSA quietly issued a class deviation to the Federal Acquisition Regulations in March removing the requirement for Polaris to have a minimum or maximum quantity under the indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) type contract. By the way, and to be clear, FAR deviations are rarely big news items that deserve big fanfare and press releases. But you’d think that with Polaris being in the news and garnering attention like it has, GSA may have wanted to alert folks of the significant change.

A GSA official said in an email to Federal News Network that while they issued the deviation in March, it was planning for some time to remove the ceiling requirement.

“GSA incorporated a number of good-for-government key features in the Polaris GWAC program. An important one that we’ve seen misrepresented in the media is the mention of a contract ceiling on Polaris,” said the official, who requested anonymity in order to talk about an active procurement. “In fact, designed to ensure ongoing availability for customers and maximum opportunity for vendors, Polaris will not have a contract ceiling at the master contract level.”

This is the first time  in nearly a decade that GSA, or any agency for that matter, created a multiple award, IDIQ type contract that didn’t have a ceiling.

Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, said GSA is using the authorities Congress granted them under Section 876 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act where costs only matter at each individual task order level and not at the master contract level.

“The two or three things that historically have defined how we’ve done large, multi agency or governmentwide vehicles, there’s always been a ceiling, on-ramps have been very few and far between and typically we’ve always had price negotiation at the master contract level. All three of those things are done for the right reason and they follow well-trodden paths and the Federal Acquisition Regulation. But all those three things, many times come together to cause unnecessary friction and heartburn for the industry,” Hashmi said in an interview with Federal News Network. “For our customers, ceilings are great when you can have perfect predictability, what the future is going to look like. We’re living in a world where we can’t predict what the future looks like. Digital is going to be a more central part of how the government operates. Organizations at state local tribal level are going to be going through digital modernizations and that is going to continue to accelerate. So we don’t know what the number looks like. So why come up with an artificial boundary that requires people to do artificial work at some point in the arbitrary future?”

Hashmi said GSA wants Polaris, and really all its acquisition vehicles, to solve problems.

“If it’s highly adopted, that’s a great thing because it means that it’s solving real business problems for people,” he said.

Jeff Koses, GSA’s senior procurement executive, signed the deviation because the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA), now codified at 41 USC § 4103, says a solicitation for a task or delivery order contract “shall include [among other things] the maximum quantity or dollar value of the services or property to be procured under the contract.”

In the memo, Koses wrote that the authority to issue the FAR deviation is based on the IT Category’s plan to “on-ramp” new contractors to the Polaris program at least every three years.

“Such on-ramping opportunities do not need to cover all pools, but ITC is encouraged to consider an annual on-ramp, opening a different pool each year,” the memo stated.

Top-line ceilings going away

Polaris isn’t the only contract GSA is planning not to have a ceiling for.

In its response to industry questions about the Services MAC, GSA says it will issue a FAR deviation to remove the minimum and maximum requirements.

Hashmi added that these two will not be the last ones where GSA will seek the FAR deviation.

While he didn’t specifically call it out, it’s easy to see the Ascend cloud blanket purchase agreement fall into the similar category as Polaris and the Services MAC.

Federal procurement experts were surprised about the FAR deviation for Polaris or for any of the other vehicles.

As one federal procurement attorney said, “In light of this [FASA and USC code language], I don’t see how GSA can waive the maximum quantity/dollar value requirement.”

Another said, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) may want to consider asking GSA for a business case as a contract with no ceiling may harm small businesses by reducing other means for competition. The expert added that the agency also is taking on increased risk of protest by unsuccessful bidders.

The other reason for removing the ceiling of Polaris likely is related to the challenges GSA faced with the 8(a) Stars II program. In May 2020, GSA announced the popular contract would reach its $15 billion ceiling 16 months before the end of the contract. GSA had to increase the ceiling size by $7 billion but had to limit the period of performance for contracts as a result.

Polaris update

By not having a ceiling with Polaris, GSA can avoid this potential problem over the life of the contract.

And speaking of Polaris, Hashmi offered a bit of an update. GSA just started reviewing industry feedback on its suggested updates to the evaluation criteria that came out in May.

“You can’t solve for every single use case, so we’re going to try to find the best approach that creates opportunity for the most small businesses that we can,” Hashmi said. “There’s going to be a trade-off that we need to find and that’s just reality. Depending on the feedback that we get, and then to what extent we need to completely change strategy will determine the timeline. I’m hoping that the adjustment that we’ve made or proposed in our updated criteria is it meets the expectations of industry. If that’s the case then we should be able to release the RFP for official response by the end of June timeframe but although don’t hold me to that because all of that depends on the feedback that we get and what adjustments we have to make.”

There are a lot of eyes on Polaris already so it’s understandable why GSA didn’t play up the FAR deviation for Polaris, but at the same time finding out “by accident” because of a request for a correction also makes one wonder whether GSA was trying to downplay another way Polaris is breaking many of the old rules for GWACs.

The proliferation of political appointees across government focused on cybersecurity is both a signal of the threat and a recognition of the level of attention the topic needs.

There are three political appointees at the White House alone. Anne Neuberger is the deputy assistant to the President and deputy national security advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology on the National Security Council. Chris Inglis is the national cyber director. And finally Chris DeRusha is the federal chief information security officer in the Office of Management and Budget and last November took on an additional role as the deputy national cyber director.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the  Department of Homeland Security is led by Jen Easterly, another political appointee.

The National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command are led by not only a general, Gen. Paul Nakasone, but he also is confirmed by the Senate.

The Commerce Department, the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Veterans Affairs and many others have similar cyber-focused leadership positions that require presidential appointments and some are Senate confirmed too.

The one missing from this list is the Energy Department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER). The Senate is required to confirm the assistant secretary who typically runs the office. But the Biden administration and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm have decided not to make the position a political appointee, raising concerns across the spectrum from Capitol Hill to industry executives to former CESER officials.

They call that decision shortsighted and damaging at a time when the energy sector is facing an increased level of threats.

“The problem is I’ve served as both a career and as a political across multiple administration and being a political appointee gives your office a presence by law,” said Sean Plankey, a former director of cyber policy at the White House’s NSC and the former principle deputy at CESER. “You are part of the conversation and subject to Congressional oversight, which helps ensure there isn’t mismanagement, but also ensures you are responsible for results. For the most part, a career official is likely not have that seat at the table to ensure they have resources or in whatever meetings. If you are a career official, you are never going to be in that ‘trusted circle’ of the secretary.”

Plankey, who now is director of cyber missions at DataRobot, other former career CESER officials, as well as other cyber experts say not having a political appointee to lead the office sends a bad message internally and externally to the agency employees and the overall energy sector.

Threats to energy sector on the rise

And that message comes at a time when threats against the energy sector are increasing.

President Joe Biden issued a statement in March urging critical infrastructure providers, many of which are from the energy sector, to “harden your cyber defenses immediately” in light of threats by Russian hackers.

Dragos, a cybersecurity firm, found in its 2021 ICS/OT Year in Review report that of the 18 worldwide threat groups that it tracks, two of the three newest ones focused on industrial control systems (ICS) intrusions with “a focus on access operations and data theft over disruption. This shows that adversaries are willing to spend time, effort, and resources targeting, compromising, and harvesting information from ICS/OT environments for future purposes.”

Jeremiah Baumann, the deputy chief of staff of the Office of the Under Secretary for Infrastructure, where CESER resides, said in an interview with Federal News Network that having a career official and not politicizing the office will make it more effective.

“It has been a deliberate decision that this position is too important to leave subject to the whims of shifting politics, and we need to have steady leadership in the job. That’s been the consideration from day one,” he said. “I think in my experience of this administration, at least, is when you’ve got strong skilled leaders who bring the right kind of expertise to the table, I haven’t really seen a huge distinction on who is a political appointee and who’s not a political appointee. The secretary works with both political and career leaders on all sorts of matters. They sit at the same table have an equal voice, and I say the same thing in interagency processes. I think our career leader for the CESER office is among the most respected people in D.C. when it comes to cybersecurity and I don’t think there’s anybody you can’t sit at a table with and hold his own.”

Currently Puesh Kumar is the director of CESER. He’s highly respected for his knowledge and background.

Energy created CESER in 2018 with $96 million from the appropriations bill with a goal of elevating “the department’s focus on energy infrastructure protection and will enable more coordinated preparedness and response to natural and man-made threats.”

Karen Evans was the only politically appointed and Senate confirmed assistant secretary of CESER. She started in September 2018 and lasted about 18 months before leaving in February 2020. Since then, CESER has had either acting or career deputies in charge.

Career not equal to political appointees

Experts say Kumar would be an excellent choice to be the political appointee, but as the career official, he’s at a disadvantage when he walks into a meeting with Easterly, Neuberger, Inglis or with CEOs from top energy companies.

Plankey, who also worked at BP as a global cyber intelligence advisor, saw this happen first hand.

“You try to bring the same level of official to the table. If the CEO of multi-billion dollar organization is sitting down with career official who isn’t at that level, that’s a problem,” he said. “I’m not taking anything away from that career official, but if you are not the designee through political appointment status it’s hard to curry that same level of focus and attention.”

Nick Andersen, the chief operating officer at Invictus International Consulting, a non-resident senior fellow in the Cyber Craft Initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former principal deputy for CESER, called Energy’s rationale for having only a career person at the helm a “little disingenuous.”

“All positions in Energy have senior career deputy to provide continuity. That is part of what we do with transition planning,” he said. “We are not having this debate with any other cyber or critical infrastructure positions across the government. Not at CISA or at FEMA. If you look at where cyber and resiliency mission sits in the Defense Department, they have an appointee who is a deputy assistant secretary and a Senate confirmed assistant secretary for defense for homeland defense and global security. It sends a strong message about internal prioritization of missions. When you are willing to take that level of visibility away from the office, it makes it more difficult to be on level playing field with other departments, which are maintaining level of importance for same mission areas.”

The increase in threats to the energy sector caught the attention of Congress, particularly in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lawmakers expressing concerns

In March, lawmakers passed the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022.

The legislation establishes mandatory cyber intrusion reporting requirements for critical infrastructure companies, including companies in the energy sector. While Congress gave CISA the role to implement the law, Energy, under existing authority, remains as the sector risk management agency (SRMA) for energy sector cybersecurity.

A recent letter from House and Senate oversight committees, the Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, respectively, wrote to Granholm in early April expressing concern about DoE’s role in remaining the cybersecurity lead for the energy sector.

“CESER’s mission and responsibility has grown a lot in the last few years and a lot of it is attributed to work it has done over the last few years,” Andersen said. “It has taken on work at the tactical level by coordinating with the sector or providing cyber threat information with intergovernmental partners. It has expanded the expertise it provides. And CESER is looking at strategic risk to drive one consolidated view of where risk is and how shore it up, especially within the research and development and supply chain areas.”

The letter by Senate and House members to Granholm isn’t the first expressing concerns. In March 2021, 11 Senators wrote to the secretary pressing her to name a political appointee to lead CESER.

“It is imperative that the department does not march backwards on its responsibilities to the energy sector and the protection of our critical infrastructure given the persistent, growing and significant threat cyber attacks pose to our nation’s economy and national security,” the lawmakers wrote.

Some sources say one reason that Energy isn’t making the CESER position a political appointee is there are only a limited number of slots available and Granholm and/or the White House have decided to allocate the positions differently.

Energy’s Baumann and other Energy officials referred to studies that found more than 1,200 political appointees across all agencies and the time it takes to get someone confirmed.

“We actually think that certain things are so critical and so important that they shouldn’t be left so vulnerable as to be sitting around vacant for months at a time just because of whatever political spat of the day means a single senator doesn’t want to confirm someone,” he said. “We think it’s absolutely critical that there be steady leadership, someone who can be in place, regardless of the politics to work on things like emergency response and cybersecurity. We don’t think it would be good to have situations like the Texas grid going down or the Colonial Pipeline getting hacked, and there’ll be no leadership in place because of politics.”

Funding, resources easier to come by

Mark Montgomery, the former executive director of the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pushed back against that rationale, too.

He said when you have an assistant secretary that is politically appointed ad Senate confirmed, the organization does better with funding and other resource allocations, which, he said, is management 101.

“If you value something, and think it’s important for your mission, then you assign an increasingly senior person to manage that issue. DOE over last several years has made a lot of good decisions. They have worked well with Congress on the infrastructure act and got significant cyber resources. As it gets more responsibilities and more grant programs to manage, that lends itself to more senior and accountable leadership.”

Montgomery added it’s also easier to hold the office accountable when there is a political appointee at the helm. Typically, administrations aren’t keen on letting career officials testify before Congress so a political appointee is preferred both from an accountability perspective as well as operational one.

“Over at the White House or on Capitol Hill, it helps to be a presidential appointee to argue for your agency’s or the President’s priorities, and it’s the same on Capitol Hill,” he said. “And if you’re working with the private sector, they understand where the lines of responsibility are. CEOs are more comfortable with an assistant secretary than a deputy assistant secretary. We should want this person meeting with CEOs to be in the ‘C suite’ because this is a C suite issue and is a C suite engagement.”

The National Security Agency’s Wild and Stormy cloud procurement continues to live up to its name.

Four months after NSA lost what many believe to be its first ever protest of a contract award at the Government Accountability Office, it re-awarded the 10-year cloud contract, known by the distinctive moniker, which could be worth as much as $10 billion to Amazon Web Services.

The spy agency made the re-award in February, but details just surfaced in the last week.

An NSA spokesperson confirmed the agency’s decision.

“This contract is a continuation of NSA’s Hybrid Compute Initiative to modernize and address the robust processing and analytical requirements of the agency,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Federal News Network. “Consistent with the decision in [the GAO protest] case, the agency has reevaluated the proposals and made a new best value decision.”

Sources also confirmed that Microsoft, which won the initial protest at GAO in October, decided not to protest the re-award to AWS, despite what many believe is a titled playing field.

A source, who requested anonymity in order to speak to the press, said a new protest would’ve just delayed the process, which would be detrimental to NSA and possibly national security.

But the source added, NSA’s decision does raise concerns about another single award contract for cloud services, in this case classified and top secret instances. Experts continue to question NSA’s decision especially after the controversial JEDI acquisition collapsed under immense pressure and scrutiny of its single award plan, and the move by the intelligence community from a single vendor — AWS — under the C2S vehicle to multiple cloud vendors under the C2E vehicle.

Additionally, sources highlight NSA’s decision again continues to, at least, offer the perception of special treatment for AWS. Sources says under the C2S contract, NSA and its intelligence community partners supported the development of AWS’s secret cloud instance while other cloud service providers received no financial or other type of benefit.

15 month acquisition saga

As for Wild and Stormy, NSA issued the solicitation in November 2020 and made the award to AWS in July under a two-phased best-value trade off approach.

AWS and Microsoft advanced to phase 2. NSA rated AWS higher and offered more value than Microsoft despite a base price of $482 million compared to $422 million, according to GAO’s bid protest decision.

Microsoft filed a protest on July 21 claiming NSA misevaluated proposals under the technical factor, under the management factor and around total price. Microsoft claimed that “the agency’s best-value selection decision was improper, and that NSA failed to meaningfully consider Microsoft’s lower price as part of the price/ technical tradeoff.”

GAO sustained Microsoft’s protest and recommended “NSA reevaluate technical proposals, consistent with this decision, and based on that reevaluation, perform a best value tradeoff and make a new source selection decision.”

NSA declined to offer any more details about how it reevaluated the proposals and how it came to the new award decision.

Joe Petrillo, an attorney with Smith Pachter McWhorter, told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin in December that GAO’s recommendation didn’t require NSA to reopen discussions or the Microsoft and AWS to revise bids.

“It’s up to NSA to decide how to implement this. They may have valid reasons for wanting to reopen and reevaluate the proposals,” Petrillo said. “One of the issues, interestingly enough, that wasn’t successful, although GAO did note, NSA should take it into account was there was a question about how the evaluated prices were developed, and how they were evaluated. They consisted of three sample task orders, and then prices for five different benchmarks. Those were all totaled, although it seemed that the benchmark prices, which were very small in comparison to the task order prices, in actual performance, those benchmark prices would constitute much more of the total price. Somehow the evaluation system didn’t take that into account. And NSA might want to fix that, but that would probably require a new round of proposals.”

What NSA exactly did this second time around may only be known by a handful of people involved in the procurement, but given the lessons learned with JEDI, C2S and the broad move to multi-cloud in the public and private sector, the single award is perplexing. It may make perfect sense to NSA now, but it’s hard to imagine locking any organization in to even one top secret cloud offering when others are obviously available is a smart decision over the long term.

A few months ago, Sultan Meghji walked out the door of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for the last time. The FDIC’s first chief innovation officer gave up after just 12 months of effort to try to bring some innovation to the federal financial sector.

If you read his commentary in Bloomberg published the day he left, it was clear he was frustrated and had a sense of despair.

Meghji told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin in April about why he left with what he called a “bruise on his forehead.”

“[T]he vast majority of people and systems in our regulatory environment are designed for the analog era, not the digital era,” he said. “In the op-ed, I wrote, I specifically called out that we have a lot of analog people making digital decisions. And it’s a real uphill battle. And I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter where you are in a lot of these agencies, you’re not actually going to be able to impact the change.”

Meghji’s frustration and decision to move on from federal service is unfortunate, but also not surprising.

There are plenty of examples of private sector experts who came in to federal service with the best of intentions only to fall flat for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s not understanding the culture of the organization. Other times it’s the frustration with how slow agencies can move.

In Meghji’s case, it may have been a case of all of the above and more.

Meghji’s commentary got me thinking: What does it take for successful innovation in the federal sector?

The Partnership for Public Service created a federal innovation council, toolkits and released a host of reports looking at what makes innovation successful in agencies.

PPS came up with 10 organization characteristics that foster innovation, including the usual like leadership support, empowering creativity among employees, creating a culture of change and the usual broad based ideas that we all think we already do well. The partnership said the 2020  Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® data shows that just under 67% of public servants feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing their jobs — more than seven points lower than private sector employees.

So I asked two former federal executives, who like Meghji came to government with limited or no previous public sector experience, took on entrenched bureaucracies and found a path toward innovation.

Ryan Cote was the Transportation Department’s chief information officer from February 2019 to January 2021. After serving in the Marines for four years, Cote worked in the private sector at Northrop Grumman, Contract Lumber, IBM and Gartner.

Marcy Jacobs served as a digital service expert for the U.S. Digital Service from February 2016 to January 2018 and then was the executive director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ digital service from May 2017 to October 2019. She is now an associate partner at McKinsey and Company. Previously, she worked at SRA International and was a web designer.

FNN: What makes innovation in government possible at both the operational and strategic levels?

RC: Two main ideas come to mind here. The first, of course, is people and culture. The second is finding great partners and technologies who/that can help you execute the work. In order to innovate (and in many ways that means modernize) IT systems, particularly in the federal government, it requires people who have the skills, passion, energy, vision and stamina to see difficult projects through from inception to completion. This is one of the reasons the federal government struggles in many ways, in places, to innovate and/or modernize. They simply lack enough great people, for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are external forces at work, but some are frankly self-inflicted. I’ll take this opportunity to grumble just a bit about one of the most frustrating aspects of my time in government. And that is the labor unions. In my opinion, the federal government will never attract, train and retain top talent as long as unions are allowed to operate in the government space. Firing unproductive and unsuccessful employees is nearly impossible in the federal government and everyone knows it. Which is why the bar to perform is set so low. Too many individuals know that they can perform at a minimal effort level and still stay employed. The desire to exceed expectations and push the limits of performance were almost never on display during my tenure in government.

Stop and think about the numbers from our own Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. On average, in any given month in America, 8% of the civilian workforce is fired, quits or voluntarily separates (leaves or retires) from their job. In the federal government, it is 1.5%, most of which are retirements. The federal government almost never fires anyone, which means (by logical deduction) they believe they are the best in the country when it comes to recruiting, interviewing and hiring personnel. In the real world, in business, most human resources folks know that they make bad hires all the time. Sometimes people are just not a good fit, or they simply “don’t work out” and are asked to move on. But because the federal unions protect the bad employees, we are forced to accept the notion that the federal government never makes hiring mistake? Which we know on the face of it is just not possible. So, we are often left with under-performing employees, which makes innovation and modernization projects difficult to begin and complete successfully. OK, OK, I’ll get off my soapbox and return to the main question.

The only way innovation is possible is for leaders to seek out, find and align with the highest performing individuals in their organizations. And there are some really great people working in government, there are simply too few of them. Find your thought leaders, empower them, motivate them, support them, encourage them to think and act with boldness and energy and then let them loose to unleash their inner greatness.

After you’ve found and identified that team of teams, equip them with the tools they need to be successful. That means partnering with integrators and technologies who have a proven track record of success. Get your people the tools and the technical expertise they may be lacking and support their efforts at all times. Whether you are innovating and modernizing operational systems or planning your next 3-to-5 year strategic roadmap, your success or failure will be a direct result of the amazing (or not) people doing the work and the positive (or negative) culture you help shape and build.

MJ: Innovation is born of a need to solve a problem or to do things differently. Innovation requires a mindset of experimentation and iteration — my team at the VA was focused on bringing new ideas to the table — new approaches and new ways of working. Showing progress and results built momentum and credibility.

FNN: What were 2 things you did during your time in government to promote/accomplish innovative projects? Please describe the before and after in terms of impact on mission and/or people.

RC: Probably one of the best decisions we made was to create (for the first time) a position of chief innovation officer within the Transportation Office of the CIO. My tenure ended before we had a chance to fill that position, but I’ve heard that my successor, Cordell Schacter (doing great things there also I hear), has hired the former chief innovation officer from the city of Dallas, Texas, Laila Alequresh and she is well on her way to establishing a great new culture of innovation throughout the department. It’s crucial to have someone at a very high-level pushing innovation and a “modernization revolution!”

One fantastic and innovative project we were able to develop and deliver during my tenure at DOT was to build a grants database visualizer leveraging a visual analytics platform called Tableau. We built an interactive map of the U.S. (underpinned with all the historical and real-time grants data we had) and built a friendly user interface that allows anyone, with just a few clicks, to find any and all Transportation grants data going back over a decade. Users can drill down to the congressional district level anywhere in the U.S. and find data on all grants awardees and dollars given out. It was very well received by leadership and my understanding is that it is being copied and replicated at other federal government departments and agencies.

FNN: What were some of biggest obstacles you had to overcome? Discuss why you were able to overcome them.

MJ: Agencies are very risk cautious (with good reason), but frequently maintaining the status quo is seen as the lower risk option, even if the results have been mixed, than trying a new approach. Creating the space and cultivating the executive support and air cover were big priorities.

RC: The biggest obstacles were always people and budget. Simply put, (related to my earlier complaint) there aren’t enough really smart, motivated, passionate, great federal employees! Too few rock stars in the misfit band that is the [1.8] million federal bureaucrats at work in the federal government today. Somehow, and I don’t claim to have this answer, the federal government really needs to do a better job of recruiting, training, supporting and retaining the top technical talent available in today’s workforce.

As it relates to budget, there were always too few dollars allocated to the IT budget (particularly in the cyber budget) to adequately address all the modern threats out there today. I was able to get a slight increase in the DOT cyber budget as I was leaving, and I understand that that has grown even more since I left, but Congress needs to keep increasing the funds in this particular area because new threats keep emerging every day.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure that I can claim any great victory in overcoming these two particular obstacles. I’d like to think that by sheer force of will I was able to have small successes here and there. But overall, these two aspects of the job were constantly frustrating to me and makes the job more difficult than it should be.

FNN: What advice would you give to other executives coming into the government for the first time about how they can be successful in innovating processes and technologies?

RC: There’s a lot to comment on here, but I’ll try to keep things succinct. Get ready for a wild ride! It’s both thrilling and terrifying to understand the scope of responsibilities and the challenges you’ll face. Never accept the status quo! Always believe that change isn’t only possible, but it is achievable with requisite effort! These institutional, monolithic, static departments and agencies are difficult to change, but change is exactly what they need and you’re being hired to almost always push change! Push yourself and your teams to discover untapped talents and reserves of energy and intellect to push the performance boundaries like never before. As soon as possible, find your thought leaders, your rock stars. Promote them. Empower and support them. Figure out who the naysayers and “dead weight” are and marginalize them. Ignore their negativity and surround yourself with only the best and the brightest, most positive folks in your office. Quickly work to forge successful alliances in HR, finance/budget, and legal offices. Make friends fast and try to avoid making enemies. Constant and steady leadership led by principle and expertise will allow you to effectively lead innovation and change!

MJ: Innovative ideas happen at all levels of an organization, especially at the front lines with customers – either on the phone or in person. Make the time and space to understand where there are opportunities for improvement and leverage and elevate great ideas from career staff who have likely been thinking about challenges for a long time but maybe didn’t have the avenue to actually try a solution.

The General Services Administration’s coming spring 2022 update to its federal marketplace strategy caps off one of the busiest six months for the Federal Acquisition Service in recent memory.

It’s hard to remember a previous time when FAS was dealing with so many moving pieces. From the long-awaited move to the Universal Entity Identification number from the DUNS number, to the now much-maligned Polaris small business governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC), to the unexpected challenges brought on by inflation which impacts nearly every aspect of the public and private sectors, the changes and updates have come fast and furiously since January.

So in case you missed some of the important work GSA has been doing over the last few months, here is a recap. This isn’t all-encompassing, but just highlights some of the significant memos, opportunities and items you may have missed.

Federal Marketplace Strategy 2022

Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the FAS, continues to make simplifying the buying and selling experience through the schedules and GWACs the organization oversees.

To that end, GSA said it will launch a new buyers’ experience effort based on human-centered design.

“This development will reduce pain points that federal agency buyers, suppliers and GSA acquisition professionals have mentioned in feedback,” GSA said in an April 13 release. “The updated buyer experience will offer buyers access to acquisition tools and market research solutions, as well as documents, templates and pricing resources to help plan acquisitions.”

GSA said its goals with these news tools are typical, reducing burdens, simplifying the customer agency’s experience and the like.

But digging deeper, FAS is trying to address some long-standing complaints about the menu of items it offers.

“That strategy will help to clarify government procurement options, qualification requirements, and the process of preparing to submit an offer,” GSA said. “Further, GSA is working to update the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Roadmap to simplify suppliers’ onboarding processes. Federal acquisition professionals have been working with industry to make it easier to get on the GSA Schedule, and GSA launched the new Vendor Support Center earlier this year so that all prospective and current MAS contract holders can find information and resources they need to do business with the government.”

While the specific details about the strategy are to come, if you review what Hashmi and FAS have been pursuing in the fall 2021 strategy it’s not difficult see what’s on tap.

Inflation adjustments still coming

GSA responded fairly quickly to contractors calling for help to deal with the 7.9% inflation the nation is facing.

On March 17, Jeff Koses, GSA’s senior procurement executive, and Mark Lee, the assistant commissioner in FAS’s Office of Policy and Compliance, temporarily changed requirements around the Economic Price Adjustment (EPA) contract clauses.

The four changes Koses and Lee outlined in the memo are:

• Lower the approval for price increases above the EPA clause ceiling from the contracting director to one level above the contracting officer;
• Relax time limitations on EPA increases;
• Relax limitations on the number of EPA increases a contractor may request; and
• Clarify that if a contractor has removed an item from their Schedule contract, GSA will not enforce the limitation on adding the same item back at a higher price.

“While EPA clauses normally act to protect GSA’s interests, in the current marketplace they make it harder for Federal agencies to acquire needed goods, services, and solutions. Contractors are removing items from the Federal Supply Schedules contracts to avoid selling at a loss. This particularly hurts new entrants and small businesses, the very firms the President’s initiatives around procurement equity are designed to support,” Koses and Lee wrote in the memo. “To ensure that GSA is able to continue offering a full range of products, services, and solutions, GSA must be flexible in how it applies these EPA contract clauses. Even with this added flexibility, contracting officers remain responsible for evaluating price increases and may accept them, negotiate them, or remove items from the underlying contract.”

GSA said the memo remains effective through Sept. 30.

While contractors applauded GSA’s quick action, the Coalition for Government Procurement recently raised some concerns about how FAS contracting officers are implementing the memo.

“Members are reporting that contracting officers are overlaying arbitrary (as in nowhere to be found in the Acquisition Letter) information requirements on contractor EPA submissions, effectively capping prices at certain levels without any nexus to contractor experiences in the market,” Roger Waldron, the Coalition’s president Roger Waldron wrote in an April 1 blog post.  “In addition, the scope of these information requirements is broad, indeed, broader than would exist otherwise and seeking information that is beyond the right of contracting officers to request. All told, even if contractors were to comply with such information requests, the administrative delay associated with them would be onerous.”

The challenge with any of these memos is trying to drive it down to the contracting officers, and then once they know it exists, ensuring consistent implementation can be another hurdle.

The fact FAS seems to be struggling to drive down the consistent changes to its contracting officers is a bit concerning, especially given agencies have not planned well for inflation and the impact it’s having on vendors.

The Defense Department, for example, expected inflation to be 4%. DoD senior leaders told Congress on April 5 that the military is currently feeling the impacts of a higher inflation rate than assumed. However, DoD has not released any calculations on reduced buying power.

It’s worth watching how big of a factor inflation becomes over the next few months, especially as agencies must spend 12 months worth of funding in six months.

Price remains a factor on Schedules

One final decision GSA made that may have slipped under your radar came in February and was made public in March.

GSA decided not to use its authorities to remove price as an evaluation factor when awarding a contract, provided by under Section 876 of the 2019 Defense Authorization Act, for its schedules program.

After a series of listening sessions with industry and agency customers, GSA decided keeping pricing at the contract level, versus the task order level, preserves the MAS program’s current value.

“Customer agencies expressed deep concerns about moving the pricing negotiation requirement from the contract level to the order level. Most agencies stated that this move would significantly reduce the value that MAS contracts give them,” GSA wrote in a March 23 blog post. “Industry stakeholders were split. Some acknowledged it would save time. Others had concerns about their internal market research and increased procurement acquisition lead time (PALT) at the order level.”

In a white paper outlining its decision, GSA said an integrated project team conducted six listening sessions among agency and industry customers and came up with a “pros” and “cons” list as well as risks.

Among the reasons why GSA should implement 876 authorities under the schedules program included is the potential to reduce the workload of its contracting officers as well as industry support for the change.

Meanwhile, the list of reasons not to implement 876 authorities were much longer. These included GSA already ensures prices at the contract level are competitive and agencies can ask for further discounts at the order level based on volume buying, and contracting officers wouldn’t have to conduct a formal, negotiated procurement, as required under FAR Part 15, at the order level.

“Early talks with industry during the Office of Governmentwide Policy (OGP) listening sessions indicated the risk that there may be some level of industry backlash as a result of not implementing Section 876. While the IPT acknowledges that compared to customer agencies more of our industry partners are open to implementing Section 876, this initial discovery phase did not produce any solid evidence that industry would turn away from MAS if Section 876 was not implemented,” GSA wrote. “Instead the opposite was stated by some industry partners during the IPT’s interview. Some voiced the fear that implementation of Section 876 would put more burden on customer agencies and deter them from using the MAS Program. In addition, while some stated that they would rather be able to develop pricing at the order level, the majority of industry partners interviewed by the IPT acknowledged that there were benefits to having pricing at the contract level.”

GSA has used, or plans to use, Section 876 authorities for several large multiple award contracts, including the awards under ASTRO, the multiple award vehicle for manned, unmanned and robotic platforms. It’s also strongly considering its use for the upcoming new services multiple award contract.

Two more points emerged from the listening session. The first is that GSA should review the use of the Price Reduction Clause and Commercial Sales Practice. Both are seen as historical drags on the program. GSA has been working on moving away from the PRC and CSP for almost eight years, but hasn’t quite pulled the plug.

The second recommendation is the ability to manage Service Contract Labor Standards wage determinations and pricing at the task order level, rather than the contract level.