GSA moves forward on streamlining procurement with new office
The General Services Administration has created a new office within the Federal Acquisition Service focused on streamlining the agency’s procurement of common goods and services, a GSA spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
Acting GSA Administrator Michael Rigas recently signed the order establishing the Office of Centralized Acquisition Services (OCAS), the spokesperson said, describing it as a “centralized, enterprise-wide approach.”
“By leveraging one federal wallet, GSA will deliver significant savings to the taxpayer, greater efficiencies, and reduced duplication, enabling agencies to focus on their core missions,” the spokesperson said in a written statement.
GSA senior executive Thomas Meiron will serve as the office’s assistant commissioner, the GSA said. Meiron has been with the GSA for over three decades, according to his LinkedIn profile. He most recently served as the acting assistant commissioner for the agency’s Office of Customer and Stakeholder Engagement.
The move directly supports President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed in March, to consolidate federal procurement in the GSA. The order made GSA the executive agent of all governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) for IT, as designated by the Office of Management and Budget. As part of this order, GSA’s administrator is able to “defer or decline” being the executive agent.
Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the GSA’s FAS, told CNBC last month that the agency is working toward absorbing procurement for NASA and the National Institutes of Health.
NextGov, which first reported the creation of the OCAS, wrote that the office will be the management designation for the NIH’s IT Acquisition and Assessment Center’s vehicles, like CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP4, along with NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) contracts.
Trump signed another executive order in April, which called for changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation — the lengthy document listing regulations and rules for federal agency procurement.
In an update on the agency’s so-called “FAR Overhaul” last month, Gruenbaum suggested artificial intelligence and other agentic tools could be game changers for the effort.
