Congressman Tom Davis (R-Va), Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, has hit the nail squarely on the head with his introduction of the Acquisition System Improvement Act (ASIA). Following up on his 2003 attempt to transform federal acquisition through the Services Acquisition Reform Act (SARA), Davis has called for innovative activities that will make a real and positive difference in government procurement when the bill is passed. These include:

• the creation of an exchange program that allows public and private sector acquisition professionals to temporarily swap jobs so that they can learn each others’ point of view;
• an increase in share-in-savings contracts that can potentially reduce the risk premium that contractors build into government work;
• simplification of acquisition for low dollar (up to $5 million) commercial items; and
• a number of administrative changes to protest and appeal procedures.

Pivotal Insight sees the professional exchange program as the most interesting provision of this bill. From the days when farmers and shopkeepers were selling provisions at outrageous prices to George Washington’s army at Valley Forge, there has been mistrust and poor communication between public sector buyers and private sector sellers. In the subsequent 230 years, little has changed to make this relationship more positive. ASIA is a significant and idealistic attempt to allow buyers and sellers to walk in each others’ shoes, understand the pressures that their acquisition/selling counterparts face, and develop tools for doing their own jobs more effectively. Imagine an acquisition environment where the public sector professionals don’t treat profit as a four letter word, and vendors don’t look on their government counterparts as either targets of opportunity or intransigent bureaucrats. This is one of ASIA’s goals.

ASIA did not just appear. As government has come to terms with the provisions of Clinger-Cohen, a series of small but important transformations and commitments have been accumulating. Often these are in the form of recognition that the public acquisition workforce needs new skills and a new point of view. For example, at the end of 2001 as pre-draft language for SARA became available, GSA Administrator Stephen Perry described the human capital management (HCM) activities that his agency supported. These included enhanced university-level training in acquisition, an increased focus on developing competencies in procurement, and certification of the acquisition workforce.
The passage of SARA in 2003 did not provide for all of the HCM advances that were part of the original bill, but did allow for the procurement of commercial services on a T&M and labor-hour basis under FAR Part 12, called for additional acquisition training, and incented government to use performance-based contracting. SARA created an acquisition-training fund that finally recognized the endemic under-budgeting of training funds and their fragility when budget cuts happen. It also authorized federal share-in-savings contracts similar to those which have become increasingly popular at the state and local government levels.

SARA and later ASIA have attracted critics of share-in-savings contracting. While this contract approach does allow vendors to reap additional and potentially huge benefits when their work is highly successful, the detractors of share-in-savings miss the other side of the coin. Vendors place some portion of their profit at risk until their work produces real benefits for the government and the public. If these benefits do not emerge, the vendor does not see their share. In addition, the vendor is incented to get work done, do it well, and roll it out to its users as quickly as possible so that the shared benefits can begin to accumulate.