ANALYSIS: A less burdened customer collective also means a more powerful one

Much of what people in GovCon have said they wanted to see for many years *might* be about to happen as the Trump administration pushes to overhaul how agencies buy goods and services.

Go faster they say, both on the fronts of time-to-award and delivery of those items. Simplify the framework to make the jobs of acquisition pros inside government more straight-forward, they say, and therefore the sale-and delivery cycles will be too.

Don’t forget the oft-repeated talking point of greater reliance on fixed-price contracting for certain types of services, especially for enterprise IT at scale. Completely phasing out the linear, waterfall software delivery method in favor of more agile approaches is also frequently brought up.

A full rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which governs many purchases and especially those that are custom in nature, is part of that equation. So too is a renewed emphasis on buying commercially available products and services, as agencies are required to do so under the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994.

The Defense Department is a behemoth buyer unto itself, so it makes sense that DOD is the subject of three executive orders focused just there. Those orders, which also highlight the use of alternative procurements like Other Transaction Authority, coincide with the other two that zero in on the FAR and FASA.

All of that adds up to the kind of less hamstrung, shackled, over-burdened, whatever-you-want-to-call it customer that has less rules to follow and more room to be a better buyer. Or at the minimum, the kind of buyer that is made to work in today’s Digital Age and not necessarily for the Industrial Age.

On the industry side, the idea is lowering the barriers to entry and thus more companies would enter the market.

The government customer collective will certainly like being able to move faster and have more choices of companies to work with. But their scrutiny on consulting contracts and others like them should also bring a heavier dose of the saying “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”

With consulting contracts especially, the General Services Administration and DOD already feel unshackled in their constant asks/demands for more from the companies that hold them.

GSA is zeroing in on contracts held by who it identifies as the largest 10 providers of consulting services to the federal government. DOD’s April 10 cancellation of several consulting and technology contracts names three large firms.

Both agencies have a Department of Government Efficiency to back them in their aggression toward many of GovCon’s blue bloods in seeking everything from greater savings, to changes to the contract, or even which programs could be terminated.

In one sense, GSA and DOD with the DOGE are telling companies that consulting and professional services in general are a commodity.

As tempting as it may be, resist the impulse to look at those cancellations and terminations as only affecting the largest of the large.

The layoffs we reported on in early April should serve as notice that nixed contracts and lost revenue is an industry-wide dynamic, just ask any company involved in foreign development and aid for instance. Veteran-owned small businesses are also being impacted by what is going on at their main customer, the Veterans Affairs Department.

In many of those instances, the new leadership at agencies does not believe the spend was adequately defended by their direct reports or was not going to be even if asked.