Page 40 - FCW, June 2017

BackStory
McCASKILL IS KEEPING AN EYE ON CONTRACTORS
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has taken an increasingly visible role on Capitol Hill this year — partly in preparation for a 2018 re-election campaign and partly
in support of Congress’ demand for answers about various Trump administration actions. The two-term senator is also a longtime advocate of smarter acquisition, and as ranking
member of the Senate Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee, she is bringing attention to that often-overlooked issue. McCaskill recently spoke with FCW; the remarks below have been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been critical
of the progress on
the General Services Administration’s System for Award Management. How do you think
it’s going now?
I have been critical of
contracting practices throughout the federal government for the last decade, and we’ve made some improvements, particularly in contingency contracting in the Department of Defense. But we still need to get a better handle on contracting, especially in terms of personnel.
Those numbers disappear in the budget, and I don’t think people realize that when they freeze federal hiring, they don’t freeze hiring contractors. And when federal hiring remains stable, it doesn’t mean contractor hiring is not going up. So we’ve got a lot more work to do on contracting.
What about getting rid of the ‘bad’ contractors? How is that effort going? It’s going to continue to be a struggle because there is a relationship that develops between contractor and agency, and what we’ve discovered, in most instances, is that
regardless of how well they executed the contract, they still got a performance bonus. We continue to look at that.
It’s getting better, but we still have room for improvement. You’ve got to make sure that performance bonus
is actually for good performance and not an entitlement that so many contractors enjoyed
over the years without even having to perform adequately on the contract.
What do you think
about President Donald Trump’s negotiating skills with contractors? He’s made a big deal of his talks with Boeing about the Air Force One program, for example. Do you think he’s headed in the right direction? I’m not aware of any direct impact he has had at this point. Maybe he will in the future, but the cost changes that have occurred were well in the works before he became president. n
34 June 2017
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