GovernmentExecutive.com

The acquisition workforce is desperately in need of an infusion of resources, greater individual empowerment and new leadership, a half-dozen experts in government procurement agreed on Tuesday during a meeting of a bipartisan congressional panel.

The first public event of the Smart Contracting Caucus brought together leaders in federal contracting from agencies, academia, private industry and the oversight community.

While the panelists' backgrounds varied significantly, they voiced a common theme: The acquisition workforce has been cut down to size, both literally and figuratively, over the past two decades and the trend needs to be reversed immediately.

"This is a crisis," said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog group. "The acquisition workforce has been ignored for so many years."

The panel suggested that the reinventing government reforms of the Clinton administration in the 1990s, while well-intentioned, had left the procurement system undernourished with talent and overfed with burdensome regulations.

The result, said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president of the Professional Services Council, an Arlington, Va. trade association that represents contractors, is that a profession that manages more than $500 billion per year in contracts is not treated as a core competency of government.

"We need to get back to a core of well-trained and well-paid [acquisition workers]," Chvotkin said. "And we need to trust their judgment."

The experts suggested that the tone set by the Obama administration thus far has been positive, but rhetoric alone would not solve the problem.

They suggested that government drastically increase the size of its contracting workforce, provide acquisition officials with greater training and pay them salaries more commensurate with the private sector.

"Some reforms are just pocketbook reforms," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a member of the caucus.

But Steven Schooner, co-director of the government procurement law program at The George Washington University Law School, cautioned that the procurement system is not fundamentally broken and does not need yet another overhaul.

Rather, he suggested the solution will be found in hiring not only more people but in allowing them to make decisions without fear of reprisal by Congress, the administration or the media.

"Our acquisition workforce does not get respect and in fact they fear for their careers," Schooner said.

The panelists said the tone in Washington has become unfairly negative toward the entire government contracting community -- both federal officials and private industry. That hostility, they said, has deterred many young people from joining the profession.

"We have become so focused on absolute compliance that we don't focus on results," said Steve Kempf, assistant commissioner of acquisition management at the General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Service.