GSA chief advocates for simplified cloud buying, ‘best value’ contracting as Congress considers legislation

HERSHEY, Pa. — Robin Carnahan, the leader of the General Services Administration, is hopeful that Congress before the end of its term will pass legislation that will make it more streamlined for agencies to pay for cloud computing services and allow the government to take a more flexible “best value” approach to procurement, instead of chasing bids with lowest costs.

Speaking Tuesday at ACT-IAC’s Imagine Nation ELC 2024 conference in Hershey, Pa., Carnahan said GSA is working with Congress “trying to update federal procurement policies” for the digital age.

“So many of these procurement policies were written in a time when contracting officers were literally paging through written-document product catalogs [to do their jobs] — not for the world of today,” Carnahan said.

Congress is beginning to gain some momentum, the GSA administrator said, pointing to a pair of bills that have made some recent progress on the Hill.

In September, the Federal Improvement in Technology Procurement Act, introduced by Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., advanced past the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and is now awaiting consideration by the full House. The bill — which has a Senate counterpart led by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas — aims to simplify tech procurement for the federal government by, among other things, allowing agencies to pay for cloud services through an advanced subscription-based model.

If passed and enacted, that model could not only “save the government a lot of money” but it could also “provide the certainty that the vendor community needs to be able to deliver these services,” Carnahan said.

The same House committee in September also passed Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds’ Value Over Cost Act that, as its name suggests, would give GSA the flexibility to award contracts under its Multiple Awards Schedule based on best value instead of the current decades-old standard of “lowest overall cost alternative.”

After her keynote, Carnahan expounded upon the proposed policy updates in an interview with FedScoop. “At that time, it probably made sense in many cases to pick the cheapest item to get,” she said. “But today, we know there are other ways, particularly in technology, because there’s a long tail to whatever you buy when it comes to cost, to think about best value, and so that’s the approach that we’re pushing.”

In both cases, the bills passed the House Oversight Committee unanimously. But, time is quickly running out for the current Congress to move on the legislation, with its term ending Jan. 3, 2025.

“We’re really anxious and hopeful that we can maybe make some progress on that,” Carnahan told FedScoop. “So if not this session, next session, because … this is delivering better value for people and better results.”