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Hubbard Radio Washington DC, LLC. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
“Reporter’s Notebook” is a weekly dispatch of news tidbits, strongly-sourced buzz, and other items of interest happening in the federal IT and acquisition communities.
Submit ideas, suggestions and news tips to Jason via email.
About half way through the potential total life of the Alliant and Alliant Small Business governmentwide acquisition contracts, agencies continue to show why it’s one of the most popular GWACs ever.
General Services Administration statistics show agencies have obligated more than $15 billion through 357 task orders between 2009 and 2013.
So it’s no wonder GSA already is planning the follow-on contracts even though Alliant and Alliant SB don’t expire until 2019.
GSA earlier this week launched a social media site for industry and federal acquisition officials to discuss what the next generation of the Alliant contracts should look like.
“The final option on both Alliant and Alliant Small Business will be exercised in early to mid-2014,” GSA wrote on the site. “The development of a new contract vehicle starts first with industry and government agency feedback. By starting this market research early and involving all stakeholders the Alliant II and Alliant Small Business II GWACs will be awarded on schedule.”
GSA offered no timeline for the release of new solicitations or even awards.
Fiscal Year: |
Alliant TO Awards |
Estimated Value |
Obligated Dollars |
FY2009 |
17 |
$160,719,121.72 |
$37,782,140.92 |
FY2010 |
81 |
$1,490,230,168.21 |
$429,710,261.77 |
FY2011 |
97 |
$6,372,770,171.21 |
$980,353,240.41 |
FY2012 |
95 |
$3,675,629,878.99 |
$1,742,372,725.72 |
FY2013 |
66 |
$3,980,251,829.43 |
$1,959,174,752.55 |
FY2014 |
1 |
$55,703,625.45 |
$71,691,555.39 |
Grand Total |
357 |
$15,735,304,795.00 |
$5,221,084,677.00 |
Source: General Services Administration
One industry executive praised Alliant, saying agencies like it for its flexibility and vendors like it for its variety of services and ease of use.
And the numbers support that opinion. GSA says the Defense Department is the biggest user of Alliant, issuing 77 percent of all task orders. The Air Force is the biggest users, awarding 24 percent all task orders. Civilian agencies issued 33 percent of all task orders, led by the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.
As for the companies under the Alliant contracts, SAIC has received the most task orders, 37 worth more than $3.7 billion, followed by Northrop Grumman with 25 task orders worth more than $1.4 billion and Booz Allen Hamilton with 23 task orders worth more than $879 million.
This just in late on Friday from OMB, the improper payment rate dropped to 3.54 percent in 2013 from 3.74 percent in 2012.
A new blog post by OMB Deputy Director for Management Beth Cobert said the rate in 2009 when President Obama came into office was 5.42 percent, meaning the rate dropped almost 2 percent in five years.
“Over the past year, we reduced improper payment rates in major programs across the government, including Medicaid, Medicare Advantage (Part C), Unemployment Insurance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP – Food Stamps), Pell Grants, and two Social Security programs — Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Retirement, Survivors, and Disability Insurance,” Cobert wrote. “Furthermore, agencies recovered more than $22 billion in overpayments through payment recapture audits and other methods in FY 2013.”
Agencies have been using data analytics and innovative approaches such as recovery auditing, to reduce improper payments.
Cobert said OMB is expanding the use of innovative approaches.
“OMB has also begun conducting a comprehensive analysis of agency-specific corrective actions to identify programs with the highest return-on-investment or potential for substantially reducing improper payments,” she said. “This analysis will help shape guidance on improper payments to be released in the months ahead.”
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The Small Business Administration has a new CIO. Renee Macklin is taking over from Chase Garwood.
Macklin joins SBA from the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration. Garwood had been acting CIO since March and deputy CIO at SBA since August 2012.
Garwood is heading back to DHS, where he spent the first 11 years of his post-Army career, to work in the Science and Technology Directorate’s resiliency office. Garwood previously served as the chief technology officer of DHS’ U.S. Visit program and CIO of the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD).
In an email to staff obtained by Federal News Radio, Garwood said he hopes to provide DHS with some good practical and operational experience, and help the continued movement of research and development, and applied technology into the hands of DHS operational missions.
“SBA has an important mission, but supporting homeland security and first responders is just too much in my DNA and what gets me excited to go to work and serve,” he wrote.
Macklin spent the last 12 years at ITA after serving as a programmer for the CIA and working for large telecommunications firms.
The shuffle of Garwood and Macklin, as well as the Office of Personnel Management’s announcement that Donna Seymour, former deputy chief human capital officer for the Defense Department, is the new CIO, is likely the first of several CIO changes coming in the new year so be on the lookout for others to move around.
A funny thing happened to me at the Federal Cloud Computing Summit sponsored by MobileGovt earlier this week after I commented about my disdain for Major League baseball in the wake of the 1994 strike — I know it’s been almost 20 years and I should get over it. San Francisco Giants CIO Bill Schlough decided to try and “convince” me to come back to baseball.
During his fascinating speech about how the Giants are using big data in the cloud to analyze players, determine strategy and make the fan experience better, he decided to poke a little fun at me by calling me out to the audience a couple of times for my disparaging comments about baseball. At the end of his speech, Schlough called me on stage and took one last crack at getting me to change my mind. He presented me with a San Francisco Giants 2012 replica World Series ring. Did it work? I’ll withhold comment; I’ve learned my lesson, so to speak.
It’s also one of the reasons GSA continues to test the cloud broker concept with DHS and HHS. Day said GSA is looking at the cloud broker model along the lines of vendors who integrate, vendors who customize and vendors who aggregate.
“There’s a cloud broker who can help do security, single sign-on tie-ins for all cloud providers. You could have a cloud broker do security monitoring in a standardized way across all cloud providers, giving you a single pane of glass to manage from. You could integrate legacy and cloud so it’s easier to manage your pieces,” Day said. “There’s a whole set of layers as you start to think this through that a cloud broker could do. Now the question is, which of those functions can a cloud broker do economically and efficiently for the federal government? Where do they add value? Where do they drive speed to market? Where do they make it easier for the consumer to know what they’ve actually gotten and be able to anticipate problems and react to problems better? And where frankly, are they just an added cost?”
Day added GSA is digging into and testing those questions to understand the value proposition for the government. GSA is about six weeks away from the pilot ending, and then they will analyze to see what worked well and what didn’t.
It always amazes me when I’m researching a story and find one that I wrote over the summer or the spring and have no recollection of ever having done that piece. It reminds me of how fast things move in the federal community and that I’m getting old.
Without a doubt, 2013 ranks as high on the list of interesting and newsworthy years among the last 16 I’ve covered in the federal community. We saw a government shutdown, a major administration program fall on its face and a host of smaller, but just as important developments from mobile to big data to the first attempt at IT and acquisition reform in a decade that will continue the government’s evolution.
I asked more than a dozen current and former federal officials for their top choices of IT and acquisition stories for 2013. The following is a list compiled based on all their answers.
At the same time, many agency chief information officers, IT and acquisition experts say it also spurred better, more substantive discussions around IT and procurement reform. One agency official said HealthCare.gov demonstrated the importance of “getting IT right” as a major success factor for policy initiatives, and reinforcing what happens when you take technology implementation for granted. Just this week President Barack Obama met with private sector CEOs to discuss the challenges around IT and procurement. The White House’s statement on the meeting: “The President made clear his continued focus on improving the way we deliver technology to maximize innovation, efficiency and customer service, and encouraged the CEOs to continue to share their ideas on how to do so.”
Pay attention here, this is a precursor to the steps the administration and Congress plan to take in the coming months, especially now that the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) didn’t make it in the final version of the Defense authorization bill, passed by the Senate Thursday. Several sources say the most recent CIO Council meeting featured a long discussion on where the administration needs to go with IT and procurement reform.
One executive said the government is actively fortifying its insider threat protections as a result of Snowden- related leaks. The President received recommendations earlier this week from a committee of experts detailing 46 recommendations to improve the privacy and civil liberties of signal intelligence collection. These changes also will impact the federal contractor community, especially in the wake of the shootings and tragedy at the Navy Yard.
The idea of contractor support and security clearances have come under more scrutiny and will continue into 2014, many experts say. In fact, the Defense Department announced earlier this week at the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing on protecting federal facilities that it’s testing a new continuous monitoring approach to security clearances.
Stephen Lewis, the DoD’s deputy director for Personnel, Industrial and Physical Security Policy in the Directorate of Security Policy and Oversight in the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, told committee members that the Pentagon established a “pilot on continuous evaluation, which is going to look at — do queries, automated queries of public and DOD records, to look for issues of concern.”
Additionally, several experts have said contractors are suffering from the Snowden-effect worldwide as foreign countries are hesitant to do business with them because of the NSA’s intrusions and capabilities. One former federal executive said, “The combination of anti-contractor rhetoric generated by the actions of these individuals and a widely acknowledged need to review the entire security clearance process, has led to a series of studies and analyses that could either lead to smart, thoughtful change or could adversely affect how companies are allowed support the government in the future. In either case the government’s ability to respond to national security threats could be hampered by an inability to access key skills in a timely manner.”
Associated with the budget crunch is the government’s move to lowest-price, technically acceptable procurements, which also is wreaking havoc on the vendor community. Additionally, the IT passback from the Office of Management Budget, which usually comes right around Thanksgiving, is delayed until after Jan. 1, according to multiple government sources. This cuts down the time agencies have to prepare to implement the new IT and acquisition policies. With Congress passing a topline budget for the next two years, makes planning a little easier, some of the federal executives say they are hopeful for some stability in their budget situations. A New Year’s resolution from Congress, maybe?