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positive surprise
has been its approach to improving
Also during those years, the trend continued toward a larger percentage of contracting dollars being spent on services — from 23 percent in 1985 to 63 percent in 2014 — and those contracts generally require more resources to manage than contracts for products.
Added to all this was the new procurement leadership’s orientation toward constraints rather than goals under President George W. Bush (the rst head of Bush’s Of ce of Federal Procurement Policy was a procurement lawyer) and partisanship between the White House and Democrats in Congress over the Iraq War, which led the Democrats to use procurement scandals to oppose the war. Those political battles also fed an orientation toward constraints.
A continuing focus on innovation and improvement
Again, it is remarkable that the combination of insuf cient staff and political headwinds did not derail the new goals orientation of the 1990s. It did go into hibernation, though, and no innovations are associated with those years.
Since 2009, the decline in the procurement workforce has been modestly reversed, with the number of contract- ing of cials governmentwide increasing 22 percent by 2015. The Defense Contract Management Agency also increased its headcount during the same period by about 20 percent. And after the dramatic post-2001 increase, spending fell by 19 percent, with the steepest declines in 2014 and 2015.
Together, those changes gave the contract management system a bit of breathing room. In DOD’s effort to slow cost growth, the increased staf ng levels provided resources for developing and managing should-cost analyses, determining negotiating positions and spending more time in negotiation rather than agreeing to a deal too quickly.
Those changes are creating an opportunity for an increase in the resources and attention to post-award contract manage- ment that could yet produce the kind of noticeable improve- ment in performance not seen in the past quarter-century. But that improvement will not happen automatically.
The increase in resources has not yet given birth to an overall performance turnaround. And it’s not as if the sys-
tem’s performance was so wonderful at the beginning of this 25-year period, even though at that point resources devoted to contracting were far greater than in the years to follow.
However, the improvement in DOD’s weapons cost perfor- mance since 2009 suggests that, with appropriate leadership attention, a recovery in resource availability could produce improved results. Executing what I have called a “pivot to post-award” in contract management should, in my view, be the highest priority for those leading the procurement system.
Perhaps the most signi cant overall positive surprise com- ing from the Trump administration has been its approach to improving government management. Although one might have expected that the issue would never make it onto the administration’s agenda — indeed, I expressed that concern in a number of FCW blog posts after the election — that has not been the case.
The Of ce of American Innovation (with leadership from the top in the person of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kush- ner); the president’s tweets about getting better procure- ment deals; high-level meetings with technology leaders interested in digital government; and the pleasant surprise of continued support for the Obama-launched Presiden- tial Innovation Fellows, the U.S. Digital Service and 18F initiatives re ect an interest in government management that is extraordinary.
Furthermore, the Trump administration has embraced an innovation and improvement approach that is very different from the focus on waste, fraud and abuse that has histori- cally been associated with Republicans. This administration seems to want to continue to focus on performance rather than compliance.
It is still early, of course, but there is at least a chance that the years to come will produce the kind of noticeable improvement in the procurement system’s performance that many of us had been hoping for in the past 25 years. n
Steve Kelman is a professor of public management at Har- vard University’s Kennedy School of Government and for- mer administrator of the Of ce of Federal Procurement Policy. His blog can be found at fcw.com/thelectern.
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