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Six Practical Steps to Improve Contracting
Contracting issues will be on the front burner of the Obama administration, and the stakes are large. With the passage of the Stimulus Bill, having an effective federal contracting function will be critical to the success of the Bill. While many observers see the current federal contracting system as broken, the seminar participants identified a series of practical steps that can be taken now to begin to fix it.
The IBM Center for The Business of Government and George Mason University's Public Administration Program convened an Acquisition Reform Working Group, which met multiple times during 2008 to address
government contracting oversight issues. The Acquisition Reform Working Group was comprised of
government, private sector, and academic leaders well versed
in the field of public administration and acquisition reform.
This group of thought leaders
was challenged to lay out an agenda of practical steps that the leaders of the new administration could take to improve how agencies acquire and use goods and services via contracts. The group met on seven different occasions and generated an issue paper outlining the challenges. These issue papers, presented below, contain practical recommendations
that participants thought would be useful ways to act on the challenges.
The complete paper, presented on the right, includes six actionable recommendations and a summary from each session.
