Trump executive order consolidates federal IT contracting under GSA
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to consolidate the contracting of common goods and services, including information technology, under the General Services Administration.
Within 30 days of the order’s issuance, GSA will take over as the executive agent of all governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) for IT, as designated by the Office of Management and Budget.
“Consolidating domestic Federal procurement in the General Services Administration — the agency designed to conduct procurement — will eliminate waste and duplication, while enabling agencies to focus on their core mission of delivering the best possible services for the American people,” the order says.
As part of GSA’s new role, the administrator will be able to “defer or decline” being the executive agent of IT governmentwide contracts “when necessary to ensure continuity of service or as otherwise appropriate.”
Other major GWACs for technology across the federal government include the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center’s vehicles like its CIO-SP3 and embattled CIO-SP4, as well as NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) contracts.
The order doesn’t clarify what will happen to those non-GSA IT contracts and the staff that support them.
Additionally, the GSA administrator will lead efforts to “rationalize Government-wide indefinite delivery contract vehicles for information technology for agencies across the Government, including as part of identifying and eliminating contract duplication, redundancy, and other inefficiencies,” the order says.
Trump’s executive order comes after GSA last month sent a memo to federal agencies telling them to find paths to eliminate contracts with the top-10 highest-paid consulting firms across the federal government, which acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian said are set to make “$65 billion in fees” in 2025 and beyond.
OMB will send out guidance sometime in the next two weeks to agencies on how to move forward with implementing this order’s efforts to consolidate IT contracting, it says.
While the order focuses on IT contracts, it also sets a broad charge for agency leaders to work with contracting officers within the next 60 days to send proposals to GSA to transfer “domestic procurement with respect to common goods and services for the agency, where permitted by law.”
Thirty days after that, the head of GSA will submit a plan to OMB for how it will lead the procurement of common goods and services across the government.
Trump’s contracting executive order follows another earlier Thursday aimed at dismantling the Department of Education.
GSA held an all-hands meeting with agency personnel Thursday during which Ehikian teased that the executive order was coming, according to sources who attended the meeting. Agency leadership also demoed a new generative AI tool during the meeting.
