After more than 25 months and at least two misfires, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy is a step closer to having a full-time, Senate-confirmed administrator.

President Donald Trump today announced his intent to nominate Michael Wooten, the senior advisor for acquisitions at the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office.

If confirmed by the Senate, Wooten would replace Anne Rung, who resigned as OFPP administrator in October 2016.

Since the start of the Trump administration, at least two other candidates didn’t make it through the vetting process and Emily Murphy, who many thought was the perfect candidate to be OFPP administrator, ended up coming in as the administrator of the General Services Administration.

It was unclear if the Trump administration even would fill the OFPP administrator role.

Wooten brings a mix of federal and state and local experiences to the position.

He served as deputy chief procurement officer for the District of Columbia Government from 2016 to 2017, and spent 10 years as a deputy department chairman and full professor of Contract Management at the Defense Acquisition University. He also served as DAU’s deputy for contracting, where Wooten managed contract requirements from DAU’s Headquarters and its five regional campuses and worked closely with DAU’s director of operations and a team of resource management professionals to track expenditures; monitored DAU’s purchase actions.

Wooten holds a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s in contract management from the Naval Postgraduate School, master’s degrees from George Washington University and Norwich University, and bachelors in psychology from Chapman University.

He also is a retired Marine Corps major and previously served in Afghanistan.

As OFPP administrator, many of Wooten’s priorities are well defined by the President’s Management Agenda, including category management, IT modernization and shared services and improving the management of major acquisitions.

Additionally, OFPP continues to focus on improving the acquisition workforce, in part by training contracting officers to improve how they buy digital services.

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