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constraints are so baked into culture don’t need to think about them.
and ful lling public policy objectives,” the principles state. In other words, goals take priority.
The second message was to deemphasize the role of rules. In a system tilted toward constraints, rules play an impor- tant role because they are an effective way to communi- cate a message that a certain behavior is always prohibited or required. In a system oriented toward compliance, one complies with the rules.
However, if the emphasis shifts to performance, the system often requires approaches tailored to situations that cannot typically be commanded by rules. What are sometimes called “rules of thumb” or “standard operating procedures” might communicate the results of past learning about what works.
The message was to reduce the rules’ hold on people by counteracting the then-widespread view that if the rules did not speci cally authorize a certain behavior, that behavior was prohibited.
“The role of each member of the acquisition team is to exercise personal initiative and sound business judgment in providing the best-value product or service to meet the customer’s needs,” the updated FAR declares. “In exercising initiative, government members of the acquisition team may assume if a speci c strategy, practice, policy or procedure is in the best interests of the government and is not addressed in the FAR, nor prohibited by law (statute or case law), exec- utive order or other regulation, that the strategy, practice, policy or procedure is a permissible exercise of authority.”
This important change, perhaps surprisingly, survived strong headwinds that could have sunk it. The rst chal- lenge came from scandals in the 1990s involving misuse of government credit cards for buying items for personal use. Unscrupulous individuals took advantage of a reform that allowed purchases under $2,500 to be made directly by a government customer rather than having the procurement of ce review and process the purchase.
When efforts had been made in the past to loosen con- straints on the system, they typically collapsed at the rst whiff of scandal. This time, to my astonishment, that didn’t happen. New checks were set up to detect misuse, but very few people suggested abandoning the change.
An even greater challenge, as will be noted in a somewhat different context later in this article, was a “perfect storm” during the George W. Bush administration of a procurement leadership more sympathetic to a constraints-oriented legal perspective than to reinventing government, efforts by Demo- crats in Congress to emphasize scandals and compliance as part of a partisan battle over the Iraq War, and severe con- tract management understaf ng that threatened the system’s performance.
Yet the changes of the 1990s largely survived even those challenges. A performance orientation returned during the Obama administration and appears to be continuing under President Donald Trump.
Has the system’s performance improved?
If one looks at the results, has the turn toward performance produced an improvement in procurement practice?
The 1990s did produce some improvements, but they most- ly involved reducing the irritation and friction the system created for its government customers rather than improving the quality and reducing the cost of what the government was buying. When I came into government, a colleague at the Defense Department reported waiting four months for the purchase of a $40 Dictaphone machine, and medium-sized IT service contracts of around $1 million typically took 18 months to award.
The government credit card (whose use was dramatically expanded starting in 1993) and the development of multiple- award inde nite-delivery/inde nite quantity contracts (autho- rized by the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which advocated the use of task orders rather than a fresh procurement for each requirement) notably decreased the delays and frustration of career employees.
However, the bigger question is whether there are large categories where one can say that the results delivered have clearly and visibly improved in terms of quality and/or price. Here there are fewer reasons for optimism.
In important ways, we don’t know the answer to this ques- tion because there are so many different contracts, and they change over time, making apples-to-apples comparisons dif-
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